Bruce (11 page)

B
RUCE’S VERSE WRITING HAD ALREADY
come a long way from the romantic poems and singer-songwriter experiments he’d crafted in his high school and college years. No longer splayed among the diaphanous ladies, drifting birds, and starving children of his post–high school imaginings, Bruce looked to his own boyhood and the plague of draft notices, cops, teachers, and priests that haunted his adolescence.

And while most of his late-sixties lyrics seem less than fully formed, the visceral crunch of the music throttled the listener. “Sister Theresa,” performed with a lone guitar and Lopez’s bell-clear recorder, projects the passion of faith into unabashed eroticism. “You say you’re married to Jesus Christ / And that he’s in your bedroom every night,” Bruce sings. “Come with me for a while / I promise I’ll make you smile.” The tune often served as a bookend with “Resurrection,” a fan favorite thanks to its fire-and-brimstone attack on Catholicism. Yet neither of those songs
packed the wallop of “The Wind and the Rain,” an outraged breakup tune with a hurricanic climax that had the unsettling habit of coinciding with large-scale police busts, unexpected cloud bursts, and, on one breathtaking night, a lightning strike on the building they were playing. “Whoosh! It just exploded through the room,” Lopez says. “It caused this chain reaction of sparks . . . like lighting a chain of sparklers.”

Bruce also wrote a litany of antiwar songs: “We’ll All Man the Guns,” “The War Is Over,” “The War Song,” and more. But the lyrics were often undermined by their author’s righteous indignation. “America Under Fire,” for instance, describes the home front as a circle of hell populated by “conquered freak soldiers,” lovers “all turned to whores,” and streets chockablock with men who are both blind and “viciously insane.” And if those horrors hadn’t driven home the world-gone-wrong idea, the song’s climactic coda of “America the Beautiful” includes a sarcastic recitation of the chorus to the
Mickey Mouse Club
theme song.

Clearly, Bruce’s lyrics lagged behind the power of his music. But even at this awkward age, his authorial ambition is striking, particularly when it came to defying the conventions of rock ’n’ roll songcraft. “Bruce started writing these . . . odd combinations of things,” Steve Van Zandt says. “Epic, long songs. I don’t remember anyone else going through all those chord changes. Maybe the Mothers of Invention, but I don’t think he was a big fan of theirs.” Bruce remembers being swept up in the Allman Brothers. “It was almost southern rock, some of them,” he says. “Prog rock, southern rock. There was an amalgam of things, I think, at the time, Allman Brothers were very influential. But the interesting thing about those songs is that the arrangements were quite complex.”

The sprawling “Garden State Parkway Blues,” for instance, aggregates three or four distinct songs—different sounds, different styles, different voices—all knit together by instrumental pieces and various solos. Often stretching to thirty minutes or more in performance, “Garden” begins with a pleasant, midtempo rock groove accompanying a wry portrait of one working man’s journey from his bed to breakfast (“Whoa, my Kellogg’s Corn Flakes are my very best friend!”), to the driver’s seat of a
cheap used car that refuses to respond to the ignition key. “But I don’t care . . . it’s really got a heart!”
¹

The chorus introduces an increasingly frantic chant of “Punch in at nine, punch out at five,” which transitions into double-speed guitar solos, and then back to a spoken-word segment about unpaid bills and unfulfilled obligations. From there it is back to a full-throttle guitar-and-drums vignette describing an endless highway packed with “two-eyed monsters,” to a dreamy, voice-and-recorder fantasy featuring Douglas Fairbanks, Peter Pan, the guards at Buckingham Palace, and the Hell’s Angels’ notorious leader, Sonny Barger. Then come the clipper ships, chariots, sunlight soldiers, and an unnamed guy who refuses to steer his car up the on-ramp. The band eases into a three-chord vamp (repurposed three years later as the coda of “Kitty’s Back”) and the dream world finds form in a musician who skips away, instrument in hand: “playing with his guitar singing, he goes down upon the green hillside . . . and sunlight soldiers dance and sing before your very eyes.”

“Garden State Parkway Blues” may not be Springsteen’s most successful attempt at picaresque writing, but even
Born to Run
’s ten-minute mini-epic “Jungleland,” with its superior sense of narrative and restraint, can’t touch the daring that went into “Parkway” ’s twisty, modular structure. Bruce dismissed his Steel Mill songs not long after, and hasn’t played a note of them in public in more than forty years.
²
Now he concedes the songs were “fun,” and he still hears the connections to the work that would come. “I ended up tightening things, like in ‘Rosalita’ and some of those early things that really had twists and turns,” Bruce says. “I was always interested in that a little bit, you know. But I tell you what, Steel Mill played it for a long time and people liked it.”

Tinker West certainly did. Bruce was just on the threshold of his songwriting career, no one could say how far he and Steel Mill might go. And with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, and a paisley
cloud of other bands adrift in San Francisco, with music industry types giving laid-back chase, Tinker knew exactly where to find the most reliable launching pad.

• • •

West’s first call went to Doug “Goph” Albitz, last seen working with Wavy Gravy at the Woodstock festival in August. He spent most of his time running the kitchens at the oceanside Esalen Institute a couple hours’ south of San Francisco in Big Sur. A favorite meditation/getaway spot for California’s most gilded hippies, Esalen’s mix of exclusivity and aquarian ideals attracted some of the era’s most popular artists and musicians. The Beatles, minus Paul McCartney, had meditated in Esalen’s emerald hills. Bob Dylan also came through, blazing the way for Simon and Garfunkel, Arlo Guthrie, and Joan Baez. Most ended up performing in the institute’s ocean-view art barn. And when Goph noted that the institute still needed a band for its End-of-the-Sixties New Year’s Eve party, it all came together.

They set out the day after Christmas in a two-car flotilla, West and Bruce in West’s reconditioned 1948 Ford pickup, while Roslin, Lopez, and Federici rode in a station wagon. They traveled to Memphis, then got separated when an exhausted West, who had been piloting the truck for fifteen hours, hit his limit. He wheeled to the shoulder and told Bruce it was his turn to take the wheel.

Bruce knew this moment would come but still had no real idea how to pilot an automobile. He’d avoided steering wheels ever since his sole attempt to learn from Doug had left him feeling humiliated. “It sort of was like one shot, you’re not doing it, you’re done,” Bruce says. The few hours he’d spent piloting Pam Bracken’s automatic transmission sedan around the Challenger factory’s parking lot hadn’t prepared him to work the aged pickup’s herky-jerky manual transmission.

“So I’d have to tell him, ‘Push that pedal! Move the gearshift over there and now let out the pedal,’” West recalls. “Then the truck is grinding, and we’re lurching around the highway. But he got it going eventually, and as long as he didn’t have to stop, he was fine.”

Bruce and West pulled into Esalen on December 30, not long after the other guys had driven through the gates. They dropped their luggage
at the main lodge, then headed straight to the art barn to spend the next few hours shaking road dust off their fingers and toes. Then a smiling woman arrived with a steaming loaf of just-baked bread, presented on a cutting board with a crockery cup full of hand-churned butter. The group members made straight for the cutting board, eagerly consuming two-inch-thick slabs of the warm, herbal-scented loaf. Just beyond the open barn doors, they could see fluffy clouds drifting across the sky and rays of sun dancing on the surface of the Pacific. All so beautiful that no one in the group, not even the experienced potheads (everyone but Bruce) thought to wonder exactly what had given the bread’s aroma such a sweet, herbal undertone.

“Big Sur pot was some of the best in the nation back then,” Albitz says. “And it was everywhere, so we used it for a lot of things.”

It’s unclear how much the perpetually starved Bruce gobbled up, or what the rigidly self-controlled young man thought of his unexpected ascent through the leafy doors of perception. “All I know is that we all ate it,” Lopez says. “And things got a little strange.”

That was it for the rehearsal. Lopez, Federici, Roslin, and Bruce put down their instruments in order to take a closer look at the hippie paradise they’d heard so much about. Bruce and Lopez drifted together across the institute’s main lawn, almost stumbling over a class of spiritual seekers wrapped in white sheets and squirming across the lawn. “Someone told us they were being amoebas, going through phagocytosis,” Lopez remembers. “So we’re walking away saying, ‘Aha! So
that’s
how you get to your inner self. How could we have missed that?’” The two musicians found a trail leading up toward the desert canyons in the hills above. They climbed through the brush and rocks for a while, feeling the silence in the air and the sun on their T-shirted backs. And it was all so strange and beautiful that when Lopez saw something wriggling in the weeds, he reached down, turned over a rock and found “this
huge
fucking Gila monster. That’s when Bruce and I freaked out and ran back down to Esalen.”

• • •

Steel Mill played a second show at Esalen’s art barn on January 2, then drove up to San Francisco to audition for Bill Graham’s bookers—one
of twenty bands competing for a place on the city’s reigning promoter’s list of opening acts. These off-night cattle calls were regular events at the Fillmore West Ballroom, a low-cost evening ($2 a ticket) that came with instructions for the audience: drink, laugh, or enjoy. Bruce had an attack of nerves when he caught sight of the band Grin, led by a teenage phenom of a guitarist named Nils Lofgren.

A Maryland boy, Lofgren dropped out of high school to pursue a music career in California, and was more shocked than anyone when Neil Young tapped him to play on his 1970
After the Goldrush
album, and as a member of his touring band.
³
At first Bruce was intimidated by the younger guitarist’s prowess. “No way am I playing after that guy,” he muttered after watching Lofgren toss off yet another nimble-fingered solo. He regained his composure in time for Steel Mill’s set, and once they met in person, Bruce felt instantly at ease. “When I met Nils, we kinda already knew each other,” he said. “We looked at music in the same way and cared about the same things.”

Graham’s bookers were encouraging but noncommittal. No matter, as West had already booked a show at the College of Marin on January 10, and three days after that, they got a spot at the Matrix club, opening for Boz Scaggs. The
San Francisco Examiner
sent a critic named Phillip Elwood to cover the headline act. Instead Elwood devoted 90 percent of his review to Steel Mill’s set. “I have never been so overwhelmed by an unknown band,” he wrote, calling Steel Mill’s set “one of the most memorable evenings of rock in a long time.” The critic went on to praise Bruce’s songwriting, particularly the dramatic stops and starts, and gave special mention to Bruce’s “Lady Walking Down by the River,” for its compelling lyrics and a guitar-fired coda that Elwood described as “very, very heavy.”

Bill Graham called the next day, reaching Lopez at the Oakland home of Linda Mendez, a friend of West’s who had agreed to put up the band. Graham congratulated Lopez on the
Examiner
review and then offered the group a gig opening for blues guitarist Elvin Bishop at the Matrix.
The gig came with a slight hitch: they’d have to get their shit together and be onstage playing in, let’s see, three hours. Or slightly less. Three hours and one frantic journey across the Bay Bridge later, Bruce counted off the first song, and Steel Mill was back onstage, playing with all its might.

The pay didn’t amount to much: Roslin recalled earning a hefty $5. But the electric feel of playing at the epicenter of America’s rock scene kept them going, while the burgeoning following they could command at one or two of the nearby colleges kept their hopes up. Who knew where all of this might lead? As long as the group could up its game while also establishing a foothold in the West Coast’s most important rock ’n’ roll city, it all made sense.

Except for the increasingly pinched mood within the band. Most of the problem seemed to stem from Roslin, who had been spirited off by a pair of limpid-eyed girls who offered to share their apartment, their drugs, and (it would seem) themselves with the handsome bassist. Roslin didn’t hesitate, and found his new setup to be so diverting that he frequently spaced on band rehearsals, meetings, and even the occasional preshow sound check. None of this made his bandmates happy. And front man Bruce, with all of his endless, obsessive energy, was particularly irate.

If Bruce seemed especially moody in California, it often had something to do with his semiregular journeys to see his parents and baby sister in their new home in San Mateo. Doug, Adele, and Pam had arrived in the Bay Area the previous summer, and after a frustrating day or two exploring neighborhoods around the city, Adele found a real estate office that looked similar to the one where she had worked for so long in Freehold. Asking the first realtor she saw to point them to where “people like us live,” she followed directions to the blue-collar suburb on the peninsula south of San Francisco, where they rented a small apartment. Doug found a job driving an airport shuttle bus, and though his darker visions continued to resist the endless sunlight of their new home, a kind of optimism drifted in. “It did seem better,” Bruce says. “They had a better life, to my eye.” And yet Doug’s days still ended in the dark, smoky isolation of his lightless kitchen. “We became very close by our standards, but he never really changed,” Bruce says. “It was just his lay of the land.” And yet Bruce had to reach out. “I do remember the one time Bruce gave my dad
a hug,” Pam Springsteen says. “I think he was leaving after a visit. And that was a real moment.”