The way things happen gets lost to time unless you write them down. This is why I need to tell this one story the best I can. So that it outlives me, at least for a while. This is all we can ever hope for as storytellers, I think; that a few of the tales we told outlived us and got re-told by someone who’d heard it long ago and felt compelled to revive it from whatever musty dark places these things end up in. Like anyone trying to recall things that happened 25 years ago/ the details are questionable. And it isn’t my job, I don’t suppose, to convince you of anything one way or the other. The truth plays a part, but how much of a part it plays is one of life’s most enchanted mysteries. No one knows, you see. Not even the rememberer remembers right.
Aside from all that though, the story I will tell you is the one I lived. Not because it is the bona fide truth but rather because it is the way I tell it to myself. The way I recollect it going down. The details are frivolous, I guess. But when you break it all down, so is everything.
Asbury Park Convention Hall is a crumbling ruins of another era. There have been times when huge chunks of her simply lose grip and detach from the ceiling or the wall. Hurtling to the floor below, perhaps crumbling across a row of seats or thudding down in a backstage corridor, the hall has been dying and dying for so long now that few alive recall her when she wasn’t.
Built in the late 1920’s, the hall came to define the Asbury Park boardwalk as one of two bookends (the other being the late great Casino). Over the years the list who played there is jaw-dropping. Frank Sinatra. Iron Maiden. Bob Dylan. Otis Redding. Ike & Tina. John Lee Hooker. KISS. James Brown. So many of the greats. The Stones. The Temptations. Skynyrd played there a few weeks before their plane went down. Zeppelin famously refused an invite to Woodstock and opted instead to play in the hall for a few thousand rather than up at the farm for a zillion. All of these bands and artists went to Asbury Park to play music maybe a hundred yards from a Jersey flounder who had no clue. I’ve always been dazzled by that notion.
On the night of Dec. 18, in the year 2000, though, it was us up there. Me and my brother Dave. Slo-Mo, I think. I sure hope he was there. I remember smelling deeply, breathing it like a fucking madman as I attempted to create something lasting across a moment I knew would be gone soon. There was Bruce Springsteen holding his Telecaster. There was Southside Johnny singing soulful spit from his lips. There was Clarence Clemons looming over everything/ his movements deliberate/ his saxophone gleaming in the holiday lights. I saw Nils Lofgren and Miami Steve. I saw Garry Tallent. I saw everyone, I guess. I saw Elvis Costello out in the crowd where we sat for most of the show. He was a couple rows in front of us. I wouldn’t have even known it was him unless someone told me. Maybe I dreamed it though. Maybe he was in Paris that night. Or L.A. or Rome.
My story starts with us on that stage. I don’t tell this thing in chronological order much anymore simply because I get too excited. I can’t reel the narrative back to me more often than not. The thing is a sailfish, a taproom trophy the size of a Cadillac, and even though it has been so long now since it raced through the dark night sea like a missile, the memory still has the juice to overpower me and my Kmart gear any old time. Trying to land something like this, I’m telling you, it makes me nuts. I still get afraid that it’ll go away from me. Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that kind of sad and strange in a way? 24 years after Bruce Springsteen let me and my brother know that he wanted us to show up at one of his holiday shows in Asbury Park, I’m still running scared that it maybe didn’t happen. Or if it did happen, that he had the wrong dudes. And maybe it was supposed to be the other guys but it wasn’t supposed to be me. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be up there, trying to catch a whiff of something I could lock away in my vaults. Trying in vain detect some weed from the crowd or maybe someone’s amp giving off a little bitter electrical smoke, I would have settled for anything, honestly. Southside’s boozy breath. Jimmy Vivino’s cologne. Patti’s fragrant conditioner like a French garden coming hard at me right in the time of my life.
Nothing concrete stuck though.
I wrestle with it now.
I go back there and I stand in the hall alone in my mind. I kick my shoes through some plaster from the ceiling and I feel it breaking under the weight of me now but still I hardly can smell a thing or taste one.
There are visions that remain, of course: flashes of deep velvety red and the lights casting shadows on the back of Bruce’s sweaty neck; I see random stuff I recall but even then it’s barely what you’d think you’d remember. Such a night in a young man’s life and the visceral seems more prominent than the defined. The feeling I had in my heart and my guts as we belted out Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, it clamps my bones and rubber bands my muscles. It insists, without opposition, that I lay down in its vociferous path and accept everything. To drag back such lost magic nights in this existence is to tempt fate. I suspect, you know, that the most wonderful things we have lived through could be popped like bubbles floating across the yard.
My dad by the BBQ. His lazy smile all drunk and mischievous. The smoky tang of his pork chops and the sweet thick slices of onion resting/ scalding/ over the coals beside the meat.
I look at him lovingly. His most basic eyewink could lift me so high.
But he reaches out at the bubble I chase and with the tip of his cigarette he destroys it mid-flight.
I lick on the old summer vines and they taste like my kid snot tears.
We were at a recording studio in Conshohocken when we got word that Bruce Springsteen was requesting our presence. It was the Nicolo Brothers’ place and we were there with Joe, who was about as easy to get along with as any studio guy I can remember. This was me and my brother’s hometown and I don’t even know exactly why we were there. Our album Kids in Philly had come out back in March of that year and ever since then our lives had been a tumult of traveling and making music. We’d toured a lot and now we were trying to lay down a few older songs like Reservation Girl, a live staple for us.
But why were we doing that? I have no clue. I kept no journal so I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter anyway. It was early afternoon when our manager Paul called and told us that Bruce Springsteen, my all-time full-on rock ’n’ roll hero bar none, and who we had met a few times by then, was inviting us to come down to Asbury Park that night. Nicolo promptly told us to go. He said, ‘You guys need to go. You need to go now.’ We invited him along. He politely declined.
I don’t remember if there was talk of us joining Bruce and the other musicians onstage or anything like that, but we knew enough about E Street history to understand that this kind of summoning from the man himself had to mean that it was possible. And, we were correct. It was indeed possible. Thanks to joining a band, the most impossible things in my young man’s head were now possible, possible, possible.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
