Lopez took to the fairways and became a caddie master at the Deal Golf and Country Club, buying into the workaday wasteland that never included as much music as he wanted.īut Mr. I still thought it was my band."Īfter his brief run with the E Street Band, Mr. "I made a few mistakes, you know, everybody makes mistakes. "At that point, I didn't think the band was going to go too far and I didn't care either," Mr. After a poorly attended performance at Villanova one night, he clashed with Mike Appel, the band's aggressive producer, and later came to blows with Steve Appel, Mike's brother and the band's road manager. Lopez, nicknamed "Mad Dog" because of his unpredictable temper, he was earning $85 a week and wasn't happy about it. Federeci and the current members Clarence Clemons and Garry Tallent - toured as they were recording "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle." According to Mr. Springsteen didn't name the band right away.Īfter "Greetings" was released, the group - which consisted then of Mr. He needed musicians to record "Greetings," and so the E Street Band was born. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, which featured upward of 20 musicians plus two guys who inexplicably played Monopoly center stage, before finally scoring his own recording contract with Columbia Records. Springsteen soon broke Steel Mill up, then went through a few more bands, including Dr. Steel Mill toured briefly in California, where a critic at The San Francisco Examiner, Philip Elwood, declared he had "never been so overwhelmed by an unknown band." Even so, Mr. The group was christened Child before dropping that name, adding Steve Van Zandt and reincarnating itself as Steel Mill, a tight unit that developed a fierce following at Monmouth College and beyond. He's got charisma.' When he was done, Danny and I went up to him and said, 'Next set, let's us guys play.' And we did, and we made the band." Lopez recalled recently as he sipped a can of Budweiser in the kitchen of his house off a dirt road in Jackson. "When I got to the top of the staircase, there was Bruce with the way he looked in those days, with the hair and suspenders with no shirt, playing away," Mr. Early one morning in 1969 at the Upstage, an after-hours club in Asbury Park, he and his friend Danny Federeci saw Bruce Springsteen onstage. After graduating high school in 1967, he rolled up his sleeves and went to work in the Point Pleasant boatyards while performing at the local Rollerdrome and Hullabaloo Clubs at night. Vini Lopez, who grew up in Neptune, taught himself the drums as a teenager. Springsteen and his songs about fast cars, pretty girls and redemption amid the carnival of the Jersey Shore. The two men have traveled very different roads since Asbury Park. Lopez left because he was fired by, well, the Boss. Sancious left because he had signed his own record deal. Springsteen became a household name - if not yet a Garden State legend to rank right up there with the Jersey Devil - Vini Lopez and David Sancious, the original drummer and keyboard player who recorded and toured behind the first two albums, were no longer with the band. Two of the E Street Band's founding members, though, never got to bask in the glory days that arrived with "Born to Run." If their lives were being filmed by VH1, it would be for a documentary called "Way, Way Behind the Music." Call it Fifth Beatle Syndrome, in honor of Pete Best, who was the Fab Four's drummer before Ringo and superstardom.īy the time that Mr. Springsteen appeared bound for rock 'n' roll Valhalla. It wasn't until "Born to Run" raced up the charts in 1975 that Mr. His first two albums, the wordy and sometimes weird "Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J." and its raucous, horn-infused follow-up "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle," both released in 1973, barely caused a ripple. Springsteen was hardly an overnight success. Who can possibly resist the bootstrap tale of the guitar-slinging dervish who spun himself onto the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously in 1975 by way of the Jersey Shore?īut for all that, Mr. Springsteen's fans, especially those in New Jersey, will once again warm themselves by the comfortable fire of that myth. Now, with a new album out, "Devils & Dust" (released last Tuesday), and a tour that will find its way to Continental Airlines Arena on May 19, Mr. Springsteen - Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and ringmaster of what he calls "the heart-stopping, earth-shocking, legendary E Street Band" - has fulfilled that early hype and then some. NO telling of the Springsteen Myth is complete without dusting off Jon Landau's prophesy of more than 30 years ago that Bruce Springsteen was the future of rock 'n' roll.
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