Bruce (4 page)

One day in 1962 Fred and Alice were chatting with Adele in her new South Street kitchen, visiting with the baby, and waiting for Doug to come home from his night shift at the plastics plant. Saying he felt a little under the weather, Fred went upstairs to take a nap. When Adele went up to check on him an hour later, the old man was cold and still; obviously dead. Running downstairs to tell Alice the terrible news, the older lady responded with a nod. Deciding to hold off from doing anything else until Doug came home, they sat together in the kitchen until the door opened. Doug responded with the same absence of emotion his mother had shown. He paused for a moment, said, “Oh, okay,” checked his pockets for coins, and then went to a pay phone to call the funeral home and alert a few relatives. When Bruce heard the news after coming home from school, he became hysterical. “It was the end of the world,” he says. “But we didn’t talk about my grandfather’s death. He was probably about sixty-two, sixty-three, or sixty-five when he went. I was quite close to him, but you never know how to react as a child. I remember the funeral, the wake, and all those things. But it wasn’t like today. Everyone was still . . . just different.”

With the Randolph Street house close to being condemned, the widowed Alice moved in with her son’s family. She spent most of her days helping care for Pam and also took the opportunity to shower more adoration over her fourteen-year-old grandson. Once again, she took to laying out his clothes in the morning, making his favorite treats, and glowing at his every word and gesture. Then Adele was playing the game too, making certain that Bruce had the one bedroom that was actually a suite, given its attached sunroom. And when Bruce realized that the sunroom had enough space for a real pool table, Adele and Doug scrimped for the money, then drove to another town in a snowstorm in order to bring it home in time for Christmas morning.

• • •

Alice had been hiding it for weeks, maybe for months: something was wrong with her insides. But without a fortune to pay the bills, what was the point of asking anyone to help? Adele took her to the hospital, and when the doctors concluded that Alice had cancer, they took her into their ward and kept her for the next three months, running the older woman through a litany of treatments, all debilitating, and many of them experimental. “I think they treated her like a guinea pig because she had no money or insurance,” Adele says.

When she finally came home, Alice was weak at first and then rallied. She seemed nearly back to her old self when Pam, then three years old, woke up in the middle of the night and asked her mother if it was okay for her to sleep in her Aggie’s bed. Adele thought it a bit strange—Pam had never asked to do that before. But she nodded and saw her daughter pad down the hall and slip through the bedroom door at the end of the hall. “I remember going into her room, her moving over and lifting the covers to let me in,” Pam says.

They both fell asleep that way, the little girl cuddled up against the older woman’s body, just as little Virginia had done so many years ago. Whatever Alice thought or dreamed about the past during her drift toward sleep will never be known. “When I woke up the next morning, I shook her to get up, and she didn’t move,” Pam says. Bruce, headed to school, had no idea. Bruce: “I’m sure I went through the room when they were there, only about fifteen feet from my own bedroom. That was a life
changer; the end of the world for me. I don’t remember anyone making a huge deal about (my grandfather), but it was different when my grandmother died. My dad was really upset.”

The untended 110-year-old house on Randolph Street trembled on its long-fractured foundation. Vacated by Alice in 1962, it stood for only a few more months before the bulldozers rolled in. The house’s weathered framework fell into a cloud of dust, then became a chalky pile of detritus hauled away in a truck. Once cleared, the property was rolled flat and paved over, cast for eternity as a part of the St. Rose church’s parking lot. Bruce refused to look. “I didn’t go back for years after it was knocked down,” he says. “I couldn’t go back and see the space. It was very, very primal for me.” The stillness in the air, the desperate love of his grandparents, the adoration he’d earned simply by being himself. This was the seat of his consciousness. His roots as deep and entangled as the ones anchoring the Irish beech still in the soil out front.

“I thought back,” Bruce says of the warped house that never stopped feeling like home, “and realized it was the place I loved the most.”

W
HAT BRUCE REMEMBERS MOST VIVIDLY
is the way the man looked. The way his every step, gesture, smile, and sneer set him apart from everything you were supposed to think, feel, or know about modern America. “A child wants nothing but to upset the world, and so there it was being done. It’s like sort of tearing your house apart and reconfiguring it according to your dreams and your imagination. You knew that this man was doing that.”

He’s talking about Elvis Presley, adding just a little retroactive analysis to the perspective of the grade schooler he was in 1957, gazing up from the rug just in front of his family’s little black-and-white television. As Bruce recalls, he was eight years old
¹
and completely unsuspecting, since
his main interest in
The Ed Sullivan Show
revolved around the comics, jugglers, and puppets who generally performed on CBS’s Sunday night variety show. Adele Springsteen was a regular viewer and also, as it turned out, something of an Elvis fan. “In those days,” she says, “we always danced when Elvis Presley came on.” Nothing could keep the electric vision of Presley’s wildly rebellious image from imprinting itself onto the boy’s consciousness. “He was actually the forerunner for a new kind of man,” Bruce says. “Everyone changed their ideas about
everything
after that. About race, about sex, about gender descriptions, what you could look like, what you could wear. It was outrageous. It’s a fantastic thing to be.

“It was an early signal that you could just be different,” Bruce continues. “And that the difference you may have already been feeling was not necessarily a handicap; was not necessarily inappropriate, wrong, or unsuitable. Suddenly there was some cachet just through your own uniqueness.” Obviously a powerful message to a kid who had long since sensed the chasm between the other kids’ families and the life he’d been born into. Better yet, Elvis said all that with an attitude that made it clear he wasn’t about to entertain dissent, let alone complaints.

“He had this enormous, balls-out, unchallenged authority,” Bruce says. And he did it with the insouciant joy of the world’s naughtiest boy. “It looked like he was playing, like a child is drawn to play. It looked like so much fun. Imagine throwing out all the self-consciousness that’s sort of like a blanket over you. What would happen if you threw all that off for two and a half minutes, three minutes, as a performer! It was an enormous key that unlocked your imagination and your heart and soul.”
²

Music always called to him, from the speaker of the radio Adele kept on top of the refrigerator in the family kitchen, and, even as a toddler, from the spinet piano his aunt Dora had in her living room. “He’d come running in and put his hands on the keys,” she recalls. But once he glimpsed Elvis, Bruce needed a guitar. He went straight to Adele, who loved the idea of her son making music, and within days, she had Bruce in hand, walking him to Mike Diehl’s music store to rent an acoustic instrument for her quivering son. She also signed him up for lessons. But Diehl’s formal style of teaching—music theory first, then scales, then at some too-distant-for-an-eight-year-old point, chords and songs, required far more patience than he could muster. As Bruce told Steve Van Zandt many years later, being subjected to yet another set of strict rules was the last thing he was looking for. “I need to make a horrific noise right
now.
” Stuck between that frustration and his own inability to coax anything resembling music out of the instrument by himself, Bruce’s interest faltered quickly. The guitar went back to Diehl’s music store, and that, it seemed, was that.

Except that now his ears were open. And it was easy to find and fall in love with new music, given Adele’s appetite for pop and her ear for a danceable tune. Still in the thrall of Elvis, Bruce scraped together sixty-nine cents to buy a four-song EP (extended play 45) of Elvis’s biggest hits, only performed by a guy named Dusty Rhodes. Who clearly wasn’t Elvis but, as far as Bruce was concerned, that didn’t matter. “I could put it on, and it made me
remember
Elvis,” he says. “It was close enough to give me a piece of what I was looking for.” That, and Adele’s radio, held him for the next few years, although Bruce also had an ear for novelty records, particularly Sheb Wooley’s 1958 smash “The Purple People Eater,” which he played ceaselessly on the local luncheonette’s jukebox, along with British skiffle
³
star Lonnie Donegan’s “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor (On the Bedpost Overnight).” Both Bruce and Ginny were so crazy for Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” that in July 1961 Adele piled them into the car and took them to Atlantic City to see him perform as
part of a Dick Clark package tour that also included Freddy Cannon, the Shirelles, and Bobby Rydell. And while both kids were eager to see the Steel Pier’s diving horse, they were, Adele recalls, both mesmerized by Checker’s star turn. He could dance, he could sing, he could play their favorite song exactly the way it sounded on the radio. And the crowd stood up and cheered! What could be better than that?

Because he lived halfway between New York and Philadelphia, Bruce’s transistor radio pulled in a wide array of radio stations, and when he tuned into the Philly rhythm and blues stations, a new horizon opened up. One of his favorites—thanks most immediately to his family’s new address—was called “South Street,” a doo-wop-style party tune by the Philadelphia-bred singing group the Orlons, whose male singer Stephen Caldwell boasted a tummy-rumbling double baritone voice. “Meet me on South Street,” they sang, “the hippest street in town!” Did it matter to Bruce that Freehold’s South Street was the furthest thing from the Orlons’ minds? Of course not. “But it gave some magical cachet to the address, so I went out and bought it,” Bruce reminisced with Van Zandt. Then came Dick Dale’s proto-psychedelic surf guitar tune “Miserlou,” the razored harmonies of the Four Seasons, the white-guys-on-a-front-porch folk groups on the TV show
Hootenanny
, and then the California vision of the Beach Boys, strolling the golden coast to the gorgeously wrought songs of Brian Wilson.

In early 1964 Bruce was riding in the front seat of his mother’s car when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” beamed out of the radio. “It’s those old stories, like when you hear something and your hair stands on end,” Bruce reminisced to Van Zandt. “It’s having some strange and voodoo-like effect on you.” Leaping out of the car, Bruce sprinted to a nearby bowling alley that he knew had a telephone booth, slammed his way into the box, and spun the number of the girl he was dating.
“Have you heard of the Beatles? Have you heard this song?”

“It stopped your day when it hit,” he said on Van Zandt’s syndicated
Underground Garage
radio show in 2011. “Just the sound of it. And you didn’t even know what they looked like.” Then the Beatles were shaking their astonishing mops on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, and then they were dominating the radio dial, with a wave of similarly tressed countrymen
marching on their Cuban boot heels. When summer came, Bruce invested a few weeks painting his aunt Dora’s house, then used $18 of his proceeds to buy an acoustic guitar he’d seen in the window of the Western Auto store
⁴
on Main Street. Next he bought himself a copy of the
100 Greatest American Folk Songs
songbook and committed himself to mastering the instrument.

It didn’t come easily, even as a fourteen-year-old. It took a week or two for Bruce to figure out (thanks to his slightly older cousin Frankie Bruno) that the guitar was far enough out of tune to be a completely different instrument. And even when it was tuned correctly, the auto store guitar wasn’t what you’d call user-friendly. “The neck,” Bruce recalls, “was basically razor wire on a two-by-four.” Something about its sound, or perhaps Bruce’s deepening fixation on the instrument, abraded his father’s fragile nerves.

“I’d be with Bruce up in his room, holding up the music book while he was learning chords,” his friend Bobby Duncan says. “And we’d hear his father yelling upstairs, ‘
I don’t wanna hear that goddamn thing!
’” Even the dull murmur of an acoustic guitar being played behind a closed door on a different floor of the house? “His dad hated that stuff,” Duncan says. “But his mom would do anything for him.” Which Bruce knew full well in December when he took Adele by the hand and led her to Caiazzo’s Music, near the Karagheusian Rug Mill on the corner of Jackson and Center Streets, and showed her the wickedly thin black-and-gold electric guitar gleaming in the window. Built in Japan, Kent guitars didn’t register on the professional musician’s list of must-haves. But it had the shimmering look, the jagged edges, and the electrified volume this young rocker craved. So he knew it was expensive, but if it were possible, somehow, it was the only thing he could ever imagine wanting again.

Adele took another look at the $60 price tag, and a few days later made another visit to the Household Finance Company for one of the short-term loans she turned to when she needed help squeezing through a tight spot or making the holidays as merry as possible. If Doug had any objections, the family’s main breadwinner wasn’t listening to him. So
when Christmas morning dawned in 1964, the precious instrument was waiting right where Bruce knew it would be, just beneath the lights decorating the lower boughs of the Springsteens’ Christmas tree.

• • •

His room equipped with the Kent and a small amplifier, the fifteen-year-old felt wired. When he got home from school, he ran upstairs to his room, shut the door tight, strapped the guitar over his shoulder, snapped the amp’s power switch, hit a chord, and
boom
: instant glory. “It was just, door closed, and you’re in there, doing your jam,” he says. “I had a pretty decent ear, so that helped. And then I developed quick, so that helped too, once I got just a little bit of the mechanics in.” Working through the chords, then the simple guitar solo from the Beatles’ arrangement of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout.” Mastering the twelve-bar basics of rock ’n’ roll, then working into the pop realm, with its larger palette of chords and melodic possibilities. Sometimes he played to the mirror, watching his hands on the guitar’s neck and reveling in the instrument’s potential to serve both as a shield against his shyness and a bridge to carry him to the center of everything. As he told
Newsweek
writer Maureen Orth in 1975: “The first day I can remember lookin’ in the mirror and standin’ what I was seein’ was the day I had a guitar in my hand.”