They are Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, the second best band in New Jersey, whose debut album on Epic will be out shortly, produced by Bruce Springsteen's guitar player (and former Juke), Steve Van Zandt. But after 10 years on the beach club circuit, Southside John Lyon, the man Time and Newsweek sought out when they wanted to find out what Bruce Springsteen was really like, couldn't quite put into words what this "overnight" success meant to him. "It's still not real to me," he said, during the Jukes' first week in the studio. "Recording is one of those fantasies you can't afford, working in bars."
But Springsteen was on hand at the Record Plant to recall his own experience. Three-and-a-half years ago, he quit a band that Lyon was singing with to make his own bid. "It's everybody's dream," Bruce declared. "Simple as that. You work all those years in a bar because you want to make a record. There's one moment when it hits you. In my case, it was when John Hammond said, 'We want you to make an album.' That day, I was like going crazy. Then, Pffff, it's over -- then it's the New Reality. But in that moment, that's where the magic is."
Between Springsteen's stardom and the Jukes' signing, six months passed, proving that record companies weren't exactly rushing to make Asbury the Liverpool of the '70s. "Asbury's hipper than the rest of Jersey," Van Zandt remarked between sessions, "but it's no Mecca -- it doesn't have music coming out of every window."
"Let them make the Brucie connection," Southside added, in his raspy off-mike voice. "Maybe they'll buy the album. If they like Bruce, they'll probably like us . . . I don't think I should say that!"
"That was exactly wrong, Johnny," Miami Steve cautioned, laughing. Lyon is college-educated; Steven, street-wise. "There's no similarity at all -- like Bruce and Dylan."
"I mean, I've been in Asbury all my life," Lyon continued. "What am I supposed to do, say I come from Duluth? I'll play in bars forever before I change what I'm doing."
"Southside uses five horns," Miami added. "Bruce uses a horn."
"Cause he's cheap," Johnny joked.
Springsteen said he couldn't remember "any case when this type of connection really worked out. But John's got a great voice, a good band, and he's got a lot of integrity in his approach to music. I think their name will get them played on the radio."
Bruce met Southside in 1968 at the Upstage Club in Asbury, "the pivotal spot of the whole scene," Springsteen explained, "where everybody met everybody. The Upstage was like the first place where people from a lot of different places came to play. I lived on Route 9 in Freehold, a really weird place with heavy, heavy greasers. Mongolian gangs, I'm not kidding. You'd go out Route 537, kids would spit, throw pennies at you for being a greaser. Then you'd go back to Freehold with long hair and get it from the real greasers."
"I was the only guy at the Upstage who'd get up and sing," Southside reminisced. "Steven and I must have had 48 bands in two years. Bruce played rhythm guitar with us for a while in the Sundance Blues Band. Steve played lead guitar. We gave Bruce a lick in a couple of songs and he was happy."
"I don't think we let him sing one song," Steven recalled.
"The hell with him!" Southside responded. "If he wanted to go to California and come back and find no band [an early Springsteen habit], that was all right with us."
Who gave Lyon his name?
"The Boss [Bruce] coined it," Steven replied. "The Boss said 'Chicago Johnny'. . ."
". . . and I said 'Southside Chicago," Lyon added, "and we split the difference."
And how about "Miami"?
"It's been there a long time," Van Zandt declared. "You make a left at Pennsylvania. . ."
The Jukes spent most of the first week laying down the brassy backing. Rather than each musician cutting his own track, the band played "live" with corrections punched in afterwards. "I want to hear it while it's happening," Van Zandt offered. "I worked with Phil Spector [on Lennon's oldies album]," engineer Jimmy Iovine added, "and he was the same way. Like Phil, Steve wants the snare drum to hit you in the face."
This was Miami's first production stint and everyone agreed he was doing a terrific job at getting the "feel." When Springsteen decided last July he needed another guitarist in his band, he plucked Van Zandt out of the Jukes. Steven immediately fit in with the E Street Band but every time he returned home between gigs, he'd mention something about "getting the Jukes going."
Of the 10 songs recorded for the album, two were by Bruce and three by Steven, who is emerging as a talented songwriter. Five other tunes reveal the true roots of the band -- Solomon Burke's "Got to Get You Off My Mind," Buster Brown's "Fanny Mae," Sam & Dave's "Broke Down Piece of Man" and the Swallows' "It Ain't the Meat (It's the Motion)." Although they've played many types of music over the years, Lyon and Van Zandt have their hearts set on the blues.
"We knew the first album couldn't be a blues album," Steve reflected, "so we decided to bring back R&B -- in the true sense of the word, not according to Billboard. Real R&B goes back to the Drifters in '51 and went down with Otis Redding."
"We're not stuck in the '50s and '60s," John added. "Just because you live at a certain time doesn't mean you have to love all the music being made. I hear those heavy metal groups and they don't move me one bit. I just don't have those kinds of roots. Why put three good songs and seven mediocre ones on an album when you can take the three originals and pick seven other great songs someone else wrote? I don't need that much of an ego boost to see my words on a lyric sheet."
As the week progressed, the scene became increasingly bizarre. Joe Cocker was recording down the hall in Studio A and on a couple of nights, he could have stood a little rain.
"You're a mess," fabled session drummer Bernard Purdie told him, quite amiably, one night.
"Oh, I'm all right," Joe answered bravely.
"Oh, yeah, you've been all right for years," Bernard said.
At mid-week, Van Zandt announced that he was trying to bring Lee Dorsey up from New Orleans. The E Street Band had played a rollicking date at Dorsey's Ya-Ya Lounge in the Crescent City last September, spending the better part of the night coaxing on stage the sweet singer of "Ya-Ya," "Working in a Coal Mine," "Ride Your Pony" and several other 60's hits. "Lot of those unique singers out there," Southside asserted, "and they should be recording."
Three days later, after Marshall Sehorn's arm had been sufficiently twisted, Dorsey arrived in the Big Apple and was handed a cassette of Steven's "How Come You Treat Me So Bad." The next day, when Dorsey drew his slight figure to the microphone and sang in his distinctive crystal funk style:
How
come you treat me so bad? Tell me 'cause I've got to knooooooow
Van Zandt screamed: "I think I'm going to die!"
Dorsey entered the control room to listen to the playback and admitted: "It's been so long [three years since he last sang in the studio], I have to hear it back to know what I sound like." The song is a lively New Orleans shuffle on which Johnny harmonizes with Lee's lead. As part of the song, they engaged in a hysterical jive rap, during which Southside promised to sock Dorsey so hard "when you wake up, your clothes will be out of style." After the final take, Lee smiled beatifically and Steve announced: "That's it. Next legend!"
"I'm a legend," Dorsey replied, "but not in my own time." Then he went on to complain that Allen Toussaint, and his partner, Sehorn, had been taking all these "outside acts" -- John Mayall, LaBelle, McCartney -- and "forgetting about the home folks. If I was sick or lost my voice, I wouldn't mind so much." With resigned dignity, he explained that he'd recently closed down his lounge, after being robbed at gunpoint four times and getting shot twice, "I said the heck with that. Opened a body and fender shop with my son." The morning before, when he'd come out of his house to drive to the airport, he'd spotted somebody "trying to steal my battery. That son of a gun, found him under my hood. Would have had a hell of a time finding another battery at six in the morning."
Dorsey claimed that the Jukes' song was "strong enough for a single. This guy [Steve] writes and produces and arranges -- Allen will find out he's not the only fish in the sea; maybe it'll get him off his fanny." Before Dorsey left, John and Steve agreed that if "How Come" is a single, it will be released under Dorsey's name (he's also on Epic).
An hour later, the next legend dropped in. The night before, Jimmy Iovine had suggested to Ronnie Spector that she "come by the studio." Once he had her, he played her the backing tracks to "You Mean So Much To Me," which, like "Fever," is a Springsteen song from five years back. She flipped. "I want you to sing on this album," Steven told her. "I'll sing anything," she replied. Steven called Bruce, who rushed to the studio at 1 a.m. to rewrite a couple of verses.
And so it was with some anticipation that Ronnie was greeted at the studio the following night. Dressed in brown boots, denim jeans with suspenders and tight red t-shirt, she immediately brought back every adolescent fantasy any of the men in the room had ever had during Veronica and the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" heyday more than a decade before. In the intervening years, Ronnie has grown into an amply mature woman but the exotic hair, the pouty mouth and ethnic mystery remain intact.
Springsteen, always one of Ronnie's biggest fans, was sitting at the studio piano, playing Miami one of his new tunes when Ronnie approached.
"Hi Bruce, so good to meet you," she said, giving him a robust kiss on the cheek.
"Nice to see ya," Bruce replied, and, slightly impressed, didn't seem to say a word to her the rest of the night.
While Ronnie went over the song with Johnny, Bruce returned to the control room, in good spirits after six weeks off the road. "You know, Mrs. Southside [Lyon's wife, Betty] altered Southside's appearance quite a bit. He was a crazy-looking guy. He had black Roy Orbison-like glasses, and real long straight hair parted in the middle when I introduced him to her. That was about four years ago in Virginia. We had a band -- there was me, Johnny, Stevie, Garry [Tallent], Davey [Sancious]. That was the night Mad Dog [Vini Lopez -- the Pete Best of Springsteen lore] passed out on the drums and we had to get a kid from the audience . . ."
Suddenly, it was star time. Ronnie burst into song, her unmistakable voice as powerfully seductive as ever. After the first take, there were whoops in the production booth.
"I smell the sweet smell of success!" Van Zandt exploded, then, looking at Joe Cocker, who'd dropped in to catch the show, deferred: "Must be from Studio A." Joe simply nodded. "But we need something at the beginning -- some 'whoa-oh-ohs' or something," Steve decided.
"I know whoa-oh-ohs," Ronnie replied, between drags on a Viceroy. "That's my life!"
As Southside and Steve coached her at the piano, Bruce sat slumped in his seat sipping a coke, feigning nonchalance. "Ever think you'd see that little tableau?" someone wondered, pointing to the unlikely trio.
"Nowadays, I believe everything," Bruce said.
The second take raised goosebumps. Ronnie sang like a cyclone on fire, closing the song by screaming: "Love you, need you baby, whoa-oh Johnny, sock it to me . . ."
"Sock it to me?" Bruce roared, straightening in his seat.
After the session, Ronnie said she'd recorded her first album in 10 years ("some old me, some new me") on Tom Cat Records; it's not produced by Phil Spector. She's about to play clubs for the first time sans Ronettes. "The band'll sing back-ups and I'll be wearing see-throughs and various things, wait'll you see. Why'd I do this? I love Bruce's stuff. His music sounds like my husband's music, and any person who can even get near Phil's stuff is fantastic. John sings great, he's so natural. If my album doesn't make it, maybe his will.
"You can never tell in this business."
Slumped against the wall at the other end of the hall after the most remarkable week of his life, Southside John Lyon could only agree. "I used to make a deal at the Upstage," he recalled. "I'd do one of their English-rock things if I could do a blues. Who wants to do that? So I put my first band together. If you can find musicians who all like the same music and it's different from everyone else, you're lucky. Then, to get a chance to play it -- you've got to be a magician."
Greg Mitchell
Crawdaddy (May 1976)