Bruce (8 page)

• • •

The administrators at Ocean County Community College felt less confident of their own futures. With so many other colleges and universities becoming battlegrounds of protest, dissent, and, sometimes, pitched riots, they feared the same thing happening at their own as-yet-unaccredited institution (those formalities were concluded in 1969), a prospect the school seemed far too fragile to survive. Hoping to stave off that calamity, the administrators decided to be proactive: they’d look for kids who seemed not to fit in with their peers, and then keep an eye on them. Not to control them or concoct reasons to eject them, of course. Just to make sure everyone was happy. And not planning to blow anything, or anyone, to smithereens.

Instantly, Bruce was on the school’s radar. “There were only a handful
of us with long hair, and he was one of them,” says classmate Bo Ross. “We all sat together at one table in the student union, hanging around and talking.” Bruce, he recalls, didn’t say very much and wore metal-framed sunglasses with yellow lenses that made him look like an assassin. Usually absorbed in his own thoughts. Bruce impressed, or perhaps unsettled, the other students by abruptly filling a silent hallway with a burst of hoarse-voiced melody. Once again, he seemed so far out on his own wavelength that even the aggro jocks who so enjoyed bullying the hippie kids kept their distance. “He just seemed too weird to mess with, I guess,” Ross says.

Perhaps all that public strangeness was another performance—an encore of the routine that kept him so comfortably distant during his boyhood. But in the confines of his Advanced Composition class, Bruce felt free enough to throw open the doors to his hidden depths. Written neatly on college-ruled paper, Bruce’s short stories read like dark meditations on a world leeched of humanity. In one piece, the narrator spies a woman alone at night, “caressed only by the icy hands of the moon. She shared her love and was crushed by the greediness of those to whom she gave.” His teacher awarded the story an A and scrawled his praises in the paper’s margins: “Oh, Bruce, you have a lovely mind . . . at least what shows on paper.” Another paper earned another A, and praise for his use of imagery and metaphor but ends with a plea for more information: “Where do you want to go? Until I know your direction, I can’t help you at all.”

But Bruce’s most striking composition is also his most disturbing. Even his admiring teacher appended his/her A grade with a note admitting “I can’t pretend I enjoyed the story,” and for good reason. Starkly composed and washed in misery, the story describes a young girl, clad in a thin white party dress, attacked by a “faceless creature” that “beat her fragile body down upon the hard pavement.” Vivid descriptions of the girl’s wounds and the bloody shreds of her dress lead to a final image of the mangled girl dying slowly on the pavement, “[c]rucified upon the cross of night by the violence of man.”
³

At some point during Bruce’s third semester at OCCC, he got a message in his mailbox: Could he make an appointment to speak with the school counselor? He did as asked, and as Bruce remembers, the conversation was extraordinarily personal and hurtful. “I was told people were complaining about me,” he says. “And to be honest with you, that’s all they said. It was weird. I said, ‘What about?’ but it was nothing.” In earlier tellings, Bruce recalled that his fellow students had gone so far as to circulate a petition demanding that he be ejected from school, on account of being too odd to countenance. But Bo Ross finds that story far fetched at best, if only because Bruce wasn’t the only student who received a referral to the counselor’s office. Determined to head off that dreaded student riot, the administration had sent the same request to all of the kids who spent their lunch hours at the cafeteria’s long-hair table.

“We
all
had an appointment,” Ross says. “And the guy was cool. He’d ask for our thoughts on certain things, and I kind of liked it, actually.” But for Bruce, who still swears the counselor described the petition calling for his ouster, it was another in a long line of school-based humiliations. “It kind of cemented my feelings that I was someplace I didn’t really belong,” he says. “And, really, I had the one [Advanced Composition] class that I was enjoying, and I did get some value out of it, because it did encourage me. And the rest was just another instance of, you know, it’s just not your time.”

• • •

Earth played a series of shows in the usual Monmouth County spots—Le Teendezvous, the Off Broad Street Coffee House, the Hullabaloo—through the fall, building enough of a reputation to draw crowds throughout the region. But although the group had played a semester-starting concert at Ocean County Community College in September, Bruce kept his musical life separate from his academic identity. Even his pals at the hippie table knew nothing about Earth, or Bruce’s ability to play guitar, until a friend of Bo Ross’s came in talking about this hot new band he’d just seen. “He was saying, ‘Holy shit, this guy is
good
,’” Ross recalls. And he wasn’t just talking about Bruce’s prowess on guitar. “What impressed him the most was that this guy got onstage and just
activated
everyone. He just had a presence.” A few days later another friend from the hippie table brought in a picture of
Bruce playing with Earth onstage. “He
looked
great up there, too. And we thought he was weird, right? So we were like . . . wow.”

At the same time, managers Spachner and Duffy had secured Earth a gig at the famous Fillmore East theater, then the New York showcase for virtually every significant hippie/psychedelic band coming through the city. Bruce was already a regular concertgoer at the Fillmore—going alone, generally, to check out whoever was in town and absorb what he could from the bands’ musical and stage performances for subsequent adaptation and use—but on this day, the Fillmore was officially closed. The audience, such as it was, would be the cast of
NYPD: Now You’re Practically Dead
, an arty, albeit porny film that included a wild party scene set at a rock concert. Earth’s job was to play the band onstage, lip-syncing to a song recorded by a group called Rhinoceros
⁴
while the actors and extras danced, tore off their clothes, and tussled and rolled across the stage around them. “So while we’re lip-syncing, the director’s giving direction to this hot babe to take off her top,” Burke says. “Bruce had this
look
on his face.” Later in the evening, the director took to the catwalk above the stage to film a midair sex scene punctuated at one crucial moment by a shot of panties tumbling through the spotlights to drape elegantly across the tuning pegs on Bruce’s guitar. The film was never released, but Earth still collected their enormous (to them) fee of $350 for the day’s work.

The band’s next (and last) New York gig was as half the bill in a December 28 show booked into the Crystal Ballroom, an 1,800-capacity hall in the Diplomat Hotel on West Forty-third Street. It didn’t take long for the promoters to realize they’d made a serious error: Earth was completely unknown in New York, and the fans it did have lived on the Jersey Shore. Facing economic disaster, the promoters came up with the brilliant solution of renting some buses and offering to transport Jersey fans to and from the show for free. When the OCCC activities committee agreed to help promote the shows, the tickets began to move. By the time Earth hit the stage on the twenty-eighth, the hall was nearly sold out, giving the trio the largest audience it would ever have.

And there were some special guests in the seats. As Spachner told Bruce, Graham, and Burke the next day, two executives from different major labels
⁵
had buttonholed him after the show, both eager to sign the group to a recording contract. But nothing that serious could happen, Spachner added, until each member of the band signed a contract designating Spachner and Duffy as the band’s official managers. The only problem was that Graham and Burke were still young enough to require their parents to countersign their legal agreements. And neither set of parents was happy about the amount of time and energy their sons were investing in their music hobby. Spachner and Duffy put together a presentation to appeal to the boys’ parents. “But even going in, I had a feeling of doom because my situation at home was tenuous at best,” Burke says. “I had an absolutely terrible relationship with my parents, and John was even worse off.” The contracts did not get signed.

Earth played a small handful of shows in the first weeks of 1969, including a dance in the Ocean County Community College student union
⁶
and a pair of nights at the Le Teendezvous club. A February 14 show scheduled originally for the Paddock Lounge in Long Branch sold out so quickly that the promoters rebooked the “St. Valentines Day Massacre,” as they called it, for a larger room at the town’s Italian American Men’s Association Clubhouse. The show was another good night for Earth, and a great one for Bruce, whose screaming guitar and catalytic presence as a front man riveted one tall onlooker at the back of the room. Vini Lopez had known of Bruce since his days as the drummer in local guitar hero Sonny Kenn’s band, Sonny and the Starfighters, when they shared concert bills with the Castiles. When Lopez learned that the teenage guitar player was the same guy his Asbury Park music pals were talking about, he drove up to Long Branch to see what was going on. He was not disappointed. “Imagine your rock star, and there he was, right in front of you, when he was a kid,” Lopez says. “I didn’t need any more convincing.”

Earth would never play in public again.

O
N THE MORNING OF SUNDAY,
February 23, 1969, sometime after three o’clock, Bruce climbed the stairs to the Upstage Club’s third-floor entrance. Sitting on a stool at the top of the steps, Margaret Potter, who owned the Asbury Park club with her husband, Tom, watched him coming. He seemed underfed and, given his worn-out clothes, dangling black curls, and beat-up guitar case, even more ragamuffin than most of the rest of the Upstage’s waifish clientele.

“Is it okay if I play my guitar here tonight?”

The Upstage had been around almost exactly one year, so a lot of unknown guitar slingers had already climbed those very steps to ask that very question, all hoping to join the club’s after-midnight jam sessions. Ordinarily, she’d have a kid sign in on the clipboard and tell him to hang out until he heard his name called over the PA. But the musicians were taking a break, and something in Bruce’s voice, or maybe the way he couldn’t seem to hold eye contact, made her warm to him.

“That’s why it’s there,” she said, gesturing to the microphones and amps on the stage. “Go ahead and plug in.”

It wasn’t Bruce’s first visit to the Upstage. As coincidence would have it, he’d come in a month or two earlier to see the Downtown Tangiers Band, an Asbury Park group made up of singer-guitarist Billy Chinnock, bassist Wendell John, keyboardist Danny Federici, and Vini Lopez on drums. Bruce was impressed: “I thought that Vini and them were superstars. They just all seemed great,” he says. But the after-hours, jam-happy club—its floor teeming with musicians, serious fans, and musician-eyed girls—made him fall in love. “I just thought, ‘This is the coolest place I’ve ever seen in my life.’”

Exactly a week after Earth’s Valentine’s Day show, Bruce went back to the Upstage, guitar in hand. Given Margaret Potter’s approval, he climbed the steps to the stage, opened his case to retrieve his new gold-top Les Paul, and slung the strap over his head. Feeling the instrument’s weight on his shoulder, he cranked the volume and took a breath. “I came to stun, you know,” he says now.

At the start of 1969, the Upstage was the place to do it. Opened in March 1968 as a coffee house with live music, the club—located above a Thom McAn shoe store in downtown Asbury Park—was for musicians and serious music fans excited by the postmidnight jam sessions that kept the place thumping until dawn. Potter took a lease on the building’s third floor that fall, building a larger stage equipped with a powerful PA system, lights, and a closet full of instruments to keep the jams going at full throttle. Drifting into the dawn above Cookman Avenue, the Upstage was like an ark for the Jersey Shore’s musicians and other young renegades—a world bathed in black light and strobes, where the rhythm of life revolved around the club’s day-for-night schedule.

Without looking up, Bruce let loose a long, soaring run up the neck of his guitar. The sound razored the smoky air. He kept going, his fingers spidering across the frets, chasing melodies, doubling into harmonies, reversing direction, and then leaping skyward again. Heads swiveled. Conversations stuttered to a stop. Within moments, all eyes turned to the guitarist, his face still hidden behind the curls draped over his face.

“That quickly, he took over the room.”

Geoff Potter, Tom Potter’s nineteen-year-old son, was working alongside his stepmother at the door. “Ordinarily, you had all kinds of hubbub and noise between sets,” he says. “But he’s up there, playing free-form riffs. And within five minutes, you couldn’t hear a sound except for his guitar.”

A few of the musicians recognized Bruce from the Castiles’ days on the high school band circuit in the midsixties. Others had mentioned seeing an unfamiliar guitarist playing miraculously accurate renditions of Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck tunes around Ocean County Community College. But no one in the room expected this fusillade of power and finesse, especially with the visceral intensity he projected across the room.

After watching from the doorway for a few minutes, Margaret went down to the Upstage’s second floor Green Mermaid coffee-house looking for Sonny Kenn. “You’ve gotta get up here!” she told him. “There’s a guy playing guitar onstage, and he sounds just like Clapton!” Kenn followed her up the stairs, and although the sharp-dressed guitar hero looked doubtfully at the new guy’s rope belt and torn jeans (“He looked like fuckin’ Tiny Tim,”
¹
Kenn says), he kept watching and listening. And when Upstage regular Big Bad Bobby Williams hit the drums, with the Motifs’ former bassist, Vinnie Roslin, on his heels, the trio’s rollicking blues cut right through Kenn’s skepticism. “It was kinda cool,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s got it!’ Somehow that skinny kid was larger than life!”