Bruce Springsteen didn’t want to be on the road in the latter half of 1976. He wanted to be in the studio crafting a follow-up to Born to Run — an album that he was provisionally calling American Madness. But a nasty legal battle with Mike Appel, his
former manager, meant that he was legally unable to enter a recording studio with his producer of choice, Jon Landau, until the matter was resolved by the courts. With legal bills mounting and very little money coming in, booking shows was his only way to support himself and the rest of the E Street Band.
“I took comfort knowing I could lose all but one thing: myself,” Springsteen wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run. “No lawsuit, no court decision, no judge, no legal outcome could take away what I treasured most. That was the craft and inner life I’d built since I was a teenager, founded on the music I could make with my heart, head, and hands. That was mine forever and could not be won from me.”
He continued to describe his thought process in those days: “If I lose and have nothing when this is over, you can still drop me with my guitar by parachute anywhere in America; I’ll walk into the nearest roadhouse, find a pickup band and light up your night. Just because I can.”
That doesn’t mean it was always easy. Between March 25, 1976, and May 28, 1976, Springsteen and the E Street Band went on a grueling run of largely southern markets that was booked so haphazardly they dubbed it the Chicken Scratch Tour, because it looked like it had been routed by a barnyard animal clawing at a map.
After decompressing back in Jersey for the summer, where Springsteen spent a lot of his downtime at the Stone Pony and other Asbury Park hotspots, another run of shows was booked for the fall. This one was informally called the Lawsuit Tour, since they were in the strange position of being unable to record new material per very clear and specific orders from a judge.
But before they went on the road again, Springsteen arranged a six-night run at the Monmouth Arts Center in Red Bank, New Jersey, that was aimed squarely at his most devoted hometown fans. “In four years the young Holmdel resident and his loyal musicians have become international performers,” reads a July 19, 1976, report in Red Bank’s Daily Register. “Yet, they never forget their origins. They often play at the Stone Pony in Kingsley St. in Asbury Park. Many nights Springsteen just goes down to the Asbury Park bar to hear the Asbury Jukes with Southside Johnny Lyon and Miami Steve Van Zandt or some other rock and roll band that has been booked for a one-night stand.”
The six Red Bank shows were booked between Aug. 1 and Aug. 7, giving Bruce just a single night off on Aug. 4. Tickets were $6 for the balcony ($35.21 today) or $7 for the orchestra ($40.87). Advertising didn’t extend beyond Jersey, and tickets were sold at Jack’s Music Shop in Red Bank, the Music Den, the Turntable, and other nearby stores. All 9,000 seats were scooped up very quickly.
“I like this theater,” Springsteen told Daily Register report Carol Jacobson when she stopped by his dressing room before opening night for a very brief interview. “I like the sound here. And we have fun. There’s no money in it though.”
That’s a bit of an understatement, since these shows likely grossed somewhere in the ballpark of $60,000, which is $343,000 today. And even once you take out production costs, agent fees, insurance, and other expenses, Springsteen surely walked away with a decent amount of money for his ongoing legal fight.
Some of that money also went to Southside Johnny’s horn section. Springsteen hired them for the entire run after Southside came down with a throat infection and had to call off some shows. The lineup included sax player Ed Manion, marking the first of hundreds of shows he’d play with Springsteen over the next 50 years, including the Land of Hope and Dreams tour earlier this year.
The lawsuit couldn’t stop Springsteen from writing songs, and he debuted “Rendezvous” and “Something in the Night” on the first night. He wouldn’t officially release “Rendezvous” until the Tracks box set in 1998, but “Something in the Night” wound up on Darkness on the Edge of Town two years later. These shows were the first time the public heard any of the Darkness songs, even if the lyrics (“And I picked this chick up hitch-hiking, she just hung her head out the window and she screamed/Said she was looking for someplace to go, to die or be redeemed”) were far from finished.
To keep the show fresh after touring Born to Run for over a year, Springsteen added many covers into the set, including “You Can’t Sit Down” by the Dovells, the Crystals’ “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” (retitled “She’s Sure the Girl I Love”), and “It’s My Life” by the Animals. The latter song had been in rotation for several months, and it featured an intense prologue that Springsteen delivered almost verbatim every single night, centering around a teenage memory of coming home late at night and finding his father waiting for him in the kitchen.
“He’d start asking me what I thought I was doing with myself, where I was getting my money from,” Springsteen told the Red Bank crowd on Aug. 1. “Pretty soon we’d start screaming at each other. My mom’d come in from the front room to keep us from fighting with each other, and I’d be running out the back door, telling him that it was my life, I could do what I wanted to do.”
The legal battle with Appel was never referenced onstage, but the fury and defiance in Springsteen’s voice as he belts out “It’s My Life” is clearly not aimed at Douglas Springsteen.
And during the third show on Aug. 3, Springsteen’s feelings towards his ex-manager came out again when he unveiled one of the most beloved non-album songs of his long career: “The Promise.” It’s a tale of broken bonds, disillusionment, betrayal, and the death of a dream.
“Well now, I won big once and I hit the coast, but I paid a big cost,” Springsteen sings. “Inside I felt like I was carrying the broken spirits of all the other ones who’d lost/When the promise was broken, I went on living, but man, it takes something from down in your soul/When the truth is spoken and it don’t make no difference, something in your heart turns cold.”
On the final version, Springsteen concluded with a reference to his own work: “Thunder Road/Remember what me and Billy, we’d always say/Thunder Road/We were gonna take it all and throw it all away.”
But in Red Bank, he sang, “It’s a loser, here’s one for the tires rushing by in the rain/It’s a loser, and the way me and Billy, we’d always say/It’s a loser, we was gonna take it all and throw it all away.”
The swap of “Thunder Road” for “It’s a loser” is a masterstroke that alters the emotional tenor of the entire song. It also removes any doubt that the pain at the core of the song is deeply personal.
Most of the public was oblivious to Springsteen’s battle with Appel when these shows took place. And the press was more focused on his new look. “Gone is the punk look of wispy beard, recycled jeans, and T-shirt under a big denim cap,” reads a live review by George Kanzler Jr. in the Newark Star Ledger. “He appeared in a black three-piece suit, blue and white striped shirt, buttoned at the collar, clean-shaven with long, curly hair carefully sculpted and styled back with a part in the middle.”
Rock critic Sam Freedman summed up the entire Monmouth run in an article for the Courier-News. “After a year of touring and trying to live up to the hoopla,” he wrote, “his long-time fans on the Jersey shore posed another question: What would success do to him? Would he still be the same ‘Magic Rat’ who electrified local audiences for years with his wailing E Street Band and his tortured songs of the dead-end, drag strip and six-pack lifestyle? Absolutely. He turned in a high-voltage performance for six sell-out crowds in the 1,200-seat theater as if he were still jamming in a sweaty boardwalk honkey-tonk.”
By 1976, Springsteen had no doubt that he could turn a 1,200-seat theater into a boardwalk honkey-talk. He was much less sure he could do the same for a 20,000-seat basketball arena, especially since bitter memories of opening up for Chicago at Madison Square Garden in 1973 still lingered. But with legit money concerns, and a growing reputation as one of the best live performers in rock, Springsteen finally acquiesced a couple months later and agreed to play places like the Spectrum in Philadelphia and the Vets Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.
It turned out that playing to 20,000 of your own fans in an arena is very different than facing a sold-out crowd that have never heard of you and are counting until the seconds until Chicago plays “Saturday in the Park” and “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day.”
When it finally came time to tour Darkness on the Edge of Town a couple of years later, after the legal matter was finally resolved, Springsteen agreed to hit many arenas. And by 1980, when he hit the road to support The River, venues like the Monmouth Arts Center were a thing of the past for his headlining tours.
Today, the Monmouth Arts Center is known as the Count Basie Center for the Arts. Springsteen has played there many times over the years, often at special shows like the annual Parkinson’s fundraiser for the Light of Day organization, which was co-founded by Tony Pallagrosi.
In his previous life, Pallagrosi was a trumpet player with Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. Fifty years ago, he was in the horn section, alongside Ed Manion, during Springsteen’s six-night Monmouth residency. And now he stands on the side of that same stage, year after year, as Springsteen raises money for his charity. The week they debuted “The Promise” and “Something in the Night” must seem like a distant memory from another lifetime.
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