Cover Me: Quarter to Three

“Man, when I´d wake up in the middle of the night, I´d put that record on and drive everybody in the house fucking nuts. I’d just wake up and slam that thing on, man, and turn it on 10, and shit!‘”  –Bruce Springsteen, October 29, 1976

Of the more than a thousand songs Bruce Springsteen is known to have covered on stage, few loom larger than Gary U.S. Bonds’ “Quarter to Three.”

Both the song and its original artist rank high among Bruce’s influences, attested to by the almost 300 times “Quarter to Three” has appeared in his set lists over the years.

Musically, “Quarter to Three” is an irresistible dance number. Lyrically, it’s filled with strange references to characters like Daddy G and the Church Street Five.

Except they weren’t really characters.

The Church Street Five was the house band for Legrand Records, which happened to be Gary U.S. Bonds’ record label, and their standout performer was a saxophonist named Gene Barge… also known as “Daddy G.”

In 1960, The Church Street Five recorded an instrumental called “A Night With Daddy G” that featured their star saxophonist and a very familiar melody.

The following year, Bonds (or perhaps his manager, accounts vary) wrote lyrics to accompany the instrumental, assembled Daddy G and the Church Street Five, and recorded “Quarter to Three.” (Now you know why Bonds yells “Blow, Daddy!”)

“Quarter to Three” was an instant hit, topping the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in the summer of 1961, driven in part by the “Louie Louie” effect of Bonds’ indecipherable patter at the beginning of the track.

(Teenagers at the time were certain that Bonds was shouting something obscene which I will not reprint here. “Absolutely not,” said Bonds when questioned about it in a 1994 interview.  “I mean, my mother was at the recording session where we did `Quarter to Three.’ Do you think I would say something like that in front of my mother?”)

Rolling Stone included “Quarter to Three” on its “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll” list. That honor was well-earned, because the influence of Bonds’ hit was felt almost immediately, starting with Dion’s immortal “Runaround Sue,” released only a few months later…

…and continues through the present day.

“Quarter to Three” first surfaced in Bruce’s set lists very early in his career, and it was a reliable crowd-pleaser from the start. In fact, Bruce’s very first known performance brought the house down… or at least the stage.

Bruce debuted “Quarter to Three” as his final encore at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall on October 4, 1976. It wasn’t supposed to be the last song, but it ended up that way when the stage collapsed(!) mid-song.

“The first two rows of seats next to us just disappeared,” a fan told Brucebase, and “the left side of the stage and first couple of rows fell about six feet. A couple of monitors fell in where the people were seated but it didn’t appear that anyone got hurt. The encore was abruptly ended, however.”

You can hear that abrupt ending in the bootleg recording below.

Fast forward to the Born to Run Tour a year later at Hammersmith Odeon (after Bruce and the band had performed the song dozens of times), and “Quarter to Three” was honed to a tight, frenetic showpiece, with The Big Man proving a suitable Daddy G stand-in.

Bruce and the E Street Band performed “Quarter to Three” more than 75 times in concert before Bruce and Bonds ever met in person. That moment finally came in October 1976, when Bruce caught Bonds’ show at a club called The Hanger on the Jersey shore.

“The owner of the club came over to me during the show and mentioned that Bruce Springsteen was in the audience and wanted to come up and play,” Bonds recalled in an interview. “Bruce who? I didn’t recognize the name! But the guys in my band did, so I said OK. When I introduced him the place went crazy… and I’m saying to myself, ‘gee, what on earth is happening here’?”

One of the songs Bruce and Bonds performed that night was the song Bruce used to wake his family with in the middle of the night, and the following week Bruce asked Gary to reciprocate at the E Street Band’s Palladium show. Their duet on “Quarter to Three”–captured below on a bootleg tape–marked their very first performance together on an E Street stage.

Bruce continued performing “Quarter to Three” throughout the Darkness Tour, accompanied by stage antics that went increasingly over the top. Proclaiming himself “a prisoner of rock and roll,” he was more possessed than imprisoned by it.

On the eve of his 30th birthday, Bruce rocked himself to faux exhaustion in one of his most famous filmed performances (soon to be released as an official concert film).

That legendary M.U.S.E. performance marked the end of regular “Quarter to Three” appearances in Bruce’s set lists, but both it and Bonds himself have made a handful of cameo appearances with Bruce over the years since, including this one from the end of the Rising Tour in 2003.

Bonds, of course, plays his greatest hit regularly during his own shows.

Daddy G is still around, too. Besides his long and influential career on the Chicago R&B scene, Barge has appeared on the big screen in action films like Code of Silence with Chuck Norris, Under Siege with Steven Seagal, and The Fugitive with Harrison Ford.

Now 95 years old, Daddy G still performs from time to time, and when he does, he’s almost guaranteed to play his signature song, the one that eventually led to some of Bruce’s most exciting on-stage moments: “A Night with Daddy G.”

Quarter to Three
First performed: October 4, 1974 (New York City, NY)
Last performed: May 17, 2014 (Uncasville, CT)