Friday, March 31, 2023 Entry #54
Less than a week after coming home from Washington D.C., I was flying back east, this time to New York City. This was another much anticipated #YearOfSpringsteen pilgrimage, as I had a ticket to see Bruce at the fabled Madison Square Garden as well as a reservation for a bus tour of Springsteen-related sites in his home-base of Asbury Park, NJ and the Jersey Shore. As focused as I was on all of that, I did have one other mission to accomplish while in the Big Apple. As a rabbi at my St. Louis congregation, I teach the 10th grade Confirmation class, and the experience includes a group trip to New York which I would be leading a few weeks hence. I used this arrival day little more than 24 hours before the Springsteen concert to scout some of the stops on the itinerary and test out the subway routes.
That night I left my friend’s condo where I was staying and headed downtown to roam around Greenwich Village. Amy and I lived in the Village in the late 90’s, and our oldest child Zoey was born there. But, this legendary New York City neighborhood was a big part of my psyche long before it became a home for my family and me. For Greenwich Village, of course, was the epicenter of the 60’s counter-culture, radical politics, and avant-garde art world in New York. And, there was the music; jazz, rock and roll, and the folk-topical-protest music that Bob Dylan made famous. Even before I set foot there, Greenwich Village was my paradigm of the kind of place where I wanted to be.
Though I was born maybe 10 years too late to see it in its prime, the romanticism of the Greenwich Village of the 1960’s was somehow born into me (no, my parents were not hippies!), and I sought it out. When I was a teenager living in the Chicago area, I went on a Model United Nations school-sponsored trip to New York City. On the first morning, my best friend Scott (who was with me when I attended my first Bruce Springsteen concert) and I slipped out of the proceedings (it was a different time), hopped a subway downtown and spent an unforgettable day on the loose in the Village browsing record stores, watching hippies play chess, eating at the bodegas, purchasing colorful sketches of Jim Morrison, Malcom X, Abbie Hoffman, and Dylan from street artists, and generally just soaking up the groovy vibes. Even now, the spirit of the 60’s still hasn’t completely disappeared from certain pockets around the country, and in every city I lived in until my 1996 move to New York, I always sought out the districts most like Greenwich Village to reside or hang in-Chicago (Old Town), Washington D.C. (Adams-Morgan, Georgetown), and St. Louis (The Loop, Central West End). So it was delightful and invigorating to find myself actually living in the original and still the real deal for four lively years.
Though Asbury Park gets most of the credit, Greenwich Village was also an important place in Bruce Springsteen’s early career. Crossing the bridge from New Jersey to New York, Springsteen was drawn to the hippie enclave and the clubs and cafes that seemed to be overflowing with live music. Like me, Springsteen first visited the Village when he was in high school, but much different than me, Bruce and his first band The Castiles were there to rock out on one of those storied stages.
“New York City…that’s where bands found fame and fortune. Tex made a few calls and somehow got us booked into Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village…This was major…the Village in 1968 was something we’d never seen…We got the gig. We didn’t get paid…Our experience in the Village was crucial…This was the big world, the free world, in Greenwich Village... I could walk with my freak flag held high and nobody was gonna bust me. It was a world I could call my own, a little piece of my future beckoning...We basked in the freedom of it all and it became our true home away from home.”-Bruce Springsteen
And there it was in 2023, still a place for bands (and now, for stand-up comics as well) to try and stir the crowds and shoot for the stars. I loved being at the Cafe Wha? that night and imagining the young Bruce Springsteen performing at this intimate club, years before hitting the big time.
The Castiles above, Springsteen second from left
After the Castiles broke up and his high school years ended, Springsteen played in a panoply of bands and he gained a reputation, as one publication labeled him, as the “King of Jersey Shore Rock with deep, soul-strutting guitar licks fortified with blaring horns and back up singers.” In the early 70’s however, Springsteen temporarily changed course and embarked on a solo career, commuting by bus to New York City with his acoustic guitar to play the Greenwich Village folk clubs. He seemed to be following in the literal foot steps of another scruffy musician-poet who mined this territory some ten years earlier, and so this was the Springsteen era where he was tagged with the “New Dylan” moniker. Listening to Springsteen’s songs from those Village days, there are similarities, but also differences, when it comes to comparing this version of Bruce Springsteen with early, Greenwich Village era Bob Dylan. Bruce offered up a more street-smart and heart-on-the-sleeve version of Dylan’s guitar and harmonica fueled wordplay and beat philosophy on the very stages where Dylan had earlier honed his craft.
As the Springsteen website Brucebase describes one of those shows, “An informal, now famous performance within hours of Springsteen’s audition meeting with the famous record executive John Hammond (who “discovered” Dylan himself in the Village and signed him to Columbia Records) took place in 1972 at the Gaslight Au Go Go, a merger of two long-established Greenwich Village clubs, the rock-dominated Cafe Au Go Go on Bleeker Street and the folk-orientated Village Gaslight, the McDougal Street club made famous by Bob Dylan.”
Bob Dylan at the Village Gaslight and on the streets of Greenwich Village, early 60’s
While the Go-Go is gone (gone), the Bitter End, another Village venue where Springsteen played solo in ‘72, is still kicking. Tonight, I paid the cover, and spent quality post-midnight time with an aging but effective blues-rock band. I also checked out all of the fantastic archival photos adorning the walls, including the one of Dylan and Patti Smith from the Rolling Thunder period, when Dylan began to knock around and perform at the Greenwich Village clubs again after many years away.
Before I leave this reflection on Springsteen and Greenwich Village, I want to write a word or two about the late, great Bottom Line. This wonderful music venue was right across the street from where I attended rabbinical school off Greenwich Village’s colorful Washington Square Park on the corner of West 4th and Mercer Streets. In my time, I saw some great singer-songwriters perform there, including Dar Williams, Peter Himmelman, and Dan Bern (who does a mean Springsteen impression in his hilarious song “Talkin’ Woody, Bob, Bruce & Dan Blues.”). But, unfortunately for me, I was only 11 years old when Bruce Springsteen himself played an historic five-night, 10-show stand at The Bottom Line in August of 1975, a series of high-energy concerts that Rolling Stone magazine named one of the “50 Moments That Changed Rock and Roll.” The fabled co-owner of the club, Allen Pepper said of those shows in amazement, “I never saw somebody that charismatic take the stage. I was just floored. He owned the stage. When he came on, he was on fire.”
“The Bottom Line was the gig that finally put us on the map…For five nights, two shows a night, we left everything we had on tiny stage at 15 West Fourth Street. For us, these were groundbreaking appearances, the band pushing its limits as I cakewalked across the skinny tabletops, leaving that burn in the air of something happening. The Bottom Line shows seriously raised the bar. We got born again there. When we left something new had taken hold of our band. As “Born To Run” had defined us on record, these shows defined us as a live act intent on shaking you by the collar, waking you up, and all-or-nothing performances.”
-Bruce Springsteen
Alas, due to rent increases from its landlord New York University, the last Bottom Line show was on January 22, 2004, just shy of the club’s 30th anniversary. Although none other than Bruce Springsteen offered to pay the club’s back rent if the two parties could settle on a new lease, the building now houses NYU classrooms.
When I returned to my friend’s place from my night out in Greenwich Village, it was almost time to head uptown.