E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Read Online Free PDF Page A

was only that period when he was important to me, where he was giving me what I needed…I was never really into the folk or acoustic music thing. The one thing I dug about those [electric] albums was…the sound. Before I listened to what was happening in the song, you had the chorus and you had the band and it had incredible sound, and that was what got me. [1974]
    By the time he was picking up the likes of
Blonde On Blonde
, an expensive double-album in a fold-out sleeve, Bruce finally had a little money of his own, which he’d earned from playing locally as the rhythm guitarist in The Castiles, named after a dodgy brand of cigarillos. He had apparently reached at least some kind of rapprochement with his bemused parents, one that enabled him “to play weekends somewhere and make a little extra dough…which is what my parents used to say that I could do. That was allowed.” At the same time he had started doing some intensive homework, though not the kind his parents still hoped for: “I remember going to see bands when I was a kid, watching the musicians from real close up, studying the way they moved their hands, then going home and trying to copy them.” He had got himself into The Castiles after he spent an intensive forty-eight hours learning how to replicate the guitar on “The Last Time,” the Rolling Stones’ breakthrough single—which was in itself quite a trick, because the guitar had been double-tracked.
    The Castiles were the quintessential high-school band, with Springsteen the junior member content (for now) to stay in the background. But that diffident demeanor was revealed to be largely a front the minute they stepped out to perform. As bassist Curt Fluhr has recalled, “Put him onstage with a guitar and he lit it up. It was like somebody had plugged him in.” They provided him with his first band of brothers; though the Castiles’ frontman, George Theiss, was more interested in impressing Bruce’s elder sister than becoming
his
blood brother.
    Remarkably, given how such bands rarely retained their shape for very long when cars and girls entered the frame, The Castiles lasted from 1965 right through August 1968. In May 1966 they even cut a record; albeit just for themselves. The two-sided single, “Baby I” b/w “That’s What You Get,” meant to demonstrate the something they’d got, was a curiously half-assed affair. Both songs, according to their indulgent manager Tex Vinyard, were“written in the backseat of a car…on the way to the studio…at the Bricktown Mall shopping center. George and Bruce wrote those. It was a rainy Sunday. [And] we had no extra strings, so through two-thirds of the songs there’s no E string.” Further compromises were required when they got there, as Springsteen himself recently revealed:
    Bruce Springsteen : It was a tiny little room…and they couldn’t stand any volume whatsoever going into the microphones. We had to turn all our amps to the wall and literally put covers over them…The recording studio was not set up in those days for any kind of overdrive; they just simply weren’t ready to record rock bands in Bricktown, New Jersey in 1965 [sic]. But it was a big deal. [2010]
    It has to be said that even in the unprepossessing pantheon of first formative efforts by later legends, The Castiles’ offering is particularly wretched. And if it convinced a young Springsteen that maybe they should get more serious, he was always fighting an uphill battle. He did at least convince the others to let him sing some songs: “Everybody in the band felt that I couldn’t sing at all. I think I got to sing one Dylan song. Over the years I started to sing a little bit more, [until] eventually…we ended up splitting…the vocals.” It proved a wise move, because as Vinyard notes, “Soon, we let Bruce sing ‘Mystic Eyes’ and The Who’s ‘My Generation’. That’s how we got the booking in New York.” He is referring to a brief residency at the fabled