Bruce (12 page)

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Weeks turned into a month. Then it was mid-February, and Steel Mill was still in the Bay Area, hustling from one low-paying gig to another, still hoping to find a serious break. Which seemed to beckon when Bill Graham asked Steel Mill to perform an in-studio audition for his new Fillmore Records label. The band ripped through onstage favorites “Goin’ Back to Georgia” and “He’s Guilty,” with “Cherokee Queen” representing the newer stuff and the piano-led, harmony-filled country ballad “The Train Song” to show off the band’s musical diversity. Graham came into the studio beaming, saying he’d heard enough to offer Steel Mill a full recording contract. Which sounded dreamy until it turned out that the advance Graham had in mind was only $1,000. For which Graham also expected to claim the publishing rights to Bruce’s songs, thereby controlling how they would be used and claiming the lion’s share of money they generated in perpetuity. West gave the band members a chance to kick it around for themselves, but his opinion of the offer was obvious. “Graham wants Bruce’s publishing? No way I’m letting anyone have that. That’s Bruce’s fuckin’ pension plan, right? And it’s not mine to sell.”

West’s argument swayed Bruce, although he certainly did like the sound of coming home with a record deal. Lopez didn’t feel right about trying to talk his bandmate out of his song publishing, though he was also eager for the band to be stamped with Bill Graham’s approval. But it fell to Roslin to try to argue his bandmates and manager into accepting Graham’s proposal, no matter how stingy. “Let’s just take the deal and go from there,” the bassist said, speculating on how Graham’s imprimatur would enhance their price for gigs, which would in turn enhance the value of the songs Bruce would write even after they scored a better deal somewhere else. But Bruce had already made up his mind. After the meeting, he called Lopez aside to tell him the news: Vinnie Roslin had to go.

He’d always been an odd man out. For all the dynamism Federici and Lopez put into their playing, Roslin struck Bruce increasingly as a bystander. He had a steady hand on the bass but, to Bruce’s ears, not
much more. Meanwhile, Roslin’s stoic demeanor onstage added nothing to the band’s energy. And he’d been even less on point since he’d taken up with Bambi and Thumper over there in San Francisco. All those missed rehearsals and sound checks had taken their toll: blown cues, forgotten riffs, and, sometimes, entire songs performed with bass lines that bore no relationship to what everyone else played. Given his role as protector/hatchet man for Bruce, Lopez knew it fell to him to give the bass player the bad news. “Bruce didn’t do stuff like that,” he says ruefully. “He relied on me for certain things, so I’d just do it.” Lopez peers at his shoes as he recalls the rest of the episode: How the news pinned Roslin to the back of his chair, and how he wept and begged for another chance. “But there was no going back,” Lopez says. “There never is any going back.”

Nearly two months into their West Coast residency, West, Bruce, Lopez, and Federici agreed that their momentum in San Francisco had sputtered. With cash running perilously short, they booked a two-night gig in Richmond, Virginia, at the Free University’s student center. But who would hold down the bass end of the music when they got there? At first Bruce made like he hadn’t given it any thought at all. But when Lopez suggested pulling in Bruce’s frequent wingman Steve Van Zandt, the guitarist nodded happily. They called back to New Jersey, and Van Zandt didn’t have to think about it. He would meet them in Virginia, where he might get an hour or two to rehearse with the rest of the band before the first set began on February 27. “I figured, yeah, sure, why not?” Van Zandt remembers. The prospect of switching to bass, an instrument he’d rarely if ever played, didn’t slow him down for an instant. “It’s just not that big a deal with a hard rock band, you know.”

Back on its usual circuit of clubs, universities, and opening slots, Steel Mill continued to fill the nightclubs and draw well at the schools, particularly at Monmouth College and Free University, where the group could attract crowds in the thousands. Local media attention started to flow too, especially after West invited a handful of writers, critics, disc jockeys, and other music industry insiders to an open rehearsal at the Challenger factory on April 11. Joan Pikula, an
Asbury Park Press
feature writer, came through four days later with a lengthy profile (“The Steel Mill Blazes Trail for New, Talented Musicians”) describing them as musically innovative
pioneers. “They’ve proven there is a following here for people with skills,” Pikula wrote, concluding that Steel Mill might even make the Jersey Shore the country’s next rock ’n’ roll mecca.

For a time, Bruce took for granted that Steel Mill could take him as far as he wanted to go. The band was his future. “We played to thousands of people, with no record out,” he says. “It was incredible. Auditoriums and gymnasiums filled. We didn’t play a lot, but those were shows where you would come home with five hundred dollars in your pocket, and you could live on that for months. For a local band, that was big success. And in the area, we were big local stars.”

Pikula wrote an even more impassioned story in mid-June when Steel Mill opened for the successful rockers Grand Funk Railroad. The Detroit band would soon set a new record for selling out New York City’s Shea Stadium: what took the Beatles eighty days to do in 1965 took GFR seventy-two hours in 1971. For now, though, Grand Funk was still playing local arenas. When its scheduled openers the MC5 (the Detroit-based protopunkers whose just-released second album had been produced by a recent Brandeis University graduate named Jon Landau) had to cancel, Steel Mill took the last-minute invitation to fill in at Bricktown’s Ocean Ice Palace.

According to Pikula’s impassioned review, headlined “Rock and Inequity,” Steel Mill blew the bigger band off the stage. To drive home her point, Pikula focused her critical microscope on the bands’ respective leaders. “[Grand Funk’s Mark] Farner is slick; what he writes is solidly mediocre, as is his playing,” she wrote. “Springsteen is neither slick nor mediocre. His music is fine, diverse stuff which blends an infinite variety of musical idioms . . . and his playing, inventive, finely shaded, and clean, is superb.”

Granted, Pikula’s sense of the evening might have been influenced by her loyalty to the guys she had just gotten to know. She also took care to delineate Farner’s ability to inspire an arena full of fans to raise their fists and make other quasi-revolutionary gestures. However, Grand Funk’s rhetoric struck her ears as hollow, whereas the passion in Steel Mill’s music prompted the crowd to not just dance off its frustrations but also to focus on the ideas and images in the lyrics. “Steel Mill made the
music,” she wrote. “Grand Funk got the money. Therein lies the inequity.”

Bruce marveled at the story. “That was a biggie,” remembers his longtime friend Lance Larson, a stalwart Asbury Park musician. “He dusted their fuckin’ doors, and when the newspaper said he was way better than this big, established star, well, Bruce was incredibly proud of that.”

He had more to be proud of during the summer of 1970. Steel Mill drew four thousand fans to an outdoor show held at the Clearwater Swim Club in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, and then scored a few big paydays at a series of end-of-term events at the usual Virginia colleges. They returned to Richmond for a huge summertime blowout held on the top deck of the Seventh and Marshall Streets parking garage in downtown Richmond, supported again by Mercy Flight, a local band whose entire lineup, from manager Russell Clem to drummer “Hazy” Dave Hazlett, had become friendly with the Steel Mill crowd. The group’s lead singer, Robbin Thompson, developed a friendship with Bruce, who often slept in his apartment when Steel Mill came back to play another series of shows in Richmond. So when the garage show ended, they went off together and, as usual, talked about music deep into the night.

Bruce admired Thompson’s vocal power and onstage charisma, and as he began to feel overburdened by the many demands he faced in Steel Mill, he asked his friend if he might consider auditioning for a spot as co-singer and front man for Steel Mill. Thompson absorbed the invitation in shades of disbelief. “Bruce was obviously the group’s front man, so why did he need me?” The rest of the group shared his confusion. If all the crowds and critics declared themselves transfixed by Bruce’s singular skills as a guitarist, performer, and lead singer, why bring in another front man to crowd him out? “It was an odd move,” says Van Zandt. And yet, he continues, not surprising, given the number of options the group’s chief writer, singer, lead guitarist, and music director could claim. “Bruce didn’t know what kind of role he wanted to play. Because it’s annoying to be that multitalented. So he was the front man, and the guitar hero, and the writer. And sometimes you’re better off doing one fuckin’ thing right.”

After a week of rehearsals, Lopez, Federici, and Van Zandt could see his point. On the last day of Thompson’s tryout, Bruce gathered his three
partners in one of the factory’s storage rooms to talk it all over. It took only a few minutes for the band to stream back into the band room and tell Thompson he could join up immediately if he still felt like it. Thompson did. He quit school the next week, packed up his belongings, and drove back to New Jersey.

The group returned to Richmond in late August, then drove overnight to Tennessee to play a set at the Nashville Music Festival, where the crowd of fifty thousand fans included more than a handful of record company executives. The promoters had also tapped Steel Mill to serve as the backup band for Roy Orbison’s headline set, much to Bruce’s and Van Zandt’s fan-boy delight. When the executives swooped into the group’s dressing area to shake hands and congratulate everyone for their good showing, Thompson noticed something the others either didn’t see or simply didn’t acknowledge.

“These people were saying, ‘Hey, so-and-so record company is here, that’s the guy talking to Tinker and Bruce,’” he recalls. “And as I was watching that go down, I realized that the guy—and all the other people talking about Steel Mill—were really there to see Bruce. And that was a little flag to me. ‘Ah, I get what’s going on here.’” For all that Steel Mill presented itself as a band consisting of five equal members, everyone could recognize the one guy who mattered more than everyone else. “And I never forgot it.”

Back in Richmond, the group played another few shows before Lopez wandered off with the wrong girl, only to be roused at four in the morning by gun-wielding cops. Someone in her house had six pounds of marijuana hidden in his room, and now everyone in sight faced felony drug trafficking charges. Given the seriousness of the drug dealing charges, the only way Lopez would see the light of day in the next five or ten years would involve the labors of professional legal representation. Steel Mill didn’t have immediate access to that kind of money, but the members knew where they could get it. With a summer-ending show set up for Friday, September 11, they could declare the evening a benefit and send their proceeds down to Vini in Virginia. Thompson’s former bandmate Dave “Hazy” Hazlett could play Lopez’s drums. To make matters all the more promising, they’d be performing at the same venue where they had
drawn four thousand fans in mid-June: the Clearwater Swim Club in Atlantic Highlands.

• • •

It began as a dreamy, late-summer afternoon. Warm, but with a breeze off the ocean and acres of New Jersey kids splayed across the sloping lawn. The show started at five o’clock with sets by two local bands, Task and Sid’s Farm, and then a final warm-up set by Jeannie Clark, who juiced up her usual folk repertoire with the help of Van Zandt on lead guitar, bassist Garry Tallent, and an Asbury Park blues singer-musician named John Lyon. The police presence outside seemed thicker than usual, but welcome to the Middletown Police Department’s jurisdiction. “Middletown was famous for having no crime,” says native boy Van Zandt. “And having no black people. And having the classic sort of suburban/authoritarian order.” Eager to be forearmed in the event of a revolution, Middletown police chief Joseph McCarthy bought an inventory of riot helmets, clubs, shields, and other weapons for his force. And after receiving a few complaints from neighbors upset about the noise rising above the trees from Clearwater’s summer concerts, McCarthy figured this end-of-summer music fest would be an excellent opportunity to try out the new gear. “Like Halloween, I guess,” Van Zandt continues. “They had no use for it. But here they are.”

Just like the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. Like the May 1970 Kent State University demonstration that Bruce’s girlfriend Pam Bracken, a sophomore at the school, had ventured into moments before the National Guard opened fire and killed four unarmed students. Bracken ran for her life that awful day, and now, just four months later, nearly five thousand rock ’n’ roll fans had herded together to hear loud music, suck up their secret stashes of whatever they had, and forget all about Middletown’s just-imposed ten o’clock p.m. curfew. “It was the playing out of the generation gap,” Van Zandt says of what transpired that night. “In a physical way.”

Steel Mill, with Hazlett perched at Lopez’s drums, hit the stage close to eight and launched into its usual set, alternating exhortations to fun, sex, heartbreak, runaway trains, and dancing in the streets with the feverishly subversive tunes Bruce had been writing for more than a year. The
party packed tight across the hillside and tighter still on the patio near the stage, ecstatic with the music and comradeship. Maybe a few kids got busted for flagrant pot smoking or wine guzzling. So it goes. And if the crowd’s temperature spiked at all, it had more to do with Bruce’s intense performance. Dressed in a sleeveless white T-shirt and his usual rope-belted jeans, he fed off the crowd’s energy, his voice entwined with Thompson’s, his guitar leads pinwheeling from one verse to the next.

“Bruce was always set apart by that magic he had,” says Joe Petillo, the Upstage guitarist who had come out to see his Steel Mill pals do their thing. He’d seen Bruce play; he’d traded solos with him at the Upstage. But from the middle of the crowd, Petillo felt the awe rising in him. “When he stepped onstage, he took charge. You knew something special was happening.”