Born to Run (23 page)

My recording advance had not yet clocked in and these were some very thin times, some of the thinnest. For the first time in my life, I actually went
completely broke and had to scavenge a little bit for meals. We couldn’t even come up with the sixty dollars’ rent on Tom’s pad. In extremis one night,
I called Mike and told him times were desperate, homelessness was at hand, and he said he could give me thirty-five dollars if I could make it into the city. I drained my bureau drawer of its remaining pennies, counted them one by one and figured I had just enough to borrow my gal’s Dodge Seneca (with its push-button transmission), pump in a few dollars’ gas and have the exact amount for tolls
to make it into town. I budgeted myself down to the last cent.

I got the car, threw a few dollars of gas in it and headed for the city. All went well until I hit the Lincoln Tunnel. There in the window of the tollbooth stood the famous “No Pennies” sign. Pennies were all I had. I handed a dollar’s worth, my last dollar, to the attendant, who said, “I can’t take these.” I said, “Ma’am, that’s
all the money I have and I don’t have enough gas to get back home if you force me to turn around.” I put myself at her mercy. She said, “Well, you’re going to sit here while I count every one.” And that’s what she made me do. Very meticulously, intentionally slow as molasses, the coins scraping across the hard metal counter in front of her, she counted out one hundred pennies, penny by penny, for
the one-dollar Lincoln Tunnel toll. Then, with a poker face, she stuck her hand in the driver’s-side window and said, “I can’t take this, you’ll have to turn around.” Pinched in between her thumb and forefinger was one Canadian penny . . . one. I got out of the Dodge to a cacophony of horns behind me fed up with our little theater and I began to carefully go over every inch of the inside of that car
while she raised holy hell. In 1972 there was no self-respecting car in America without a penny trapped somewhere under its seats. After some very long minutes of mining, I found one, in the rear backseat between the cushions. I stood up, handed it to her amid what now sounded to me like a beautiful, profane opera of barking horns and shouting voices from the pissed-off parade that stretched out
behind me. All she said was, “Go ahead . . . but don’t come back here with these pennies again!” Lesson: In
the real world, ninety-nine cents will not get you into New York City. You will need the full dollar.

I met Mike, got my thirty-five dollars and went home. My partners still couldn’t make their share of the rent and we would soon be evicted. We snuck out in the middle of the night and I
slept on the beach in my sleeping bag with my surfboard and a small kit of all my earthly possessions at my side. A low point. The next day, on my way to Loch Arbour Beach, my favorite local surfing spot, at the north end of Asbury, I passed by an old pal sitting on the roof balcony of a small summer cottage. Big Danny Gallagher’s size was Clarence Clemons plus. He was a giant. He had a blinding
shock of red hair and when older wore an Old Testament fiery-red beard that made him look like a character out of Irish folklore. In his youth, he cut quite a fearsome figure and occasionally had the temperament to match. As I passed he told me his brother had just died of a drug overdose. He sat in a trance trying to make sense of it. He asked me what was happening and I told him I’d just been tossed
from Potter’s and was now indigent. He immediately invited me to bunk in with him.

It was a little upstairs apartment, just two rooms. The bedroom held Danny’s king-size waterbed, which took up all available space. Then there was a small kitchenette and connected living room, where I took up residence on the floor in my sleeping bag. This is where I lived while I recorded
Greetings from Asbury Park
. I’d bus to the city; work opening for Dave Van Ronk, Biff Rose or Birtha, one of the first female metal bands at Max’s Kansas City; get paid a few dollars; and make it to the Port Authority just in time for the last bus to Asbury. Sam Hood had hired me at Max’s and I attracted a nice crowd of hipsters: Paul Nelson, the great music writer; Paul Williams, creator of
Crawdaddy
magazine, the
first serious word on rock ’n’ roll; and David Blue, the folksinger and Village legend. He introduced himself to me after my set one night, then squired me around to meet Jackson Browne at the Bitter End (on tour for his first album) and Odetta, the great folksinger, after her late-night set at a local coffeehouse. Jackson let me sit in during
his set on David Blue’s word and I played “Wild Billy’s
Circus Story.” I was young, traveling light and excited to be in their company.

Greetings from Asbury Park

Up in Blauvelt, New York, in Brooks Arthur’s 914 Studios, we began to record
Greetings
in an atmosphere of tension. Mike and Jimmy were producing. Mike had his own engineer, Louis Lahav, a former Israeli paratrooper who’d come to America and fallen in with Mike and Jimmy. On the first day
of recording my first album, very little recording occurred. Mike was in a running battle with the union engineer from Columbia, who insisted on doing his job and manning the sound board. In several years this would all change and artists would independently choose their producers and engineers of their own volition. Nineteen seventy-three was the dawn of this kind of artistic control, a dawn that
had not yet completely broken over the recording industry. The day would devolve into a series of arguments, insults and irate phone calls while I sat around waiting. Mike was his usual ridiculously funny, combative self, putting this poor guy through the wringer. Finally an agreement was reached between the union, record company and Mike and Jimmy’s Laurel Canyon Productions. Louis Lahav would
engineer, Mike and Jimmy would produce, I would record and the union engineer would show up, get paid a full salary and sit on the couch reading the newspaper. Peace in the valley! Some version of this went on for my first three albums. The studio was located on Route 303 next to a Greek diner. Here we could get a cheap recording rate; carry on as we pleased out of sight of the nosy record company
bigwigs, who might be too curious about how their money was being spent; and eat at the Greek diner, where I found for a muse a waitress who had the finest body I’d seen since my aunt Betty. It was all good.

I’d convinced Mike and Jimmy I needed to record with a band. John Hammond, Clive Davis and Columbia had thought they’d signed a folk
singer-songwriter. The stock was way up on singer-songwriters
in those days. The charts were full of them, with James Taylor leading the pack. I was signed to Columbia, along with Elliott Murphy, John Prine and Loudon Wainwright, “new Dylan”s all, to compete in acoustic battle at the top of the charts with our contemporaries. What I had over my company in the field was that I’d secretly built up years of rock ’n’ roll experience out of view of the known
world and in front of every conceivable audience. I’d already seen the roughest the road had to offer and was ready for more. These long-honed talents would go a ways in distinguishing me from the pack and helping me get my songs heard.

Mike Appel had never seen me play with a full band in front of an audience until after we recorded
Greetings
, so my own main man was clueless about what I could
do. I tried to tell him, “You don’t understand, put me in front of a band and an audience, and I will
bury
the house.” When we started to tour in support of
Greetings
I had Mad Dog, Danny Federici, Garry Tallent and Clarence Clemons at my side. Mike was no dummy. He saw our first gig and said, “Hey, you know what you’re doing.” ’Til then, I believe he thought he was just humoring me by letting
me use my guys in the studio.

On
Greetings
I managed to bring in my homeboys Vini Lopez, Davey Sancious and Garry Tallent, with a cameo performance by Steve Van Zandt shaking my Danelectro amp’s reverb unit at the intro to “Lost in the Flood.” Steve was to be on the record but we opted out of electric guitar in my concession to the singer/songwriter I was signed to be. We cut the whole record
in three weeks. Most of the songs were twisted autobiographies. “Growin’ Up,” “Does This Bus Stop,” “For You,” “Lost in the Flood” and “Saint in the City” found their seed in people, places, hangouts and incidents I’d seen and things I’d lived. I wrote impressionistically and changed names to protect the guilty. I worked to find something that was identifiably mine.

We turned it in and Clive
Davis handed it back saying there were “no hits,” “nothing that could be played on the radio.” I went to the beach and wrote “Spirit in the Night,” came home, busted out my rhyming dictionary
and wrote “Blinded by the Light,” two of the best things on the record. I was able to find Clarence, who’d been MIA since that first night in the Prince, and I got his cool saxophone on those last two cuts.
It made a big difference. This was the most fully realized version of the sound I had in my head that I would get on my first album. The pre–E Street band did their best to sound studio-worthy while the words flowed like a storm surge, crashing into one another with no regret.

I never wrote completely in that style again. Once the record was released, I heard all the Dylan comparisons, so I steered
away from it. But the lyrics and spirit of
Greetings
came from an unself-conscious place. Your early songs emerge from a moment when you’re writing with no sure prospect of ever being heard. Up until then, it’s been just you and your music. That only happens once.

TWENTY-FIVE

LOSING MY RELIGION

I was twenty-two and I’d never had a drink—ever. I played in bars and had been around booze my whole life and never been tempted to even taste the stuff. My experience with my father’s drinking had been enough. The terrifying, all-engulfing presence he became when he drank convinced me to never go there. He lost who he was. The goodness and kindness in his heart,
of which there was plenty, were erased in a flood of self-pitying rage and a ferocity that turned our home into a minefield of fear and anxiety. You never knew when he was going to go off. As a child, my nervousness became so great I began to blink uncontrollably, hundreds of times a minute. At school, I was called “Blinky.” I chewed all of the knuckles on both of my hands night and day into brown
rock-hard calluses the size of marbles.
Nope, drinking wasn’t for me. But now, as my first album drew to a close, I was nervous about my rock ’n’ roll dream finally coming to fruition. Did I make a good record? On a national level, would I cut it? Was I who I thought I was, who I wanted to be? I truly didn’t know, but I knew I was about to find out, and that thrilled and frightened me.

I guess
it showed. Returning home from his construction job, Big Danny came up to me late one afternoon and said, “You don’t look so good. I know what you need, come with me.” That evening we drove to the Osprey, a bar in Manasquan, New Jersey, and we walked in. I’d stood outside this bar on countless afternoons listening to the bands inside, concentrating on the music and daydreaming over the brown-skinned
college girls as they slipped through the club’s swinging doors. All through the summers of ’64, ’65, ’66 and ‘67 I’d hitchhiked the twenty miles from Freehold to Manasquan and back almost every day. I’d ridden with concerned moms, drunk drivers, truckers, street racers eager to show off what they had under the hood, traveling businessmen, and only one middle-aged salesman who was a little too
interested in me. I’d hopped in with guys who had souped-up sound systems with echo chambers connected to their AM radios, “in-car” 45 record players set on springs under the dash near the shifter. Every sort of rube, redneck, responsible citizen and hell-raiser the Jersey Shore had to offer, I rode with ’em. I loved hitchhiking and meeting people. I miss it today.

As a teenager, underneath the
sweltering sun I’d stood outside of the Osprey for hundreds of hours listening to the sounds pouring out from within, but I’d never been inside. Back then, I could make out shadows through the club’s screen doors. The silhouette of the band who’d set up in the middle of the bar, right inside the entrance. I could hear the beer glasses clinking, the crowd’s laughter, boisterous conversation and
the high sizzle of the drummer’s cymbals cutting through it all and spilling onto the egg-frying mid-August streets of Manasquan. During their breaks, the hip-looking musicians would come out, have a smoke and speak casually to the young kid slouched all afternoon against a car at curbside. They were just
bar musicians making their way, but I
wanted
what they had, entrance to that smoke-filled,
beer-drenched, Coppertone-scented heaven that lay only a few forbidden feet beyond those swinging screen doors. Their break over, I’d watch them take those coveted steps back inside and rise again as silhouettes behind the bar, above the shouting crowd. As the first few notes of “What’d I Say” or some other frat band classic pealed out from within, I’d resume my sentry position. Class was in session.

So in through the swinging doors we swept and Big Danny bellied us up to the bar only feet from the sidewalk I’d endlessly tutored on. The featured act that night was the Shirelles, who’d had such great hits as “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “Baby It’s You,” but first . . . a small shot glass was slammed down onto the bar in front of me and filled with a golden liquid. Danny said, “Don’t
sip it, don’t taste it, just swig it down in one quick gulp.” I did. No big deal. We did another. Slowly, something came over me; I was high for the first time. Another round and shortly I was having what felt like the finest evening of my young life. What had I been sweating and worrying about!? All was good, wonderful even. The angels of mescal were circling around and informing my being; all
the rest was bullshit. The Shirelles hit the stage. They wore sequined gowns that looked like they were painted on and sounded great. I was singing along. I, the lone ranger, started talking to whoever the hell was around me and at some point during the evening, a miracle occurred. I smelled perfume and sidling up next to me was a very lovely and familiar-looking woman, raven haired, with olive skin.
I recognized her as one of the star ex-cheerleaders of my old alma mater, Freehold Regional High School. A conversation started as I kept sucking down a steady flow of my new best friend, Jose Cuervo Gold.