Born to Run (9 page)

My guitar was as cheap as they came but compared to the junker I’d been playing, it
was a Cadillac. The strings were smooth wound. Their distance to the fret board was minimal and allowed for easy intonation with the slightest pressure. I got better fast and was soon meeting at a friend’s house for jam sessions. I knew a drummer, Donnie Powell. We convened in his living room while his parents were out and made the most god-awful racket you’ve ever heard. Being able to play a little
was one thing; playing “together” was something else . . . uncharted territory.

The one tune every aspiring ax man struggled to master in those days was Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk.” It was unbelievably rudimentary, theoretically within the grasp of the most spastic idiot, and a hit record! “Honky Tonk” was a two-string blues concerto, a low-down dirty stripper’s groove, and is still a cool record
today. Donnie, the drummer, taught it to me and
the two of us hacked at it like ax murderers. Years before the White Stripes, the two of us beat the crap out of the blues . . . except we stunk! Singing? . . . Into what? With what? No one had a microphone or a voice. It was just way below garage-level thrashing, lasting all night long until his parents came home.

We called ourselves the Merchants.
A few other neighborhood kids came in, there were a few more exuberant, painful rehearsals, and then the day was done. It was finished and back to my room I went. But . . . there was one kid in the neighborhood who could really play. He’d taken a few years of guitar lessons. His dad was a successful businessman. He had a Gibson guitar—a real instrument—and a real amp. He knew how to read music.
I spoke to him and drafted him into a revamped Merchants, now called the Rogues (Freehold version, not to be confused with the later Shore version consisting of actual playing, singing musicians). Suddenly, we sounded close to music. My amp was a joke, so he let me plug into the spare channel of his. We even found a bass player—well, someone who had a bass and, more important, another amp. He joined
our combo. He couldn’t play but he was a nice, handsome Italian kid and his friendship would literally save my ass from a beating years into the future in a funky little backwoods dive down Route 9 called the IB Club. We plugged on, rehearsing semiregularly, with one radical and rebellious idea: someone would sing.

Showtime

In small-town Jersey in 1964, no one sang. There were vocal groups with
backing bands. There were bands with no vocalists who performed strictly instrumentals, taking the Ventures as their guiding light, but there were no self-contained playing, singing combos. That was one of the revolutions the Beatles brought with them when they came to America. You wrote the songs, you sang the songs, you played the songs. Before that, a typical local band’s set list would consist
of “Pipeline” by the Chantays; “Sleep Walk”
by Santo and Johnny; “Apache,” “Out of Limits,” “Penetration,” “Haunted Castle”—all purely instrumental pieces. In the early sixties at a high school dance, a top hometown band like the Chevelles would play all night, unmiked, without a word being uttered to the audience of frantic dancers. The Chevelles were the instrumental kings of our local scene
(challenged up Route 9 by the Victorians). They were real musicians, teachers at Mike Diehl’s music school, with good equipment and matching suits.

One day our young combo heard of Sunday matinee shows for teenagers at the Freehold Elks Club. It cost thirty-five cents to come in and all the bands played for free to a crowd of about seventy-five locals. The show was run by an unusual husband-and-wife
team of entertainers, Bingo Bob and Mrs. Bob. They were a circus act and a little on the freaky side but for a few months, until someone stole one of Mrs. Bob’s maracas and Bingo launched into a psycho fury, locking us all in the Elks Club until someone pulled a maraca out of their ass, it was a good place for your first baptism by fire. The almost strictly instrumental bands would set up
in a circle and square off for a few hours.

With anxiety somewhere around pre–Super Bowl levels, my bandmates and I loaded our gear into our parents’ cars, hauled it down to the Elks and set up. Being the newest group, we went on last. We spun through our tunes; panic and cold sweat aside, we weren’t bad. Then . . . we released our secret weapon: me . . .
singing
“Twist and Shout.” I blared my
way through it, putting on the hip-shaking show of my young life, or so I thought. There was a huge, grilled forties-style microphone plugged into the Elks’ few horrible squawk box speakers, which passed for a sound system. I hid behind the big microphone and screamed my head off . . . “Ahhhh, ahhhh, ahhhh, ahhhhh . . . well shake it up, baby, now . . .” An embarrassing performance but I felt pretty
good about it. Some kids even told us we sounded “great.” I thought almost everyone else was better than us. They had nicer equipment, more experience, but . . . barely anyone sang.

From there we were booked at a high school dance opening for the
Chevelles. Being booked to play at your high school was the top, top gig in town. It was a risky booking for us. That night we went down to Diehl’s
and rented an extra Gretsch amplifier with reverb! Reverb, that magic echo chamber that seemed to make you immediately sound like all your favorite records and lent an air of professionalism to what you were doing. Down to the Freehold Regional High School gymnasium we went. We were going to blow the sheet music out of the Chevelles and send them and their fancy music lessons crying back to Mike Diehl’s
music school. We were the “new wave.” No matching suits, no music school, just blues shouting and rock ’n’ roll.

Trouble began almost immediately. Our lead guitarist had forgotten his guitar strap, so he had to play the entire set with one knee propped up on his amp supporting his guitar . . . not cool. Also, unfortunately, our bass player remained unable as of yet to play a note, so he stood,
knee up (no strap either) on his amp (the one that got him in the band), with his bass turned firmly off for the evening. I brayed into the high school public address system microphone and a nightmare of unintelligible sound poured forth from somewhere in the rafters of the gymnasium. What was even worse, we were so excited about acquiring reverb, my lead guitarist and I plugged into our rented
amp, turned the reverb on full and reduced our sound to a quivering, echoing mash, a cheese-ball shitstorm of submerged instrumentation that sounded like it was being puked up from the bottom of some dragon-infested ocean. Our new “effect” reduced whatever we were playing to meandering gibberish. (Full reverb in a high school gymnasium . . . don’t try it, young ’uns!) It was humiliating. You could
tell as it was going by. I stood there head down, red faced, knowing we sounded awful and without a clue as to what to do about it. The crowd huddled close in front of our band expecting . . . something; we’d been bragging all week. Their faces told the story . . . “What the fu . . . ?” Then the Chevelles came on and smoked. They were professionals. They played real music, as boring and corny as
it was. They knew how to control their instruments and perform before a crowd.
We stood there watching, newly humbled, with a few die-hard pals telling us we “weren’t so bad.”

We went back to the drawing board, except this time, I’d end up there alone. I was informed shortly after our gig by my pal, the guy
I’d
brought into the band, that I’d been voted out. My guitar was “too cheap” and wouldn’t
stay in tune, and he unnecessarily added that he’d seen the same “piece of junk” in New York City for thirty dollars. Ouch . . . that hurt. I told my mom that day as I walked her home from work that I’d been kicked out of the band but I didn’t have the heart to tell her why. She’d anted up everything she had for that “piece of junk” and I was going to make it work.

In My Room

That night I went
home, pulled out the second Rolling Stones album, put it on and taught myself Keith Richards’s simple but great guitar solo to “It’s All Over Now.” It took me all night but by midnight I had a reasonable facsimile of it down. Fuck ’em, I was going to play lead guitar. For the next several months (years!) I woodshedded, spending every available hour cradling my Kent, twisting and torturing the strings
’til they broke or until I fell back on my bed asleep with it in my arms. Weekends I spent at the local CYO, YMCA or high school dances. Dancing was over; I was silent, inscrutable, arms folded, standing in front of the lead guitarist of whatever band was playing, watching every move his fingers made. After the dance, when the other kids were hanging out, heading for pizza at Federici’s or trying
to make it with the girls, I rushed home to my room and there ’til early in the morning, my guitar unplugged so as not to disturb the house, I tried to remember and play everything I’d seen.

Before long I began to feel the empowerment the instrument and my work were bringing me. I had a secret . . . there was
something
I could do, something I might be good at. I fell asleep at night with dreams
of rock ’n’ roll glory in my head. Here’s how one would go: The Stones have a gig at Asbury Park’s
Convention Hall but Mick Jagger gets sick. It’s a show they’ve got to make, they need a replacement, but who can replace Mick? Suddenly, a young hero rises, a local kid, right out of the audience. He can “front”: he’s got the voice, the look, the moves, no acne, and he plays a hell of a guitar. The
band clicks. Keith is smiling and suddenly, the Stones aren’t in such a rush to get Mick out of his sickbed. How does it end? Always the same . . . the crowd goes wild.

THIRTEEN

THE CASTILES

I was sitting in my South Street home one afternoon when a knock came at our front door. It was George Theiss, a local guitarist and singer who’d heard through my sister that I played the guitar. I’d seen George around the Elks. He told me there was a band forming and they were looking for a lead guitarist. While I hesitated to call myself a lead guitarist, I had been hard
at it for a while and worked up some very rudimentary “chops.” We walked across town to Center Street and into a little half-shotgun house fifty feet up the block from where the metal-on-metal war of the rug mill spilled out open factory windows onto the streets of Texas. In Texas I’d slip on my guitar and join my first real band.

There I met Tex and Marion Vinyard. They were friends of George
who had decided to surrender the fifteen square feet of what was called their dining room to local teenage noisemakers. It was a very informal
neighborhood, black and white separated somewhat by the rug mill but generally hanging around the streets together, with Tex and Marion’s tiny apartment seeming to be the hub of some sort of neighborhood teen club. They were in their thirties and childless,
so they took in “strays,” kids who either didn’t have much of a home life or were just looking to get out of the house to someplace less confining and a little more welcoming. Tex was a temperamental, redheaded, comb-overed, loudmouthed, lascivious, pussy-joke-telling factory worker. Like my pops, he was rarely spotted out of his uniform, khaki work shirt and pants, pocket protector and all.
He was also generous, loving, sweet-hearted and one of the most giving adults I’d met up to that time.

Tex and Marion seemed stranded between the teen world and adulthood, so they made a home for themselves and a surrogate parental life somewhere in the middle. They weren’t your parents but they weren’t your peers either. As we howled away, pushing out the walls of their little home with banging
guitars and crashing drums, with the neighbors a mere two inches of drywall away (what tolerance!), they made the rules and set the agenda for what would fly and what would not. Band practice started at three thirty and ended at six, taking place immediately after school. Tex became our manager and Marion the house mother and seamstress to a team of misfit townie rock-’n’-rollers. There was a
small collection of teenage girls (bring the guitars and they will come). There was flirting, listening to music, Tex’s cackling innuendo followed by Marion’s “Teeeeeeexxxxx . . . cut that out!” Some kissing, hand holding, but not much else, not in the house anyway. George, who bore a resemblance to both Elvis and Paul McCartney (the King AND a Beatle, the true double whammy!), was our resident lothario
and did pretty well for himself. The rest of us took what we could clumsily find but it was mostly all about the music.

The band consisted of George, myself, drummer Bart Haynes, bass player Frank Marziotti and a revolving set of tambourine-killing hatchet men. The front man position was one for which few locals qualified at the
time because you needed to actually have rhythm and sing. We were
all little white boys with weak time and voices, but hey, that didn’t stop the Stones, and the Stones were our Holy Grail and blueprint of cool. We needed our Mick, a guy out front. First we just took the toughest guy we knew and put him out there. He couldn’t sing a note and was visibly uncomfortable as we lessened and lessened his duties until they were reduced to the breathing section in Ian
Whitcomb’s wheezingly lecherous “You Turn Me On.” This was a guy who was now in the band just to breathe! We knew it wasn’t working out and drew straws to see which one of us would get a whipping when he brought the bad news. Hey . . . that’s what you have a manager for! We let Tex do it. Our “singer” went peacefully with a sigh of relief. After that we picked the best-looking guy we could find, the
guy with the coolest hair in school. He looked great onstage and played a pretty good tambourine but, alas, could not sing. George was the best vocalist we had. He had a real voice and charisma and did the job well. I was considered toxic in front of a microphone, my voice the butt of many of Tex’s jokes, and years later, after selling millions of records, I would visit Tex and he would take grand
pleasure in sneering at me, “You still can’t sing. George is the singer.”

Tex was my first surrogate father figure. He was loving in his own twisted way. More important, he was accepting. He cherished and encouraged your talents, took you for who you were and put his time, muscle, money and big black Cadillac, hauling equipment, all in service of your dreams. We’d stand together slobbering into
the window of Caiazzo’s Music over a new Shure microphone. Caiazzo’s stood next to Ring’s Barber Shop and just twenty feet across the street from the Vineyards’ front door. At night as we sat on Tex’s tiny stoop, Caiazzo’s windows glowed with white pearl drum kits, metal-flake guitars and enough amplifier wattage to wake that dead, shit dump of a town from its stupefying slumber. Tex would sit
there, silent, cigarette smoldering, and finally shout, “Fuck it, when I get paid on Friday, we’re going to bring that baby home,” and he would. Then he’d watch like a proud papa as his “boys” crowed like young roosters into
the shiny new microphone and say, “Damn . . . that new Shure, now, that’s a sound.”