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quite young when you started. Where did you play?
    Everywhere. High school dances, bars, weddings. I can remember staying up all night learning “Moon River” because the bride requested it—“Moon River!” [
laughs
] We didn’t play any of that stuff at the time, but we needed the bucks, right?
    First thing I ever did was in a trailer camp, out in the country. It was the fall, with trailer camp people. Ain’t got no trailer camps in Sweden? Motor homes, like you pull them with your car. You know America, everybody’s moving all over all the damn time. Trailer camps … you pull ’em and you park ’em. And there’s a certain trailer camp type ofperson, right? We played there, and it was us and this other country music band who had an accordion, a bass guitar, a guitar player, and a little girl who stood on a stool and sang into one of these big RCA/Victor microphones, like in them old Shirley Temple movies … And we came out and we did “Twist and Shout” and Ray Charles songs and Chuck Berry songs. And the people went nuts … and man, we played for like eight hours that day. I remember starting at noon and we played until like eight or nine, when we had to stop. That was one of the first gigs I ever did.
    So I was doing everything. I played for the fireman’s ball, where they didn’t know what kind of band they were hiring, and we’d get there and just blow everybody’s mind. The fireman’s ball, played for the Boy Scouts once, did every kind of gig. High school dances, clubs, anything, we did it. Played in the mental institutions, for the patients—everything.
    Where did you get your musicians? Was it all people that you knew growing up?
    This guy Miami Steve is a guy that I knew since I was about 15. Steve had his own band, I had my own band. I just got him in the band a few months ago, but he’d been in all my bands except for this one. So it was good to get him back in. So I’ve known him a long time; Garry, I’ve known Garry for about five years now, I guess, and he’s been in other bands with me. Danny I’ve known for six or seven years. They’re all people I’ve known. Clarence I met about three or four years ago. Most of them local boys, except for Max and Roy. Roy’s from Long Island, and Max is from North Jersey—which is not considered local [
laughs
]. Local is your town, maybe ten miles out. North Jersey is a whole other scene from where I live—it’s industrial, more like New York.
    With that very strong local feeling, you must be interested in the same things and have the same sort of associations and jokes and everything like that .
    Well, no, not really; everybody’s sort of different. Everybody’s been through different things, different ages, different experiences. But there’s a real strong vibe there, because everybody realizes we’ve got a really good thing going. And they’re all good guys, very easygoing nice guys,and it’s a very smooth-running thing right now. So yeah, to a degree, everybody knows New Jersey—when you got your local boys with you, you’ve got a thing you just can’t buy. I wouldn’t trade these guys for nobody. First of all because they all are great musicians, and there’s that extra thing.
    Like me and Steve do that rap in “E Street Shuffle,” and that’s what it was like. We sat at that table in that club at three in the morning, and we dreamed and dreamed the day would come when we could make some records. That was number one. I’ve known Steve since he was about 15, and since then it’s been the same thing—that’s all we ever talked about. All we ever wanted to do was make a record. And we’d say, what’s the matter with us? We’re as good as those guys, we’re as good as those guys, how come we ain’t got a record deal? What’s going on?
    And it’s funny, because the other day we were riding somewhere, like coming down here, and everybody was so excited: there we were, playing on the [radio]. We used to trudge around in