Fresh from a performance at Woodstock that she considered below her usual standards, Janis Joplin headed to Asbury Park for two shows at Convention Hall.
She was fronting her new group, the Kozmic Blues Band, and only weeks from releasing her first album with the band, "I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again, Mama!" Joplin took the stage in Asbury Park in all her late 1960s glory, wild hair flying and beaded necklaces hanging almost to her waist. Electric in concert, with a powerful, original voice, Joplin was deeply troubled, shooting heroin and drinking heavily at the time.
Between shows at Convention Hall, she wandered outside to check out the boardwalk, but apparently got distracted by some of the amusement rides. Monmouth Beach resident Glen Partusch, who was working the show at the time, said he had to corral Joplin's manager and bring him out to the boardwalk to get the singer to return for the second show.
"They had to drag her off the Tilt-a-Whirl to get her back on stage," Partusch said.
Once back inside, she was to have a memorable encounter with a young, aspiring musician from the Jersey Shore.
Bruce Springsteen was only 19 on Aug. 23, 1969, but he already was relatively famous at the Shore.
His band, Child, was playing regularly at venues like Asbury Park's Student Prince, Le Teendevous in Shrewsbury and the Pandomonium Club on Route 35 in Ocean Township, right down the street from the Challenger East surfboard factory, owned by the band's manager, Carl "Tinker" West.
The group, which also included Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez on drums, Vinnie Roslin on bass, and Danny Federici on keyboards, played mostly Springsteen originals, plus a few covers. They'd received rave reviews at a big outdoor festival at the then-Monmouth College and garnered similar praise during a gig down in Richmond, Va.
West was carefully guiding their career, believing they were headed for big things. He supervised their all-day rehearsals at the surfboard factory, located off Sunset Avenue.
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Lopez remembers that the band was rehearsing at the surfboard factory, along with blues harmonica player James Cotton, who was opening Joplin's show at Convention Hall. Cotton invited the band members to attend the show as his guests, and to watch from backstage.
But the band had to rehearse first. They had a gig coming up at a Sea Bright club.
"We were rehearsing so we didn't get down there until she was doing her encore," Lopez said. "We didn't see the whole show." The members of Child and their manager, West, went backstage.
When they did get to Convention Hall, Joplin quickly spied a long-haired Bruce Springsteen watching her perform. When she got offstage at the end of her set, Joplin made a beeline for Springsteen, Lopez said.
"She grabbed Bruce and wrapped her leg around him," Lopez said. "She was giving him that look, like, 'Where have you been all my life?' " But her manager urged Joplin to go back out for an encore.
When she did, a wild-eyed, startled Springsteen quickly made his escape, racing out through a fire door and disappearing onto the nighttime boardwalk.
This did not please Joplin, who came offstage searching for the young singer. Instead she found only Lopez, Roslin and West.
"She said, 'Which way did he go?' " Lopez said. "We just pointed and said, 'He went thataway.' " It was like a cartoon."
In a recounting of the tale that appears in "Bruce," his 2012 biography of Springsteen, author Peter Ames Carlin asked The Boss about Janis Joplin. Springsteen tried to downplay the encounter.
"Some whispering attention was paid, I guess," Bruce recalls in the Carlin book. "I was 19, had hair to my shoulders, was a big local star and carried myself like that."
Springsteen, of course, would go on to become the superstar West always thought he'd be.
Joplin, a profound influence on many modern singers, was a trailblazer who opened opportunities in music, particularly rock 'n'roll, for generations of female performers who followed. But she would die young, at 27, of a heroin overdose, in October 1970, just 16 days after the death of another legend, guitar god Jimi Hendrix.
Jean Mikle: 732-643-4050, jmikle@app.com
