Born to Run (18 page)

A few days later we were back at it. We auditioned at a club called the Matrix and this time we got the job. We would open for Boz Scaggs, Elvin Bishop and Charlie Musselwhite and garner one of our first unequivocal raves, in the
San Francisco Examiner
from music critic Philip Elwood. It was titled, due to the San Francisco rain outside, “A Wet Night with Steel Mill” and was everything we could’ve hoped for. Mr. Elwood wrote, “Never have I been so surprised by completely unknown talent.” It gave us the shot in the arm we needed to impress the folks and newspapers back home and allowed us to think there might be a future
there for us yet. Our pay at the Matrix was toll money across the Bay Bridge and hot dogs. That was it. We played for free. The experience was great. We got to meet and talk to some real recording artists. We weren’t the band people were coming to see, so we had to work hard, and we did. I don’t think we scared anybody but we impressed our share of the crowd one show at a time. Our next stop was
the San Francisco Valhalla of Bill Graham’s Fillmore West.

In the Hall of the Gods

Everybody had been on this stage—the Band, B. B. King, Aretha, all the great San Francisco groups—and every Tuesday the Fillmore West held
audition night. We nailed down a Tuesday slot and, nerves a-jingle-jangle, we headed down to stand on that stage and make our mark. You were one of five or six bands that would
play for an hour or so to a paying crowd seated on the floor. Everybody there was good—you had to be to simply get an audition—but I didn’t see anybody very exciting. Many simply droned on, playing in that very laid-back San Francisco style. When the workingmen from New Jersey took the stage, all that changed. We rocked hard, performing our physically explosive stage show, which had the crowd
on its feet and shouting. We left to a standing ovation and some newfound respect, and were asked back for the following Tuesday. Later in the evening, as I hung around the ballroom talking to the locals and basking in as much West Coast glory as I could, somebody else was lighting up the stage. A band called Grin, its lead guitarist, Nils Lofgren, playing his guitar through a Hammond Leslie speaker,
rocked the house ’til its closing. We went home satisfied, counting the days ’til the following Tuesday. We came back one week later and did it one more time to the same tumultuous response, then were offered a demo recording session at Bill Graham’s Fillmore studios. Finally, just what we’d come three thousand miles for: our shot at the gold ring.

One crisp California afternoon, Steel Mill pulled
up to the first professional recording studio we’d ever seen. It was a classic West Coast wood-paneled, potted-plant-infested rock star hangout, the likes of which I would be spending too much time in over the coming years. We cut three of our best originals, “The Judge Song,” “Going Back to Georgia” and “The Train Song,” as a demo for Bill Graham’s Fillmore Records. When you first hear yourself
on professional recording tape, you want to crawl, in a cold sweat, from the room. You always sound better inside your head and in your dreams than you do in the cold light of the playback room. There, the way you truly sound initially lands on you like a five-hundred-pound weight. Inside your head, you’re always a little better of a singer, a little better of a guitarist and, of course, as with
the layman, a little better-looking. Tape and film have no interest in the carefully protected delusions you’ve constructed
to get through your day. You just have to get used to it. Not being quite as good as I thought was unfortunately becoming a theme I was revisiting throughout our West Coast jaunt.

The demo was as far as we’d get. The deal never happened. We were offered some sort of retainer
fee but nothing that showed any real interest. Still, something was happening. We’d been reviewed. We had a semi-steady gig at a big city club, the Matrix. We’d drawn the attention of Bill Graham’s Fillmore organization and we were now drawing a small enthusiastic crowd of our own. I saw my folks occasionally, preferring to stay close to the action with the band in a variety of crash pads in
Berkeley, Marin County or wherever someone would allow us to take up some floor. I managed to get arrested hitchhiking (my specialty) on the California freeway. I had little money, no ID, no official residence. That seemed to be enough for them to pull me in. Reprising a role she’d played many times in New Jersey, where I’d managed to be hauled into local police stations for hard-core crimes as varied
as not purchasing a beach badge, hitchhiking and getting caught in my girlfriend’s father’s “borrowed” Cadillac, my mother came down, bailed me out and dropped me off at the Matrix for the night’s gig. I was still a kid and it was nice having her around to depend on, but soon we had to face the facts. Progress had come to a halt. We had no money, no paying work and no prospects. Unlike in New
Jersey, we couldn’t do our quarterly concert to make ends meet. Here, we had no viable, financially sound business model. We were as “discovered” as we were going to get. There were simply too many good groups around for someone to pay us to play. I was right when I allowed my parents to leave without me and stayed behind in New Jersey. We could survive as musicians
only
on our little sliver of
the East Coast. We had to get back.

Tinker borrowed some fast money for road expenses back home, and feeling not quite like complete failures but not like the successes we’d imagined, we packed immediately. I bade my folks adieu and we hit the road to Richmond, Virginia. Richmond, one of the two places we could make a
buck. If we could get there, we could work, make a few dollars and pull back
into the Shore area, hopefully resuming our previously underappreciated status as local rock gods.

Six Days on the Road

Our caravan of two once again headed south. Just a little ways out of San Francisco, Danny, leaning down to fix the radio while driving, managed to swerve off the highway, smash into a “Men at Work” sign, send the road crew scattering into the nearby brush, dent the hell out
of our esteemed station wagon and continue happily on, Jersey bound. No problem. The problems would come soon enough. I was riding with J. T., the dog, in the back of the station wagon. We stopped on an Arizona highway for a piss break and got back in, and an hour later I realized there was an awful lot of room in the back of that station wagon now. J. T. had been left somewhere back along the highway.
We signaled Tinker to pull over and I gave him the news. His eyes drifting out over the desert, containing his complete disgust, he mumbled, “Go back and get her.” Two hours after we left J. T. by the side of the road, we pulled back into what we thought was our original piss location. Nothing . . . just dry silence, so silent you could hear the blood running through your veins in the thin
desert air. Emptiness . . . vast, unending emptiness. Then to the west there was just a smudge of movement on the horizon. Something was alive and moving out there. We climbed back into the car and a half mile or so up the road, there was J. T., heading back toward the California border. We threw open our car door and one panting, tail-wagging, happy hound bounded into the rear seat, licking everything
in sight. Two hours after we’d left him, we pulled up to Tinker leaning on his truck, standing sentinel by the side of the road. J. T. hopped out and into Tinker’s cab, and a stone-faced Tink said, “Let’s go.”

Two days out of Richmond Danny’s station wagon, on its last legs, rolled to a stop. Dead. We didn’t have the spare parts and even Tinker’s
mighty skills couldn’t get it running again. Okay,
we were booked in Richmond. We had five guys. We had room for three plus the dog in the truck’s cab. That left two by the side of the road. Tinker eyed the big plywood box containing our band gear on the back of his flatbed. After thirty minutes of repacking, in between the gear and the end of that box we were able to squeeze out about two feet of crawl space. Two of us were going to have to
ride locked in there.

Now, it was midwinter and it was fucking cold; there was little heat in the cab and none in the rear box. I don’t remember how we called it but Little Vinnie and I climbed in the back, and winter coats and all, we squiggled down into our sleeping bags. We were locked in, face-to-face, inhabiting a two-by-eight-foot space of freezing blackness. We had some water, a flashlight
and each other. With no way to communicate with the cab, we were packed tightly in behind several thousand pounds of rock ’n’ roll gear, so if the truck hit a steep incline and the weight shifted . . . problem. We were pressed up against the rear gate on one side and our Marshall amplifiers on the other, our fate entwined with that of Tinker’s truck. Anything happens to the truck, we’re padlocked
in with no way out. We had an empty container for piss and a guarantee from those up front to stop every two hours to check on us. Two days went by. Mad Dog spelled one of us every once in a while. Danny had some “confinement” issues and the tight black box wasn’t for him. After a while, you just sat there in the cold dark and let your mind wander.

Whatever its results, the California trip would
have a lasting impact on me. I got to see the country. I came up against some real talent and held my own, but the band that took us out at the Family Dog stayed with me. They had something we didn’t, a certain level of sophisticated musicality. They were better than us and that didn’t sit well with me. It’s not that I didn’t expect to come up against superior talent; that happens, it’s the way
God planned it. I was fast, but like the old gunslingers knew, there’s always somebody faster, and if you can do it better than me, you earn my respect
and admiration and you inspire me to work harder. I wasn’t afraid of that. I was concerned with not maximizing my own abilities, not having a broad or intelligent enough vision of what I was capable of. I was all I had. I had only one talent. I
was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me—my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness—night after night, to push myself harder, to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive untended in the world I lived in. As I sat there in the black, I knew when we got back home, there would have to be some changes made.

NINETEEN

HOMECOMING

We arrived in Richmond exhausted but glad to be back in familiar territory. We played, they paid us. How sweet it is. We trucked back into Jersey as the conquering heroes and for proof we had . . . our . . . our . . . REVIEW! We had been recognized by a big-time newspaper music critic as Jersey badasses gone to teach those West Coast sissy boys something about THE ROCK! If
you didn’t believe us, you could read all about it in the
Asbury Park Press
. They covered our return like it was Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. We’d put Jersey, the butt of so many hack comedians’ one-liners, for a brief moment on the rock ’n’ roll map. More would follow, but for now we played a celebratory homecoming show and I stashed away some cash in my bank, a sock in the top drawer of my dresser
at the surfboard factory. Then I sat down to reconfigure the band.

On our West Coast safari a seam had opened up between Little Vinnie and the rest of the band. It happens. Only the luckiest bands don’t grow apart. There was some disagreement over rehearsal time and effort
put in. Everyone moves differently, and no two musicians’ commitment is exactly the same. You can fall out of the arc of
a group without even noticing it. Vinnie was a good guy, a charismatic bass player and one of my original rock ’n’ roll heroes in the Motifs. He hailed from the same greaser neck of the woods I did and had been through the cauldron of our California trip. It wasn’t going to be easy letting him go. So I chickened out and let Mad Dog do it. The Dog, being a good deal less sentimental than myself, probably
handled it with his usual no-bullshit aplomb. I imagine he just spit it out, made Vinnie feel glad he hadn’t been assaulted and went on his way.

It was time to call on my old paisan Steve Van Zandt. Despite our friendship we were both front men and lead guitarists, so we’d never played in the same band together. Steel Mill had built up a substantial enough name that I thought Steve might consider
helping me out playing bass for a while. We drove together up north to a music shop, where Steve bought himself a clear Ampeg see-through bass and an amplifier. We headed straight back to the factory, where we immediately began rehearsal, breaking Steve in on our original material. We timed it perfectly to have Steve setting up his equipment just as Little Vinnie came by to pick up his. Nice.
Steve stepped into the next room, Vinnie gave us hell, we took it and picked up rehearsal where we’d left off. With Steve on the bass, his playing and our long friendship kicked some new spirit into the band.

Rock ’n’ Roll Riot

We went back to our old circuit, running A to B, Jersey to Richmond, then back again. In the late sixties and early seventies it seemed to be just a part of the cultural
lay of the land that you were going to have some police trouble. If you played a few minutes over time, they sent out the local coppers to stop the heathen racket. It became almost routine. The police would gather
behind the stage, a debate of sorts would take place between the principals and usually some compromise would be reached. Most of the cops were just interested in getting the concert
over, the kids home and themselves back to the doughnut shop, but sometimes you’d run into hard-asses. When Steel Mill played, in conjunction with our audience, we owned the room. We owned it by possession. We didn’t have an attitude about it and generally wanted to be cooperative but in those days, culturally opposing forces attracted one another.

At the end of an evening of great fun in the
University of Richmond’s gym I noticed a heated discussion taking place in the small room containing the gym’s power switches. The power room lay only a few feet behind the drum riser. I watched the argument escalate until I saw Billy, our road man, and a local police officer square off against each other in an Abbot and Costello–like wrestling match, each trying to keep the other away from the power
switches. The power went on. It went off. It went on. It went off. Vini Lopez, never one to take the interruption of our endeavors sitting down, hopped off his drum kit and joined the melee. The blue-uniformed invaders were literally beaten back and the show continued on with great “fuck the man” drama. Shortly after the show, as we packed our equipment into Tinker’s truck we noticed we couldn’t
find Vini. We searched the hall and the streets around the building and waited for him to show. Nothing. Then a student told us that ten minutes before, he’d seen the police quietly slip up and take a cursing young man away in handcuffs. Vini was transported straight to the county jail, not to be seen again for a tumultuous month.