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

Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, which was probably the full extent of the others’ musical ambitions. For Bruce, though, it was just a beginning:
    Bruce Springsteen : When I started I wanted to play rhythm guitar in a local band. Just sit back there, play rhythm guitar…I didn’t wanna sing, just get a nice band and play rhythm. But I found out…that I just knew more about it than other guys that were in the band. So I slowly just became the leader. [1975]
    The Castiles had run their natural course by the spring of 1967, as the prospect of graduation loomed and real life could begin. But still they persevered. By now, it was clear that Springsteen had no intention of giving up on his dream, even when he became a target for conformists torag on, verbally
or
physically. As he informed
The Advocate
in 1995, “I was brought up in a small town [where] anybody who was different in any fashion was castigated and ostracised, if not physically threatened…Me and a few other guys were the town freaks—and there were many occasions where we were dodging getting beaten up ourselves.”
    Unfortunately, he was ill-equipped to defend himself, something he had learned at the tender age of ten, as he revealed to a Berkeley crowd one night in June 1978: “You usually stop fighting by the time you’re 18 or 19, I stopped when I was about 10 ’cause I got beat all the time, these hands just were not dangerous weapons, you know. I remember I got in a fight with this guy, I beat the hell out of his hood with my forehead, you know (chuckles). Put dents into the thing.”
    The troubled teenager was increasingly drawn to the bright neon lights of the Big City—where this boy could be free—and after those nights at the Wha (and possibly before) he began to bunk off school, hopping a bus to midtown. As he told one audience in January 1985, “I grew up in this small town. When I was sixteen, man, I hated that town; it seemed so narrow-minded and small-minded. I used to get on the bus, take Lincoln Transit to New York City. It used to feel so great when I got out at Port Authority. It was like, ‘Oh, man, nobody owns me up here.’” He was invisible. No secrets to conceal.
    To preserve that new-found sense of autonomy he would sometimes stay out all night, even after he took the bus back from the city: “I used to have a sleeping bag stashed out in these woods, under these rocks…and sometimes if it got too late, I’d go out there and just unroll it and sleep in my friend’s car, sleep out there under the trees. That spot, sometimes it felt more like my home did than my house did. I guess, everybody needs someplace to go when they can’t go home.” *
    If he was ill-prepared for a father’s fury, or fisticuffs with one of Jersey’s more conformist thugs, he was even less ready for military service. Unfortunately for smalltown America, the battle outside a-ragin’ was not only in their homeland, but also in the badlands of Vietnam. The specter of war loomed over all of his generation, and for him a college education, the one cast-iron way to beat the draft, seemed unlikely. Yet beating the draft was something he knew he had to do—“When I was seventeen oreighteen, I didn’t even know where Vietnam was. [I] just knew [I] didn’t wanna go and die!”
    The first thing he needed to do was graduate high-school, which he did. His band even played the Seniors Farewell Dance ten days before graduation. But then he began the actual day, June 19, 1967, by skipping the graduation ceremony altogether, only for it to end with his father making one last, futile attempt to bring his son under his command:
    Bruce Springsteen : By the end of high school I didn’t have much to do with anybody. I almost didn’t graduate because the kids in my class wouldn’t let me…They weren’t gonna let me graduate unless I cut my hair. So on the day of graduation, I left the house and didn’t come back. I went to New York and stayed with a friend in