Sample Chapter – The First Beat from E-Street: The Life and

 

Times of Vini Lopez, Original Drummer with Bruce

 

Springsteen’s E-Street Band

 

 

 

“Hey man, we should form a band.” 

 

Myself, Bruce Springsteen, Vinnie Roslin and Danny Federici were sitting around a table in the Green Mermaid. It was the end of the summer in 1968. We’d just played upstairs at the Upstage Club on Cookman Avenue and Bond Street in Asbury Park , New Jersey .

 

With these words, I formed a band with Bruce Springsteen.

 

I had seen Bruce in action at the Italian-American Club in Long Branch , with his band Earth, and I liked his stage persona instantly. I went over there with my friend Chuck Dillon, specifically to see Bruce and what he was all about. I’d heard good things about Bruce from several musically knowledgeable people I knew on the Shore scene. Sure enough, they were right: he knew how to draw an audience in. After his show, I said hello and told him, “Hey, I’m Vini Lopez”. I then told him a little about myself and asked him to come by the Upstage Club in Asbury Park so we could get together and jam a little bit.

I liked what Bruce had to offer, but I wanted my pal Danny Federici to hear him as well.

 

At the Italian American Club, Bruce, with his drummer and bassist, was doing the rock ‘n’ roll covers we all did in those days, Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Byrds, and Jimi Hendrix. For all I knew, Bruce may well have been doing his own songs at that point. I was supremely impressed with Bruce’s band, Earth, and I thought it would be good to work with a musician like this.

 

At some point later that month, Danny Federici and myself went to the Upstage Club and Bruce was there jamming that night. We saw Margaret Potter, who owned the club, at the top of the stairs and she was positively beaming. “Look at this guy,” she said, “he’s got so much charisma.”

Danny and I looked at Bruce on stage. He had tattered pants on, no shirt, wearing suspenders, playing that Les Paul of his. He looked like a hippie. He was extremely motley looking. Danny and I listened to his set with Roslin on bass and Big Bobby Williams on drums, and when they were done, Danny and I went up to the stage. I said, “hey, Would you like to jam with us?”  He said sure, so we went up to Tom Potter, Margaret’s husband and the real owner of the club, and asked if we could be scheduled in to play again, later that evening. By the time we took the stage later that night, it was nearly 2 o’ clock in the morning.

 

We played blues and rock ‘n’ roll songs, just jammed, and we played for perhaps 40 minutes. After that set, I knew we had found something special with Bruce singing, myself on drums, Little Vinnie on bass, and Federici fleshing out our sound with his expert keyboard treatments. 

 

I don’t remember any specific songs, but I do remember that we all took lengthy solos. It was a classic jam session. Bruce knew how to give the cues, and we just followed his lead.

 

Bruce was kind of a quiet guy in those days, but once he was on stage, he was like me: it was Jekyll and Hyde. He had two personas: one his shy, reserved offstage manner and the other, his onstage persona, where he was the man!

 

To be perfectly honest, I had actually first had contact with Bruce at the Keyport-Matawan Roller Drome, a roller rink, in 1966. All the bands were set up around the edges of this big roller rink off Route 35. I was there playing drums with Sonny and the Starfires in a battle of the bands. There were perhaps 25 bands in this band battle, and everyone got to do three songs. Bruce’s band, the Castille’s, were set up right next to us, on our left. We figured, after the Castilles had played, we didn’t have a chance. Then we played, and at this particular band battle, Little Vinnie Roslin was one of the judges. When the judging came down, this band called the Rogues won first place. We figured the Castilles would come in second place. We came in second place and this other band whose name I can’t remember, came in third place, but we felt for sure the Castilles were kind of juiced, they were very good, I was convinced they would come in first place.  

 

At this point, I should say a few words about Sonny Kenn. I was 14 or 15 when I first ran into this wild looking guitar player from Belmar named Sonny Kenn. My friend and mentor, Buzzy Lubinsky, introduced me to Kenn at the teenage dances at the 5th Avenue Pavilion in Belmar one day in 1965. Kenn had a band called the Blazers at the time, and I began by rehearsing with Sonny. Like a lot of groups at that time, everyone in the band had to sing. So, I learned to sing while playing drums at 15 years old. Musicians will tell you, it’s not easy to play lead guitar and sing at the same time and similarly, it’s not easy to play drums and sing at the same time.

 

Shortly after I began rehearsing with Kenn, we changed our name to Sonny and the Starfires. We began rehearsing at Joey Pessipane’s house on 13th Avenue in Belmar. One day, the minister from the Methodist church on the corner of 13th and E-Street heard us rehearsing. He came over and asked if we would play for the kids in his church.  That church on E Street is the first place where I played drums in front of any kind of a crowd. I mark that show in 1965 as the first public performance that I can remember.  That was the first place I ever played drums in a band. Hence, “The First Beat From E St”. We all sang in Sonny’s band, we all had matching shark skin suits and the frilly shirts, but from time to time, we’d change our getups.

 

Sonny Kenn was the first rock star that I ever met. He had long blond hair down the back of his neck and his hair was shaped into a duck’s ass haircut down to his shoulders. He played his Framus guitar with a pinky bar on it so he could bend the notes. Sonny, like Bruce, had charisma. That’s why Bruce used to come see him at places like the Monmouth Shopping Center . We also played a lot at the Hullabaloo Clubs, a chain of independently owned clubs. They had locations in Asbury Park , Middletown , Toms River , Manville, and even up in New London , Ct, where the Hullabaloo clubs were born by Johnny Angel, the founder.  Sonny and the Starfires became the house band at the Asbury Park Hullabaloo Club in 1966.

 

To give you an idea of the kind of effect Sonny had on his audiences, I remember one show we played at Monmouth Shopping Center where we opened for the Beau Brummels. We did our regular set and we included a Beau Brummels song. At the end of our show, we had to be taken off the stage in a Jeep and driven underneath the shopping center, away from the screaming throngs of teenaged girls!

 

Since then, Sonny has continued to perform and amaze audiences at clubs all over New Jersey and New York , but more about him later.

 

At the time of our first jam session at the Upstage, I was 20, Bruce was 20, and Federici was 19. Little Vinnie was the old man in the group, he was already in his mid-20’s.  To be sure, we were young and dumb, but we knew we had a special sound.

 

I spoke to Bruce afterwards at the Green Mermaid, the little restaurant downstairs from the club, and I said to him, “I know this guy Tinker West. He builds surf boards. He told me he’d help us out if we were willing to do original music.” 

 

I had been in a band in 1967 called Moment of Truth, and Tinker told me, “if you guys come up with something original, I’ll be glad to help you out.”  Moment of Truth had played the night I met Tinker at the old Dew Drop Inn in Spring Lake .

 

When I was talking to Bruce, it dawned on me that Tinker might be able to help us out. Later that week, Bruce and I went to visit Tinker at his surfboard factory in Ocean Township , not far from Asbury Park .

 

Bruce and I drove up there and Tinker was putting the final touches on a row of surfboards he had just made, and he invited us to bring our stuff to the factory to set up and practice there.  We looked up to him because he had a strong personality; he was the smartest guy we’d ever met. He was also in his 30’s, much older than us.

Within that week, we’d established a place to rehearse and found someone to help us out, which is something very important to four young guys who just wanted to play music and didn’t know much about anything else.

 

After a number of rehearsals and a couple of shows that Tinker helped us get into, he invited us to live there at the surfboard factory. Bruce and Tinker shared the larger front offices and Danny and I lived in the back, in the bathrooms. Prior to this, I had been living with my grandmother, Anna Lopez, who was an outright supporter of all of my live shows.  I’d been living with my grandmother since I was a kid. My parents didn’t get along too well when I was a kid, they got divorced, and rather than drag me into the midst of all their fighting, I was sent to live with my grandmother, who also lived in Neptune.

 

At this point in the fall of 1968, Tinker West was extremely busy with his surfboard factory and as a consequence, we all took turns helping him build surfboards. Once we got underway as a band called Child, the band helped out with the rent at the surfboard factory.

 

To be sure, doing gigs helped us pay the rent, but they were few and far between, at least initially. Perhaps we’d play once a month at Monmouth College , Virginia Commonwealth University and Ocean County College . But we’d rehearse in between every day.

 

Tinker’s role in all of this was as the band’s manager, booking agent, promoter and soundman. He built us our own P.A. system. He had the truck we traveled around in, and he would drive the equipment to the gigs. He was literally a fifth member of the band.

 

The first two gigs for Child were one show in a park in the West End section of Long Branch . We were on the bill with a bunch of other bands and I think we were a last minute addition. We were doing original songs that Bruce had written at that point. After all these other bands had been on, playing cover tunes by Beatles, Stones, Doors and the like, we came on and did Bruce’s originals. The reaction by the audience was it was clearly something they’d never heard before and they were ecstatic. They really warmed up to Bruce as a front man.

 

With Child, in our own small way, we were like a mega group from the Jersey Shore: Bruce had been making a name for himself with the Castilles and Earth; Little Vinnie Roslin was in the Motifs, one of the more popular Shore-area bands; I was with Sonny and the Starfires with guitarist Sonny Kenn, and Danny, most notably, was with the Storytellers, with a very talented songwriter/guitarist named Bill Chinnock. 

 

Child’s second show was another free show, something Tinker helped orchestrate at Monmouth College . It was a hot, sunny, early spring day in 1969. There were a lot of bands on the bill, and the show went on for upwards of six hours through the afternoon and into the evening. Once again, Child was the last band to perform. We played on the back steps of Woodrow Wilson Hall at Monmouth and by the time we got on stage, there were 3 to 4 hundred people sitting at the bottom of the steps.

 

When we started setting up our equipment to play, all the people at the bottom of the stairs rushed up to crowd around the band. While they were all rushing to do this, they scared the hell out of us, and we ran inside Wilson Hall, not knowing what was going on. Tinker calmed the entire crowd down and we came back out to do the show.

 

This show was particularly memorable because of the doctor who came out of the crowd and came up to Bruce and told him to “turn that music down! My wife is sick, we live three blocks from here, turn it down, now!”  Bruce said “get outta my face,” or something like that. This doctor proceeded to reach behind Bruce and tore all the guitar wires out of his amplifier.  Tinker proceeded to remove the guy from the premises, because the crowd was ready to kill him. We could have thrown him into the crowd, but we didn’t. We continued playing and after the show was over, it was clear the audience loved the band. We ended up doing a few encores and each one was a long, extended jam that must have lasted 20 minutes. 

 

Later that summer, we learned there was another band called Child. They had an album out, so we needed to change our name. There weren’t any legal actions from this other band, we just took it upon ourselves to change our name.

 

We had a series of brain-storming sessions over a period of a week to come up with a new name for our band. We had one at the surfboard factory, another at the Inkwell, whenever we were together. One night at the Inkwell in Long Branch , Chuck Dillon came up with the name Steel Mill. Dillon had been a supporter of the band and he’d been my friend since the earliest days of the Upstage Club. By the beginning of that summer, we had changed our name to Steel Mill.

 

One of the first big shows we did as Steel Mill was a concert opening for Grand Funk Railroad at the Brick Ice Palace . That afternoon, the MC-5 were supposed to be playing with them. They needed a band to come in and open. My friend Beth Ann Carver worked for the promoter. He ran a fence company, and she told him that she had a friend in a band called Steel Mill and that we could come in and do the gig.

 

They called us that afternoon and we were there that night to open for Grand Funk Railroad. We set up all of our equipment and there were a lot of people there to see Grand Funk, and we just kept playing on our P.A. and about two and a half hours into our set, Grand Funk Railroad’s people finally appeared. They set all their bigger amplifiers and speakers around our little equipment, while we were playing. Our sound equipment wasn’t little in those days, but it was dwarfed by Grand Funk’s equipment. They tried to out do everyone else on the circuit in those days with more decibels at every show. But we had the crowd rocking. That was the show where my friend Kenny Kemp ran up to Bruce at the microphone, put his arm around Bruce and grabbed the mic. It set off a spark that shocked the hell out of both of them. That virtually ended the show, ‘cause Bruce didn’t feel much like singing after however much voltage went through his teeth! 

 

After we were done, we didn’t get any kind of thanks from Grand Funk for saving their show, they didn’t even have the decency to say hello.

 

These kinds of things happened in those days and they don’t seem to happen all that much anymore. This is shame, because the Shore music scene in those days had places that wanted original musicians. In the Upstage, at least we had a place where we could go and jam and meet people and form bands with our cronies. These days, I don’t know of any place like the Upstage. The Upstage’s tradition was to encourage musicians to get to know one another and to sit in and jam together. You did not have to be a great player in those days, you just had to have the desire to play.  Where else could a musician who had no money and couldn’t afford an amp go and plug into a wall and just play? Tom Potter supplied all the amplification that was necessary.

 

In December of 1969, Tinker set up a show at his Challenger Eastern Surfboard Factory at which we raised $1,800 to take on a planned trip to California .

 

We took off in Tinker’s equipment truck, the 1948 flatbed truck and Federici’s station wagon. We had this fellow named Sam who went along with us also, he needed a ride to California , and we said come on with us. We left, driving through a snowstorm in Pennsylvania , got to Nashville , Tennessee and Tinker signaled he needed to get gas, and he was in the truck ahead of us with Bruce, who did not drive.

Tinker got to the top of the exit and we lost the truck. From that point on we were separated from Tinker and Bruce and the money. Myself, Federici, Sam and Little Vinnie had no money and we got ourselves to California using Sam’s credit card to pay for meals and gas along the way. We drove straight through, each guy in the car took four hour shifts driving. We just kept switching every four hours until we got to California . We got there and we were still separated from Tinker and Bruce. We went to where we were supposed to go in Big Sur to the Eslin Institute, where Tinker’s friend Gopher was the chef. I went up to the door of the restaurant and asked to speak with Gopher because I was Tinker’s friend. They laughed and said, “we haven’t seen Tinker in years and Gopher’s on vacation!”  So there we were, stuck at Eslin Institute in Big Sur with no place to stay with no Tinker and no Bruce!  We get the bright idea, because Tinker had mentioned one of his girlfriends, Linda Mendez, we drove up to San Francisco in search of Linda Mendez. She lived in Oakland and we eventually found her. We eventually found her in the phone book and looked her up and once again we got the same story, “God, I haven’t seen Tinker in years!”  Linda, knowing we were friends of Tinker’s let us stay at her house in Oakland for the night.

 

The next day, we’re still in search of Tinker and Bruce and we went back to Eslin Institute and we left early enough where there would be some daylight and we pulled into the parking lot there and we found a path off the parking lot and we were walking down this path and we saw a tree filled with monarch butterflies and we were looking at the tree and we began to hear a conga drum. It seemed like it was coming through the middle of the woods and as we got closer we heard Bruce singing and we found them both in a little shack this guy had built on the side of the mountain, and there was Bruce and Tinker sitting there, and they said, “Where have  you guys been?!”  And we all laughed.

But more about our California trip later.

The kinds of things that would happen in those days don’t seem to happen much any more with today’s fully developed rock culture. The last minute bookings, the wanna-be concert promoters who left a lot to be desired, the decibel levels at shows, in short, everything about rock ‘n’ roll has changed since those early times in the late 1960s and early 70’s.

Come along with me on this journey into the early days of rock ‘n’ roll with meaning.