Bruce (6 page)

But most of the shows were far more typical teen dance gigs held at the Woodhaven Swim Club, the Freehold Elks Club, the Farmingdale Mobile Home Park, and several weekend socials held for Bruce’s old classmates at the St. Rose of Lima School around the corner from his house. One night that fall, Adele put on her coat to walk her son down the block and to the door of the St. Rose cafeteria, where she paused to kiss him, and then watched as he stepped inside the door and toward his bandmates on the stage. Recognizing Freehold police officer Lou Carotenuto holding down a security post near the door, she went up to say hello. “She said, ‘Keep an eye out for Bruce, he’s going to be famous someday!’,” Carotenuto says. “I just thought, ‘Thank God for mothers. They’re the only ones who always believe in you.’” But then, Adele was a Zerilli, so her faith was automatically tripled by her sisters Dora and Eda, both of whom lined up with the high school kids to get tickets for the Castiles’ set at the opening festivities for the new ShopRite supermarket in Freehold. “Oh, I loved it,” Bruce’s aunt Dora says. “But even then he was pretty famous. To us, he was.”

• • •

And yet for Douglas Springsteen, it still sounded like noise. A screeching clamor from beyond the ceiling; the sound of his son’s tumble into the same trap his own life had become. When it bore down on him, Doug took the kitchen broom and used the handle to pound the ceiling beneath Bruce’s room to shut him up. “Because of the neighbors!” Ginny Springsteen says. “We lived in a duplex, and they were right next to us.” For his sister, for Adele, for Theiss, and for all the other neighborhood kids who knew Mr. Springsteen well enough to bid him hello when they entered the kitchen, the father-son static seemed par for the generational course. “Nothing happened out of the ordinary. He wanted Bruce’s hair short, and Bruce wanted it long,” Ginny says. She thinks some more. “Maybe to us it wasn’t that big of a deal, but obviously to Bruce it was.”

Doug may not have understood his son but he definitely feared for his future. He certainly didn’t know how to protect the boy from the hard truths waiting to greet him once he got out of school and faced up to the working man’s world. It had made sense for Doug to abandon his education to take up with the rug factory: the Karagheusian employee rolls touched nearly every family in town. But World War II had disrupted that career path, and nearly twenty-five years later, Doug still hadn’t found a career he could stick with. Once the very picture of a prosperous working-class town, Freehold saw its fortunes take a dark turn when the Karagheusians, who had once employed more than four hundred residents, abandoned Freehold in 1961, moving their factory to North Carolina, where labor came cheap. With the town’s other factories either gone or on their way out, and all the tertiary shops, restaurants, car dealerships, and so on collapsing in their wake, laborers like Doug were left to fight over the scraps. “It felt like the death of the town,” says Freehold native, historian, and journalist Kevin Coyne, whose own grandfather’s thirty-two-year commitment to Karagheusian ended with a pink slip and two weeks of severance pay. “There was a lot of bitterness. A sense of broken promises. Of loyalty unrewarded.”

Douglas Springsteen eased his pains with his cigarettes and six-pack. For him to see his son come up the back-door steps, guitar in hand, his long hair so unkempt, his clothes so flashy, and his youthful face so untroubled, whispering “Hey, Pop” on his way up to his room grated against the open wounds in his psyche. Needing to prepare his son to confront the bleak grind that had claimed him, Doug stiffened in his chair and asked Bruce to come back and chat for a bit. The music and applause fast fading from his ears, Bruce would lay down his guitar, grit his teeth, and walk dutifully back into his father’s charred vision of the world.

For years friends have wondered if Doug lashed out at his son with fists or an even more toxic form of psychological cruelty. The best-intentioned people whisper words like
abuse
and
brutality
. What got lost over the years is that Doug’s gruff demeanor was the thinnest veneer over his own torment. And while he was ashamed of his weakness and desperate to keep his oldest child from suffering the fate he’d been dealt, it was
all but impossible for Doug to connect with Bruce in a meaningful way. So it wasn’t the lectures, criticisms, and occasionally heated arguments that cut into Bruce’s skin. It was the vacancy that swam into his father’s eyes whenever he came into the room. When Bruce turned toward his father hoping to see something—a spark of affection, pride, a glimmer of love, a nod of recognition, even—only emptiness stared back.

“It wasn’t in the doing, it was in the
not
doing,” Bruce says. “It was in the complete withholding of acknowledgment. It was in the vacantness.” The air seems to crackle, and it’s like no time has passed, as if the smoke and the alcohol fumes still clung to him. If only because Bruce has come to understand that the hurt in the room didn’t begin or end with him. “My father, in truth, was a wonderful guy,” he says. “I loved him.
Loved
him. But the drinking was a problem. On a nightly basis, every single day, an entire six-pack is not insignificant. I don’t know if the withdrawal came from that, or . . .” He trails off, glances out the window, and then shrugs. “I’ve written about it a little bit myself. I don’t know how much of it you don’t get. You get the gist of it.”

• • •

The Castiles rolled into 1966 at a good clip, playing a steady stream of teen dances, and then working into the battle-of-the-bands competitions that pitted local groups against one another in judged (if at times suspiciously) contests for cash and prizes that sometimes included opening spots for famous acts. Those bigger breaks didn’t always materialize, even for the supposed winners. But the shows did allow the aspiring bands to meet, compare acts, and build a musical community that went beyond their own schools and towns. When Bruce met a skinny, quick-witted guitarist from the Shadows at Middletown, New Jersey’s Hullabaloo Club one night, they didn’t have to chat long before he realized he’d met a rock ’n’ roll soul mate.

“The bottom line is that we were obsessed with the same levels of detail,” Bruce recalls. “If someone cut their hair, if someone changed their shirt . . . it was about everything the performers were doing, thinking, breathing, eating, drinking, and seeing. And there was
one
other person who understood the significance of all these events in the same way that I did. And that person was Steve Van Zandt.” And although
Van Zandt’s mother and stepfather
⁸
lived a half hour and cultural world away in Middletown (“Freehold was the home of greasers and inlanders,” Bruce says. “When you got closer to the coast, it was more upscale”), the boys still found a way to spend endless hours together listening to records, stripping them down to components, and analyzing what made each part distinctive, from the lead vocal, to the rhythm guitarist’s chord inversions, to the drummer’s contrasting hi-hat patterns. “Steve was the guy you went to—every deep rock fan has one—who you don’t have to explain yourself to,” Bruce says. “You don’t have to explain why you’re so worked up that on this record the guy used a different guitar than on the last one, and it’s a
betrayal of all that is good!
All that is
righteous
in the world! And why did he comb his hair this way, then comb it that way?
No! No!
The wonderful argumentative minutiae of rock ’n’ roll came alive and on fire when we sat down together, and that continues to this day. If I ever want to revel in the oversignificance of anything that’s going on or we’re trying to do, Steve is my man. He’ll explain it all to me. And the worst part is that even if I disagree, I know exactly what he’s talking about. I can’t dismiss his argument out of hand, because I know exactly where he’s coming from.”

The Castiles developed a small but devoted following in and around Freehold, including a collection of exactly forty-two high schoolers, most of them girls, who wrote and signed a petition demanding the group “get some recognition.” To wit: “The group has a sensational sound, and we protest against the fact that record companies and radio stations completely ignore these fantastic boys.” Such girlish enthusiasm was already wearing on Marziotti’s twenty-nine-year-old nerves, so when a moist-eyed fan cornered him after an early May gig at the Le Teendezvous club and asked “Are you Brucie’s daddy?” the bass player had enough. “I told Tex they could stand on their own now,” he says. Marziotti stuck around long enough to run the much more age-appropriate
bass player Curt Fluhr through the basics of their set, then bid the group farewell.

Fluhr had been a Castile for less than two weeks when he accompanied the others to the Mr. Music recording studio in Bricktown, New Jersey, to cut both sides of the Castiles’ first single, a pair of original songs credited to Springsteen-Theiss. The A side, a high-spirited breakup song called “Baby I” with a distinct Carl Wilson
⁹
touch to the guitar work, makes light work of its romantic brush-off, breezily informing its femme fatale that her faithless services will no longer be required, as the singer, “Got somebody new / Somebody better than you / Somebody who’ll be true.” But while all’s fair in adolescent love and pop songs, the flip side, “That’s What You Get,” anticipates a legion of Bruce’s subsequent songs, with gloomy verses in which one man’s lie of a life results somehow in the untimely death of his girlfriend, which shocks but doesn’t surprise the narrator. “That’s what you get for loving me,” he concludes in the chorus.
¹⁰
What they got for recording the single added up to an impressive showpiece for friends, a calling card for bookers, and not much else.

The single also featured the band’s new drummer, Vinny Maniello, tapped to replace Bart Haynes when the older boy, then completing his senior year at Freehold Regional, joined the US Marines, hoping to earn a better rank and assignment for having enlisted rather than waiting for the draft. Haynes knew he was destined to wind up in Vietnam with a rifle in his hands, but when he came home for a post–boot camp break, he made it all seem like just another goof, wearing his corporal’s uniform with all the authority of a kid on Halloween. “He was a tough kid, kind of drawn by happenstance,” Bruce says. “He was crazy, loose, and a very funny guy.” Handed a map of the world, Bart Haynes had absolutely no idea where to locate the obscure country for whose jungles and mountains he would soon be risking his life.

The rest of the Castiles spent the next year struggling to hone their music and work their way up into the better beach clubs, teen clubs, and possibly a concert stage or two, even if at the bottom of a dozen-band lineup. The concert bookings never quite worked out, but Vinyard did manage to land them a semiregular series of shows at the Cafe Wha?, one of the best-known (and now iconic) rock ’n’ roll venues in New York’s Greenwich Village. Almost all of their sets at the club took place during the afternoon shows presented for the city’s teenagers. But playing the same stage that helped launch both Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, the latter of whom had played the club just months earlier, was no small thing. So while most of the area’s other Beatlemania-bred bands had either surrendered their ambitions or broken up, the Castiles had evolved into a solidly professional unit, thanks equally to Bruce’s ever-improving chops, Theiss’s growing poise as a front man, and the strong three-way harmonies by Theiss, Popkin, and Bruce. The addition of organist Bob Alfano, who had mastered the swirling blues-meets-gospel favored by California’s new breed of psychedelic rockers, gave the band an even more complex sound.

As 1966 gave way to 1967, and the once shaggy youth culture tipped toward full-blown psychedelia, the Castiles all kept pace. Bruce’s wardrobe took on wild colors and flowery designs, while his black curls grew into a curtain over his eyes and a waterfall down his shoulders and neck. An eager student of the rock ’n’ roll performances on TV—the Who’s literally explosive (thanks to the firepower-hungry Keith Moon and guitar-splintering Pete Townshend) performance on
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
was a huge eye-opener—Bruce took to starting the shows perched on a tall lifeguard chair, which he would leap from at some dramatic moment. He also added flash to the group’s Catholic Youth Organization show at St. Rose of Lima in April by rigging the stage with a strobe light, smoke bombs, and more. When they got to their climactic number, Bruce nodded to a friend to switch on the strobe and then ignite the smoke bombs. When the smoke cleared, Bruce climbed on top of his amplifier and used his guitar to smash a specially purchased vase of flowers into petal-strewn rubble. The kids roared, and the smoke-sheathed Bruce felt like a visionary psychedelic artiste until a few minutes after the
cafeteria lights came up. That’s when his eighth-grade geometry teacher came up and patted him on the back. “Bruce!” he proclaimed, “that was very nice.”

Such displays of intergenerational warmth were increasingly hard to come by. By the middle of 1967, Freehold, like virtually every other crossroads, town, and city in the nation, had spiraled into opposing camps: parents against kids, hawks against peaceniks, traditionalists against progressives, whites against blacks, and on and on. So maybe Bruce shouldn’t have been surprised when he walked into Freehold Regional on June 19 to collect his cap and gown for the evening’s graduation ceremonies, only to be told that he would be barred from the auditorium unless he got his shoulder-length hair cut. Bruce turned around and marched out the front door to catch a commuter bus up to New York so he could spend the afternoon checking out bands in the Greenwich Village clubs.
¹¹

The crowning irony, of course, was that Bruce’s wild hair and clothes signified nothing about actual vices he might have had. Hobbled by his grandparents’ odd ways and repulsed by his father’s smoking and habitual drinking, Bruce treasured his sense of control too much to risk destabilizing himself with drugs, alcohol, and psychosocial anarchy. So while his hair made him seem freaky to his parents’ generation, Bruce’s stubbornly sober habits also set him apart from the hazy-eyed hippies he moved among. And while teenage Bruce could summon some energy for politics and the antiauthoritarian sentiments of the day, those interests were less philosophical than visceral. “It was very real,” Bruce says. “Generationally, everything was politicized. I didn’t know anybody who didn’t at least feign interest. If you didn’t, you had to adopt a pose of some sort.” And in Freehold, a nontraditional haircut and an untucked, flowery shirt were
enough to put a target on your back. Even now, Bruce’s 1960s image is enough to reawaken suspicion among some former police officers. “He used to run the street with the rest of ’em!” says ex-patrolman (and subsequent chief of police) Bill Burlew. “He had the long hair; he used to hang out with [the] Street People [a known gang in Freehold].” When a chorus of disagreement rises around him in Joe’s Barbershop, Burlew can only shrug. “Ahh, maybe he was just a typical kid.”