Southside Johnny - Biography

Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes are a rock-soul band from New Jersey, that formed in 1975 around lead singer John Lyon, better known as Southside Johnny, and their first manmager, Steven Van Zandt aka Little Steven, who is also known for acting in the Sopranos TV show and being a member of Bruice Springsteen and the E Street Band for over 40 years.

Back in the early 1970s, Lyon and Van Zandt were aspiring musicians and part of the New Jersey Shore rock and bar band scene, which also included an obscure singer-songwriter named Bruce Springsteen. These 3 became good friends, collaborators and leaders in popularizing their local music, and remain personally and professionally close to this day. While Springsteem and Van Zandt went on to worldwide fame and fortune, Southside Johnny attained a more modest success as the leader of his band, the Asbury Jukes, and continues to perform in small clubs in the Northeast United States and put out an album every few years.

The Jukes are known for their R & B sound which includes a brass section called the Miami Horns, and on any given night can swell up to 16 members on stage. They never achieved great record success likle Bruce Springsteen, but are loved among their fans for their great live shows, and has maintained over the years a dedicated fan base in the United States and Europe. They always close with their best-known songs, "The Fever", given to them by Springsteen back in 1976, "I Don't Want to Go Home" by Steve Van Zandt, known in the early days as Miami Steve, and "Havin' A Party", a Sam Cooke record from 1962 that was one of many 50s and 60s soul and blues tunes performed by the band. The Jukes have a style similar to J. Geils Band, the Blues Brothers, and George Thoroughgood, among others, in keeping this musical tradition alive, but in addition they revere the Stax-Memphis brass sound, carried on by the Miami Horns, a sectionb of the band led by Richie "LaBamba" Rosenberg. They are named after Miami Steve, who arranged their music for the Jukes first three albums, and gained their individual recognition by touring with Bruce Springsteen on his Chicken-Scratch tour of 1976, between the jukes first and second albums, and ocasionally in later years.

The Jukes started out playing a small club called the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, NJ, where they played several times a week as the house band. Southside was the leader of the band, but the man who made things happen was Miami Steve Van Zandt. In 1975, he joined the E Street Band just in time to help finish the album Born To Run; he was the one who arranged the horn section on Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out. Bruce and the E Street Band went on a promotional tour right after Born To Run was released in the summer of 1975, but whenever he got a chance, Steve got together with the Jukes and plotted their future, which was breaking out of the Stone Pony and becoming a national band.

The big break came when Steve got an Epic Records executive to listen to a 4-song demo he had the Jukes record, which resulted in being signed to their first major record deal. Funny, just a year before, Bruce had a virtual gun to his head as he worked non-stop on Born To Run, knowing he might lose his record deal if BTR failed to sell, like his first two albums. Steve and Southside were poor musicians working every night in short-lived bands hustling for a living. Now times were good; Born To Run had critics calling Springsteen the messiah of rock n' roll, and the Jukes were getting ready to cut their first album. It couldn't last.

Bruce had a huge falling out with his manager, Mike Appell, and a judge granted an injunction locking him out of the studio indefinitely, which ended up being a year. He had to go back on tour to scratch out a living while his money was all tied up in a legal battle. The one good thing was Steve had more time to devote to the Jukes.

The new album was called I Don't Want To Go Home, after a song written by Miami Steve. Springsteen helped out by donating 2 songs he had written in 1973, The Fever and You Mean So Much To Me; Ronnie Spector, formerly of the Ronettes ("Be My Baby" and "Baby I Love You", big hits in 1963 produced by her husband Phil Spector) recorded a duet with Southside Johnny on the latter, and joined the Jukes at live shows to perform it. Miami Steve produced and supervised recording sessions at the Record Plant in New York; Springsteen hung out since he couldn't record himself.

The album came out Spring 1976 and the band was scheduled to kick off a tour May 30, 1976 at the Stone Pony. Bruce, Steve, the E Street Band and 280 people attended a wild concert that got a lot of media attention in New Jersey. The Jukes followed it up with a modest tour with dates at clubs like the Bottom Line in New York, the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio and the Savoy in San Francisco, all intimate venues with seating of 500 or less.

The Jukes second album, "This Time It's for Real" was released by Epic Records in Spring 1977. Not only did Miami Steve produce and arrange, but he also wrote 5 songs by himself, and co-wrote 3 more with Bruce Springsteen. The Jukes went on tour in May, playing the same type of venues as in 1976, and several of their concerts were broadcast iove on FM radio stations. DJs like Ed Sciaky in Philadelphia appeared at their shows and help promote their records. They were popular in east coast cities like New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Boston.

The Jukes had an edge over the other bands who played the rock clubs on the east coast, and his name was Bruce Springsteen. This is often the first thing mentioned when you read anything having to do with Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, and though it can be annoying and regarded as hype to see his name always mentioned, in this case every word his true, and here's why.

First of all, Springsteen, Little Steven and Southside Johnny are truly very good friends and have been going way back, and that applies personally and professionally. The relationship has impacted Southside's studio albums and his live performances.

With a career spanning almost 50 years, Bruce Springsteen is worshipped as one of the all-time greats of rock and roll in many ways, one being songwriting. If you look at all of his albums, or at least the first 10 or so, they all say B. Springsteen as the only songwriter on every side; he wrote the words and the music to every one of those great songs by himself. But we learned about 20 years later when Tracks came out, what bootleg collectors had known for years; that Springsteen had hundreds of unreleased original songs that he had never released, perhaps 60 for Darkness On the Edge of Town alone. He only had room for 10 songs, so this meant that The Promise, Sherry Darlin, Drive All Night, Ramrod, Point Blank, Independence Day, The Ties That Bind, and so on all had to wait for The River or Tracks to be heard.

Springsteen gave a number of those sons to other artists to record, but he gave the most to Southside Johnny, 8 on his first 3 records. Several ended up being the Juke's best songs, like The Fever, Hearts of Stone, You Mean So Much To Me, Love On the Wrong Side of Town, Trapped Again and Talk to Me.

The other major thing that he did for them was show up at their gigs without warning, often with members of the E Street Band like Clarence Clemmons. He showed up just often enough to create a real probability that he could show up at the show you were at. Springsteen's favorite venue to drop in over the years was easily the Stone Pony, Axbury Park, NJ. He's still crashing shows there, and not just Southside Johnny's.

On the evening of August 30, 1978, but technically the early morning hours of August 31, 1978 Bruce, Miami Steve, Clarence and Roy Bittan, who had played that evening with the rest of the E Street Band at Richfield Coliseum, Cleveland, Ohio, drove across town to the Agora Club, where the Jukes were performing. It turned out Miami Steve had arranged for five cameras to record 28 minutes of video because the show was being shot for the "Live at the Agora" TV series. Unfortunately, Miami Steve would not allow the 28-minute closing jam to be used in the show, because he did not want the high-profile guests to take attention away from Southside Johnny and the Jukes! Fortunately for the human race, spectacular video of The Fever, I Don't Want To Go Home and We're Having A Party, have all leaked out on the internet, and can now be seen on youtube.

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