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Authors: Peter Ames Carlin
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the Freehold Police Department had already concluded that the stream of drugs flowing into town, and the enthusiastic consumption of same by young Freeholders, had grown to disturbing proportions. They weren’t exactly wrong. Marijuana had been remarkably easy to find since the summer of 1967, assuming you knew the right people. By 1968, those same people could also be relied upon to supply LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, amphetamines, downers, cocaine, DMT, crystal meth, heroin—the whole candy store. Naturally, the question of who was doing which drugs became a hot topic among the younger set. When some group of stoners started wearing necklaces strung with small, colorful discs (distributed originally as part of a cereal box game), you didn’t have to look further than a kid’s neck to figure out his or her drug of choice: green stood for grass, yellow was LSD, red for speed freaks, and so on. All good fun for the devil-may-care youth of Freehold until it turned out that one of their number was either a narcotics officer or someone yearning tobecome one. Once the cops knew the secret, the necklaces did the rest of their work for them. It took about a week for them to put together the names, addresses, and drugs of choice.
The police cars rolled at four in the morning. They hit virtually every neighborhood in town, the officers pounding on family doors in the middle of the night, flashing their warrants, conducting their searches, collecting what they already knew they would find, and hauling the young lawbreakers off to jail. By the time the sun rose, the entire town was scandalized. “They were all living with their mommies and daddies, and the police came and took them out of their mommies’ and daddies’ houses!” Bruce recalls with mock horror. “That’s in the middle of the night ! Who had ever heard of such a thing? There had been no busts before! That word, the act itself, was unknown . People were shocked! Here in River City? ” The drama made a big impact on the Castiles, largely because Vinny Maniello, Paul Popkin, and Curt Fluhr got nabbed in the dragnet. “All I remember is that I woke up one morning and half the guys were gone,” Bruce says. “George and I were on the outside and said, ‘Well, this seems like a good moment to call it a day.’”
A day or two later, Bruce happened upon John Graham and Mike Burke, a pair of slightly younger musicians (they were sixteen or seventeen) from New Shrewsbury. Just finishing an unsatisfying run with a blues-and-Stones cover band called Something Blue, the bassist and drummer were on the hunt for a singer-guitarist when they overheard Bruce talking about the big drug bust in Freehold. The three musicians chatted for a while, and when they got to their mutual love for Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience—the best of the psychedelic blues bands, and both three-piece groups— and with a replacement band needed for the Castiles’ gig at the Le Teendezvous club on August 10, it all clicked together. “I was ready to power trio, you know,” Bruce says. “I think we rehearsed a night or two and played that weekend. And then there was no looking back.”
Calling themselves Earth (shortened from the original the Earth Band), the trio—which performed as a quartet whenever the Castiles’ gifted organist Bob Alfano hauled his Hammond to a show—built a repertoire from the most popular works of Cream, Hendrix, Traffic, the Yardbirds, and Steppenwolf, whose just-released single “Born to Be Wild” became one of Earth’s big set closers. Specializing in such jam-heavy songsmade it easy to play long shows, particularly given Bruce’s increasingly dynamic guitar work. Soon a pair of aspiring young managers named Fran Duffy and Rick Spachner convinced Bruce, Burke, and Graham to let them guide their nascent career and booked an assortment of shows to keep the band busy through the fall.
At the same time, Bruce, who still felt out of place in academic
The police cars rolled at four in the morning. They hit virtually every neighborhood in town, the officers pounding on family doors in the middle of the night, flashing their warrants, conducting their searches, collecting what they already knew they would find, and hauling the young lawbreakers off to jail. By the time the sun rose, the entire town was scandalized. “They were all living with their mommies and daddies, and the police came and took them out of their mommies’ and daddies’ houses!” Bruce recalls with mock horror. “That’s in the middle of the night ! Who had ever heard of such a thing? There had been no busts before! That word, the act itself, was unknown . People were shocked! Here in River City? ” The drama made a big impact on the Castiles, largely because Vinny Maniello, Paul Popkin, and Curt Fluhr got nabbed in the dragnet. “All I remember is that I woke up one morning and half the guys were gone,” Bruce says. “George and I were on the outside and said, ‘Well, this seems like a good moment to call it a day.’”
A day or two later, Bruce happened upon John Graham and Mike Burke, a pair of slightly younger musicians (they were sixteen or seventeen) from New Shrewsbury. Just finishing an unsatisfying run with a blues-and-Stones cover band called Something Blue, the bassist and drummer were on the hunt for a singer-guitarist when they overheard Bruce talking about the big drug bust in Freehold. The three musicians chatted for a while, and when they got to their mutual love for Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience—the best of the psychedelic blues bands, and both three-piece groups— and with a replacement band needed for the Castiles’ gig at the Le Teendezvous club on August 10, it all clicked together. “I was ready to power trio, you know,” Bruce says. “I think we rehearsed a night or two and played that weekend. And then there was no looking back.”
Calling themselves Earth (shortened from the original the Earth Band), the trio—which performed as a quartet whenever the Castiles’ gifted organist Bob Alfano hauled his Hammond to a show—built a repertoire from the most popular works of Cream, Hendrix, Traffic, the Yardbirds, and Steppenwolf, whose just-released single “Born to Be Wild” became one of Earth’s big set closers. Specializing in such jam-heavy songsmade it easy to play long shows, particularly given Bruce’s increasingly dynamic guitar work. Soon a pair of aspiring young managers named Fran Duffy and Rick Spachner convinced Bruce, Burke, and Graham to let them guide their nascent career and booked an assortment of shows to keep the band busy through the fall.
At the same time, Bruce, who still felt out of place in academic
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