Roll of the Dice: Mr. Jones

You’re about to hear the earliest live recording of Bruce Springsteen performing an original song. At the time of this performance, Bruce was only one week past his eighteenth birthday. (There’s one circulating show from a few weeks earlier, but it’s all covers.)

“Mr. Jones,” played here by Bruce’s original band The Castiles, is generally attributed to the band’s organ player, the late Bob Alfano. However, shortly before his death, Alfano gave a radio interview in which he credited Bruce as his co-writer. If you have nine minutes to spare, listen to that interview below for some additional background.

I’ll warn you that the recording is terrible. It’s impossible to make out most of the lyrics, and the best I’ve been able to do is mostly decipher three consecutive lines (the final verse, in which the singer says goodbye, looks up into an orange cloud-filled sky and witnesses the strangest sight he’s ever seen).

But it’s clearly Bruce singing the lead vocal, and it’s a fascinating historical document of his very beginning days as a musician, performing at a teen club called The Left Foot in Freehold. (You can even hear him ask the audience for requests, a practice that continues to this day.)

How in the world did we manage to get a surviving recording of a group of high school students?

We can thank Father Fred Coleman, who recognized the young band’s potential and decided to capture their performance on reel-to-reel tape for posterity.

Unfortunately, Father Fred was a priest, not a sound engineer, and it shows in the recording. Coleman placed the microphones on the floor, causing the drums to drown out the vocals, so the only times you can clearly hear what Bruce is singing is during the quiet moments of the song.

But again: it’s simply remarkable that this tape exists at all. Listen and marvel.

Mr. Jones
Never recorded or released
First performed: September 30, 1967 (Freehold, NJ)
Last performed: September 30, 1967 (Freehold, NJ)

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