Greetings from Freehold

Greetings 1 Greetings from Freehold: How Bruce Springsteen’s Hometown Shaped His Life and Work David Wilson Chairman, Communication Council Monmouth University Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium Presented Sept. 26, 2009 Greetings 2 ABSTRACT Bruce Springsteen came back to Freehold, New Jersey, the town where he was raised, to attend the Monmouth County Fair in July 1982. He played with Sonny Kenn and the Wild Ideas, a band whose leader was already a Jersey Shore-area legend. About a year later, he recorded the song "County Fair" with the E Street Band. As this anecdote shows, Freehold never really left Bruce even after he made a name for himself in Asbury Park and went on to worldwide stardom. His experiences there were reflected not only in "County Fair" but also in "My Hometown," the unreleased "In Freehold" and several other songs. He visited a number of times in the decades after his family left for California. Freehold’s relative isolation enabled Bruce to develop his own musical style, derived largely from what he heard on the radio and on records. More generally, the town’s location, history, demographics and economy shaped his life and work. “County Fair,” the first of three sections of this paper, will recount the July 1982 episode and its aftermath. “Growin’ Up,” the second, will review Bruce’s years in Freehold and examine the ways in which the town influenced him. “Goin’ Home,” the third, will highlight instances when he returned in person, in spirit and in song. Greetings 3 COUNTY FAIR Bruce Springsteen couldn’t be sitting there. Could he? The question came to me in the summer of 1982, as my then-fiancée and I sat in a field at the Monmouth County Fairgrounds in Freehold, New Jersey. We were waiting for Sonny Kenn and the Wild Ideas, a local band that she followed around the Jersey Shore, to start playing. Sonny was already a guitar hero by the time Bruce debuted with Freehold’s Castiles in 1966. His band at the time, Sonny and the Starfires, had even been the opening act for rocker Jerry Lee Lewis.1 Since then, their fortunes had diverged. Bruce had released five albums for Columbia Records and was getting ready to put out his sixth, “Nebraska.” He had scored four top-40 singles -- “Born to Run,” “Prove It All Night,” “Hungry Heart” and “Fade Away” -- and played to millions of fans with the E Street Band.2 Sonny worked at a musical-instrument store in Red Bank by day and played in Shore- area bars and clubs at night. With the Wild Ideas, he released an independent single with two original songs, “All American Angel” and “Turn It Up.” It went nowhere. There was no reason to expect Bruce to be anywhere near the fairgrounds, let alone sitting next to me and my fiancée. Yet when I looked to my left, I saw someone who looked mighty familiar. He wore blue jeans, a flannel shirt and a yellow cap that said CAT -- short for Caterpillar, the farm-equipment maker. He was chatting up a woman I didn’t recognize. Nobody was bothering him, and I didn’t either. A few minutes later, as dusk set in, the concert started. Sonny and the band made their way onto a trailer-like stage at one end of the field. When the lights came up, there they were. And there was Bruce, jamming with them. They played Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” Greetings 4 Berry’s “Carol,” Sam Cooke’s “Shake” and an early hit for Wilson Pickett, “Land of a Thousand Dances.”3 Sonny and his band didn’t usually play songs like those. Their sets featured originals and covers like “Jack the Ripper,” by Link Wray. But that night was different. Bruce was there. Based on what happened that evening -- July 23, 1982 -- it wasn’t a complete surprise to learn that Bruce wrote and recorded a song called “County Fair” the following year.4 These lines, included in the third verse, rang true to my experience: “At the north end of the field they set up a stand / And they got a little rock and roll band / People dancin’ out in the open air.”5 While there isn’t any record of Bruce playing at the Monmouth County Fair again, he easily could have attended the event when he wasn’t on tour. He owns a house in Rumson that’s about half an hour’s drive from the fairgrounds, now known as East Freehold Park. He also has a house, recording studio and horse farm in Colts Neck, just 12 minutes away by car.6 Assuming that Bruce made the trip at least once wouldn’t be unreasonable. He has returned again and again to Freehold, where he lived, attended school and found his musical calling in the 1950s and 1960s. He has revisited his hometown just as regularly in his lyrics. “Springsteen is not just from Freehold, but is of and in it,” Kevin Coyne, the town’s historian, once wrote. He drew a parallel between Bruce and William Faulkner, a Nobel Prize- winning writer whose works were often set in his native Mississippi -- “the ‘postage stamp of native soil,’ as Faulkner called it, in which he found the whole world.”7 Greetings 5 GROWIN’ UP Bruce Frederick Springsteen arrived in Freehold, the seat of Monmouth County, New Jersey, shortly after he was born on Sept. 23, 1949, in Long Branch. His parents, Douglas and Adele, brought him to the home of his paternal grandparents at 87 Randolph St., where they lived at the time. His sister Virginia, known as Ginny, was born the next year.1 St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, which his family attended, was next door to the house. Bruce was baptized and confirmed there, which might explain why he has another middle name, Joseph, that isn’t listed on his birth certificate.2 He also served as an altar boy.3 Many of his relatives lived nearby. “There was my cousin’s house, my aunt’s house, my great-grandmother’s house, my aunt’s house on my mother’s side with my other grandmother in it,” he later said. “We were all on one street, with the church in the middle.”4 Bruce and his family moved out of the house in 1954, shortly after his fifth birthday.5 About three years later, St. Rose of Lima acquired the property and tore down the building as part of an expansion of its parking lot.6 The family settled into a duplex at 39 ½ Institute St., about three blocks east of Randolph Street.7 Forman and Willetta Smith owned the house until 1959, when they sold it to a neighbor, Samuel J. Venti.8 He worked at the A. & M. Karagheusian Co. rug mill and was president of the plant’s union local when production was shut down in 1961.9 The duplex was across the railroad tracks from Karaghuesian and Texas, a residential area to the east of the mill.10 Douglas and Adele moved the family again after their daughter Pamela, known as Pam, was born in January 1962. They rented half of a duplex at 68 South St., four blocks from their Institute Street home, that November.11 Greetings 6 Ducky Slattery’s Sinclair gas station, the topic of stories that Bruce would later tell during concerts, was next door.12 John W. Duckett Jr., a Sinclair distributor, was the family’s landlord. He bought the house on the assumption that his company would want the property to expand the station.13 It didn’t, and Slattery’s was eventually closed. A convenience store now operates on the site. Bruce’s education began at the St. Rose of Lima School, an elementary school that his father had attended. In the classroom and in church, he gained an awareness of religious images that would later resurface in his lyrics. “Nuns run bald through Vatican halls, pregnant, pleadin’ immaculate conception,” he wrote in “Lost in the Flood,” released on his debut album.14 Music first attracted him as a 7-year-old, when he watched Elvis Presley perform on the Ed Sullivan Show. After seeing the show, he asked his parents for a guitar. They bought him a small, semi-toy acoustic.15 Before long, he set his sights on baseball instead. “I wanted it pretty bad at the time,” he said later. “Every day from when I was eight until 13 I’d be outside pitching that ball.”16 In 1960, he played in the Colonial League. He moved up to Little League the following year as a member of the Indians, the first team in league history to go unbeaten in the regular season.17 They were the “Indians in the summer” cited in "Blinded by the Light," also from his first album.18 Bruce returned to music at 13, when he bought his first guitar with money earned from doing odd jobs. The second-hand acoustic cost $18 at a Western Auto store in Freehold. Frank Bruno, his cousin, taught him some basic chords. His mother borrowed $60 to buy a Japanese- made Kent electric guitar and an amplifier for him as a Christmas gift.19 She made the purchase at Caiazzo’s Music Store, at the corner of Center and Jackson streets, when he was 16.20 Greetings 7 Bruce made his performance debut with the Rogues, a band that threw him out because “my guitar was too cheap.” George Theiss, a guitarist who was dating Ginny, then recruited him for the Castiles.21 Bruce passed an audition with the group’s manager, Gordon “Tex” Vinyard, in June 1965.

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