Springsteen was once second-bill at $4 York College show

by John Duffy, Correspondent
Sunday News
May 10, 2009

When Bruce Springsteen brings the E Street Band to Hersheypark Stadium this week, he'll have a small army of support personnel and musicians in tow, and about $1 million worth of lights carried by an armada of trucks. But at the start of it all, Springsteen (who turns 60 this fall) and what would later be called the E Street Band filled no more than a couple of station wagons and a rented box truck. When they turned off South George Street and rolled up to the back doors of the gymnasium at York College of Pennsylvania on the afternoon of Nov. 11, 1972, the band presented humbly.

If E Street today is a superhighway of rock 'n' roll, when the band played York, it was little more than a gravel road. But it was destined to lead somewhere special. Springsteen had finished his debut album, "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.," earlier that fall, but he would have to wait until January 1973 to see it released. The York show was among the first few performances by Springsteen and the E Street Band (so named two years later). Helping the longhaired, scruffy-bearded, greasy-looking beach bums unload their amps, drums, saxophones and guitars that day were a handful students, the "free roadies" that are the backbone of college rock shows.

Among them was Tom Gibson."It was like any other of those kinds of college shows, a lot of pushing heavy stuff around and people yelling," Gibson recalled. Today Gibson is a telecommunications manager for the college and chief engineer of its radio stations. He also runs a technology summer camp on site. Above his desk is a yellowed poster advertising the concert. Put up by the college's student government, the posters appeared around campus in the week preceding the show.

Gibson's is the only one known to have survived. Crazy Horse, playing its own music in between Neil Young gigs, was the headliner; Springsteen, the undercard. In an ironic twist, Crazy Horse would later include guitarist Nils Lofgren, a current member of the E Street Band. Ticket prices ranged from $1.50 in advance for students to $4 for the general public at the door. At the Hersheypark concert Friday, May 15, $4 will get you half a cup of beer. At the time, Springsteen was essentially an unknown outside of New Jersey and a few select Northeast markets. But his reputation had been spreading by word of mouth. In the early 1970s, much like today, Pennsylvania colleges contained large populations of students from New Jersey.

"There were quite a few students who had heard of him or seen him in New Jersey or New York," Gibson recalled. "So there was definitely an advance buzz about the show. "People said, 'You may have never have heard of him, but you don't want to miss him,' … and they were right. It was amazing," said Gibson, who was lucky enough to see the entire show from just off stage. Perhaps it was that he was now riding on someone else's tab — it was only the third time he had been introduced as "Columbia recording artist Bruce Springsteen" — but Gibson said Springsteen seemed nervous at first, laughing awkwardly (a trait he hasn't shaken) and fiddling obsessively with the microphone. "But he pulled it off beautifully. He really won a lot of people over," said Gibson, who thinks Springsteen outshone Crazy Horse. "He was the support act, but he was amazing."

He should have been. The Jersey shore in the mid- to late-1960s had a thriving, incestuous music scene, and Springsteen and the other five guys on stage had been playing together in various combinations for as long as five years.They were all veterans: bassist Gary W. Tallent, organist "Phantom" Danny Federici, saxophonist Clarence "Big Man" Clemons and drummer Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez, who had taken to decorating his kick drum with a pair of impala horns, like some outsized hood ornament.

"Yeah, I remember York College. We played with Crazy Horse," Lopez recalled. "We played with them a couple of times actually. Good guys." Most sets around that time featured most of the songs from "Greetings," some older Springsteen songs that hadn't been recorded, like "Cowboys of the Sea" and "Goin' Back to Georgia," and a healthy dose of early rock and soul covers. The sound was rollicking, swinging, soulful, full of swagger and poeticism, with inklings of the high drama that would infuse Springsteen's music over the coming decades. "What you hear on the first record, that was the sound that night ... just louder," Gibson said.

Lopez doesn't remember anything specific about the York show. "That's just how it was. If a gig went normally or nothing unusual happened, it all becomes kind of hazy," Lopez said. "It probably went pretty well. We did well at colleges." He had played plenty of them alongside Springsteen, Federici, Tallent and others in previous years. Springsteen started out with the clean-cut Castiles back in 1965 in his hometown of Freehold, N.J., playing Kinks, Beatles and Animals covers on the dance club and battle-of-the-bands circuits. Three years later, Springsteen happened to impress Lopez and Federici while jamming at an Asbury Park after-hours hangout called the Upstage.

The two had played in groups such as Moment of Truth and the Downtown Tangiers Rockin' Rhythm & Blues Band, and they immediately knew they wanted to play in a group with the longhaired guy on stage with the low-slung Les Paul. Eventually, they wore down the reluctant Springsteen. For years, Lopez thought he played a proprietary role in the band. "I asked Bruce to join my group, me and Federici. I thought it was my band." From 1968 through late 1970, they toured the East Coast as Steel Mill, a hard blues-rock combo in the vein of the Allman Brothers Band, Humble Pie, the Small Faces and Cream. Clubs, outdoor festivals and bars were the group's main haunts, but college shows allowed them to truly develop a stage presence and the kind of audience rapport Springsteen is known for today.

Frequent higher-ed gigs included Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Richmond, Ocean County College (where Springsteen had been expelled), Rutgers University and Monmouth College, which this fall will host a three-day academic symposium on Springsteen and his music. The band even crashed a festival at University of North Carolina that featured James Taylor and Sly Stone. As Lopez explained it, they just pulled up and started unloading before any other acts were ready. "I pretty easily talked my way past security. We were almost set up about to play when somebody finally asked us who we were," he said, laughing.

But after two years of slogging it out, Springsteen was leaning away from showy guitar rock and toward something more soulful, more confessional. He experimented with various bands, integrating rock and soul, but by 1972, the Asbury Park scene that had once sustained him and his fellow musicians was gone, the victim of devastating race riots the year before and an economic slump.Perhaps because the shore had become a lonelier scene, a more Dylanesque songwriting style emerged in Springsteen, yielding songs that were more verbose, with florid lyrics and complex acoustic arrangements. His songs combined elements of Curtis Mayfield, Van Morrison and Tim Hardin.

When Springsteen auditioned for Columbia Records in May of that year, he did so by himself. Legendary talent scout John Hammond (who had brought Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday to the label) thought he was signing a folk act in Springsteen, the "new Dylan." But when Lopez, Tallent, keyboardist David Sancious and later Clarence Clemmons showed up to the sessions, it was clear Springsteen would not be pigeonholed."Greetings" was finished in a mere three weeks at a cost of $45,000, about two-thirds of the advance Columbia had forked over. And as Springsteen had not yet proven himself to be anything more than a regional cult act, that was the lion's share of the group's income for the year.

Mike Appel, the manager who got Springsteen signed to Columbia and produced his first three records, has claimed in interviews that band members got paid about $200 a week in the early days, and $250 a week by the time "Born to Run" hit the airwaves in 1975. "Yeah, keep dreaming. Keep dreaming," Lopez said, laughing. "We got our hotels and meals covered and about $35 a week. That's it! I never saw $200 a week." Further clashes with Appel would lead to Lopez's dismissal in 1974. He remains the only E Street-er ever to be fired. Gibson, by his best recollection, thinks the college's student government paid about $5,000 for the entire show that night, both acts.

Two years later, it was Appel who would be fired by Springsteen, who then successfully sued Appel for an undisclosed amount of back payments and full rights to his publishing. These days, Lopez leads Steel Mill Retro and has recorded two albums of songs from the days of the original band. He's on friendly terms with both Springsteen and Appel. Back on the night of Nov. 12, 1972, in a college gymnasium, as a gas shortage loomed, a recession lumbered on and Nixon sat poised to run the country for another, well, 10 months, nothing else mattered to Lopez, Springsteen and the rest of the crew but the sweet elixir of rock 'n' roll — until the set was over.

Professionals that they were, Gibson said, Springsteen and the band, after playing for about 80 minutes, said their farewells and hit the road before Crazy Horse had left the stage. A weeklong residency at Kenny's Castaways in New York was calling, then the Detroit Auto Show, then a free show for inmates at Sing Sing Correctional Facility … then another 30 years burning down the road. "It was a rough life, but we loved it," Lopez said. "It certainly wasn't for the money. You can only do it that way when you are young."