Farewell from Asbury Park, N.J.

Jan. 3, 2006 | It would be tough to imagine an unlikelier vessel for Asbury Park's hard-rocking musical history than 24-year-old Carrie Potter. Born in Waco, Texas, Carrie was weaned on the music of John Denver and Simon & Garfunkel. "I was told that I needed to listen to good quality, moral music," she said recently by phone. Carrie knew the name Bruce Springsteen only "as part of my family's past" from way back in the late 1960s, when her grandfather Tom Potter and his then-wife Margaret had run an all-ages club in Asbury Park, N.J., called the Upstage.

Carrie wasn't even born until 1981, 10 years after the Potters had split up and Tom had left New Jersey for Florida in the wake of Asbury Park's race riots. He lived there, and then near Carrie's family in Texas, until his death from a heart attack when his granddaughter was in the 9th grade. His stories had sounded like big-fish family lore to her. "It was always like, 'Hey, my grandpa knew Bruce Springsteen. He played at his club,'" she said. "But you don't think anybody else really cares."

It wasn't until 2002, when she learned that the old Upstage building was still standing and for sale that Carrie first traveled north to the rundown shore town of Asbury Park. She talked her way into the abandoned club and found its psychedelic glory almost untouched after 35 years. It was then that she first encountered people who remembered her grandfather, his wife, their club, and how it had served as a refuge from the explosive politics of a country in crisis, and as an incubator for a music scene that was about to explode just as fiercely.

As Carrie began to get an inkling of what the Upstage had meant to the musical and social history of Asbury Park, she decided to try to reclaim it somehow. Allied with shore denizens Gary Wien and David Mieras, she attempted to get funding to buy the building and turn it into a rock museum that would preserve Asbury's fast-crumbling music history.

But the group could not get enough money together, and in 2004 the three-story building at 700 Cookman Avenue was purchased by New Jersey couple Irwin and Shiela Strauss for $1 million. "[Carrie and her partners] had the same opportunity to buy it as anyone else," said Ron Schrader, the agent who sold the building, adding, "I would have loved to see that place become a rock 'n' roll museum ... but nine out of 10 people would rather make a dollar than preserve something that's musically historical." After three decades in the economic dumps, Asbury Park is in the midst of another round of redevelopment. And while it may be the city's only chance at escaping poverty, it also means the demise of its architecture, its monuments, its blue-collar identity. In early 2006, the Strausses are reportedly scheduled to demolish the remains of the Upstage to build condominiums. Attempts to reach the couple for this story were unsuccessful.

But just because Carrie's museum effort fell through doesn't mean she's done. Now the mother of a 10-month-old son, and no longer working with Mieras and Wien, she said she still hopes a miracle will save the building. But even if it doesn't, she is putting together a book of some of the 1,200 photos she inherited from her grandfather. The pictures, taken in the heyday of Tom and Margaret Potter's Upstage, from 1968-70, show Afros and hippie hair, burning buildings and riot squads, and teenage musicians who were on the verge of making Asbury Park immortal. Frolicking and strutting through Carrie's photos like bean-thin, big-haired puppies with guitars are kids like Springsteen, Garry Tallent, Steven Van Zandt, David Sancious, Danny Federici, Vini "Maddog" Lopez, Rick DeSarno, "Big Bad" Bobby Williams, Bill Chinnock and John "Southside Johnny" Lyon.

Few of Carrie's photos have been published before, but she hoped that as some of them become available, as they do in Salon today, they will jog the memories of those who recall what they were feeling and thinking when they were captured by her grandfather's camera in images that, to her 24-year-old eyes, "show the essence of what it was to be young back then -- like a movie, except it was all real every day for three years."

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Asbury Park is most famous as a stretch of sand across which have loped beach-bum boy prophets like Stephen Crane, Count Basie and Springsteen. But that wasn't its intended legacy.

The city was founded in 1870 by James Bradley, a devout Methodist brush manufacturer who, according to Daniel Wolff's history "4th of July, Asbury Park," created the community as a buffer between the religious retreat of Ocean Grove to the south and the sinful excesses of Long Branch to the north. Bradley's Asbury Park was supposed to be a middle ground: a Methodist resort and pleasure palace for the pious.

The piety didn't last long in the face of sand and sun, and Asbury Park's prosperity was in constant flux thanks to corrupt government and the ugly racial politics of the post-Civil War north. Through its history, the town's white tourist economy relied on a population of minority laborers who lived west of town: blacks, Jews, Germans and Italians. What Wolff dubs the "shadow city" was incorporated into Asbury Park in 1906, and over time, many of its immigrant populations were absorbed into the merchant class. Except, that is, for the black population. Segregation was the rule in Asbury Park through the first half of the 20th century, with blacks barred from sections of the boardwalk and forced to swim at the "mud hole" portion of the beach where the sewage emptied into the sea. In the 1920s, the Klan maintained a presence and attempted lynchings were not uncommon. The West Side was allowed to steadily rot. By the 1960s, poverty rates throughout the town were soaring and anger was high.

But by then, even the city's tourism had dropped off, leaving Asbury Park a nostalgia trip of a beach town, with calliopes, fortune-tellers and carousels lining its beat-up boardwalk. What Asbury Park did have in the mid-'60s was bars. "In 1966, there was a club on every corner of Asbury Park," remembered drummer Vini Lopez, who was 17 that year. "And there was a band in every club."

By phone, historian Wolff said, "The Asbury Park music scene partly happened because the city was in decline ... You could have boys who lived in an old surfboard factory where they could afford rent, hang out, and learn their craft." The boys who would wind up in that old surfboard factory included Springsteen, who turned 18 in 1967. But he wasn't alone. The city was populated with kids trying to get gigs in bars they were still too young to drink in.

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