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Bruce Springsteen, Steel Mill and the swim club melee
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In 2012, concert organizers at the Hard Rock Calling Festival in London infamously pulled the plug on Bruce Springsteen and Sir Paul McCartney after the pair exceeded a 10:30 p.m. noise curfew.
The incident forced Springsteen and the former Beatle to leave the stage in silence, without thanking the crowd, after they performed together on Fab Four hits "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Twist and Shout."
The London crowd may have been disgruntled, wet and confused, but they left Hyde Park without incident.
Such was not the case in September 1970, when authorities pulled the plug on a concert by Springsteen and his band, Steel Mill, at the old Clearwater Swim Club, on Route 36 in Middletown. The resulting melee, which involved band members, mostly teen-age fans, and Middletown police, became the stuff of Jersey Shore legend.
"I didn't know at the time they had pulled the plug," said concert promoter and former Asbury Juke Tony Pallagrosi, who was 16 when he attended the Clearwater show with his girlfriend and another couple.
"The power had stopped, a lot of stuff was going on around the stage, and the police were appearing," Pallagrosi remembered. "All of a sudden, some of the PA speakers that were on the stage suddenly fell off the stage onto police…I figured, we've got to get out of here. We wrapped ourselves in our Indian blankets and took off through the woods."
In June, Steel Mill, which included Springsteen, then 20, drummer Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez, keyboard player Danny Federici, Steve Van Zandt on bass and vocalist Robbin Thompson, had played a strong set at the swim club to a couple of thousand enthusiastic fans.
Swim club owner Richard Kleva, a Middletown football coach who had purchased the Clearwater in partnership with his brother-in-law, decided to book Steel Mill again. The band was at the time the most popular on the Shore, routinely drawing large crowds and rave reviews.
Having them back at the swim club seemed a no-brainer to Kleva and his partner. The Sept. 11, 1970, show was billed as an end of summer extravaganza, with Jeannie Clark, Sid's Farm and Task opening for Steel Mill. Admission was only $2.50. Dave "Hazy" Hazlett filled in for Lopez on drums. Mad Dog was facing some legal problems in Virginia at the time.
It was a warm late summer day. The place was packed with young Steel Mill fans. There was only one potential problem: the curfew.
After the June concert ran until midnight, leading to numerous complaints from neighbors, Kleva agreed to end the September show at 10 p.m. Middletown Police Chief Joseph McCarthy had about a dozen officers at the show, the same number as at the June concert.
Estimates of the crowd at the show ranged from 2,000 to 3,000. Though no alcohol was available at the club, kids snuck into the surrounding woods to get drunk or get high.
Steel Mill took the stage a bit after 8 p.m. Pallagrosi, who had been to Woodstock and more recently seen The Rolling Stones perform in Philadelphia, was surprised at his reaction.
"I remember that, even though they didn't have the great songs the Rolling Stones had, and they didn't have the presence that the Rolling Stones had, I couldn't help but think that they were every bit as good as The Rolling Stones," he said. "There was something incredibly charismatic and incredibly powerful about what they were doing."
Steel Mill was rolling through their set, and headed into their closer, which was, ironically, "He's Guilty (Send This Boy to Jail)", when the clock struck 10. The band kept playing. The cops did not look pleased.
Kleva, fearing a problem, pulled the plug. The crowd yelled, demanding that the music go back on. A Steel Mill roadie plugged the amps back in. The band played on. The cops jumped onto the stage. The amps were unplugged again, but in the midst of the uproar, Springsteen briefly kept singing, "He's guilty! He's guilty! Send that boy to jail!" as the crowd sang along.
Then bedlam ensued. An amplifier fell on Chief McCarthy, injuring him. Witnesses said a police officer jabbed Springsteen in the ribs with a nightstick, while others chased Danny Federici. Like Pallagrosi, thousands of concertgoers tried to flee at once, knocking down a chain-link fence to escape the club. Some of the band members hid beneath the stage.
When it was all over, six police officers had been injured and 21 people had been arrested on assault and narcotics charges. A warrant was issued for Federici's arrest because police believed he had purposely knocked the amplifiers onto Chief McCarthy. Federici fled the scene by hiding under a blanket in the rear of a car driven by a Steel Mill roadie, according to Peter Ames Carlin's account of the concert in his 2012 book, "Bruce."
His disappearance earned him the moniker he would carry until he died in 2008: "Phantom."
The swim club melee caused an uproar in town at a time when the divide between adults and the younger generation was at its highest. More than 4,500 people signed petitions supporting the police. A Middletown committee member claimed that someone — perhaps a band member — had started a chant of "Kill the pigs!" that was taken up by the crowd.
But a handful of teenagers attended a Middletown meeting to complain that they were often harassed and stopped by police because they had long hair or dressed in hippie garb. The American Civil Liberties Union launched an investigation into the police department's conduct.
At a Steel Mill show in October 1970 at Monmouth College, Springsteen pulled a bunch of people up onstage during his song. "Resurrection," allowing the fugitive Federici to slip out the back and avoid arrest again. The band figured the police would not risk stopping the show in the middle to arrest Federici, thus risking another disturbance.
Eventually tensions cooled. Federici turned himself in, but nothing came of the charges. Kleva held no more concerts at Clearwater and eventually sold the swim club. He went to work at Brookdale Community College and now is retired, living in Pennsylvania.
Steel Mill broke up in 1971.
Chief McCarthy, who retired in 1989, said in a 1999 interview with The Asbury Park Press that he has no regrets about what his officers did that night.
"Wouldn't do anything a damn bit different," McCarthy said in a 1999 interview with The Asbury Park Press. "There were drugs and fighting going on — a real bad scene. You have to take a stand against these things."
But McCarthy told the Press that Springsteen "turned out OK."
"I know he's done a lot of good things, a lot of good work with charities and all. After all, isn't that what it's all about?"
