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

the Village, a guy who dealt drugs…So the phone rings and it’s my mother. Don’t ask me how she found out where I was. She’s saying there’s a graduation party over at my house, which I had totally forgotten about, and she wants me to come home. I say, “No way. I’m only coming home if there’s gonna be no big fight; I don’t want to come back and go at it all over again with my father. If he’ll promise no big fight, I’ll come home.” So, she says OK, no fight. Now, I show up with a girl. I don’t know what I could’ve been thinking of, but I show up with this girl and my father opens the screen door. He pulls me inside by the collar with one hand, leaves her outside…drags me up to the [bed]room, and
takes out all the lightbulbs
so I’ve got to sit there in the dark by myself. [1978]
    Though he had shown absolutely no aptitude for formal education—perhaps because he never quite saw the point, once churlishly complaining “they always talked to your head, they could never figure out how to talk to your heart”—by September 1968 he had enrolled himself at the Ocean County Community College “in a liberal arts course,” a situation of which the Jersey Selective Service Board were promptly advised. He was off the hook for now, but as he related in his first-ever interview as a CBS artist, he no more fit in at Ocean County than he did in Freehold:
    Bruce Springsteen : I was gonna get drafted and my parents wanted me to go to college. I got there and tried to take psychology, and I kept opening a book and seeing myself in all these different -isms. I thought, I can’t get into that. I realized you go into class and everyone would start talking aboutwhat the norm was, and I figured out I didn’t fit into that. So I said, “Well, I’ll try something else”…It’s not like it is today, where everyone has long hair. This was long ago. [So] I got sent down to the psychiatrist’s office. He [had] said, “I wanna see ya,” and he said, “I gotta tell ya the students been complaining about ya. Tell me what’s the matter.” “Nothing’s the matter.” He didn’t believe me, so I quit. [1972]
    He preferred to castigate his fellow students and their conformist outlook rather than address his own failure to knuckle down and learn. He was still blaming them in 1984 with the world at his feet, “I didn’t really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble and I was hounded off the campus—I just looked different and acted different, so I left school.” His parents must have despaired. His father, who had served in World War II, knew only too well that his son was not cut out for “fighting off the Vietcong.” And once the Jersey Selective Service Board were notified of his absence from college, he was summoned to a conscription exam in Trenton. Fortunately for him, the reckless side of his character had recently resulted in a “roadside jam” between his motorbike and another vehicle, and he had come off worse. He was judged 4–F, a physical wreck, unfit to serve. He returned home to give his parents the bad news. All his father said was, “Good.”
    The summer before he arrived at Ocean College the other members of The Castiles finally accepted the inevitable. They had always seen the band as an enjoyable hobby, while their now-leader increasingly viewed music as his Mission in life. They also seemed slightly uncomfortable with the type of material he had started introducing into the set after they all, save the younger Bobby Alfano, graduated from high-school. Covers of Moby Grape’s “Omaha” and The Blues Magoos’ “One By One” sat uneasily with the likes of “See My Friends” and “Eleanor Rigby,” two of a handful of songs George Theiss now sang at their shows. In August 1968, the band played two farewell shows in Red Bank and Shrewsbury, and that was that. As George Theiss informed
Backstreets
, by that time “a couple of the guys