The Bruce Springsteen Band had a year-long run from the summer of ’71 to the summer of ’72, but for a while, it didn’t look like they were going to make it past the six-month mark.<\/p>\n
At the same time Bruce was forming and performing with his eponymous band, he was falling “in obsession” (as he put it in Born to Run<\/em>) with a “drug-taking, hell-raising wild child who played by nobody’s rules.” (If you saw Springsteen on Broadway,\u00a0<\/em>this was the girlfriend who convinced agents to come see Bruce play and then slept with them.)<\/p>\n Bruce found out about his girlfriend’s infidelities when her roommate ratted her out, and he soon found himself romantically involved with the roommate. Given the circumstances, that wasn’t destined to work out, either.<\/p>\n By the end of the year, Bruce couldn’t take it anymore. As he revealed in\u00a0Western Stars<\/em>, “I had a gal in New Jersey who broke my heart, ripped it to shreds, trampled on it, and sent it to me COD in a paper bag. So I was out of there on the first ride west, no looking back.”<\/p>\n What he didn’t say is that he left his band in the lurch.<\/p>\n Finding themselves without a frontman, Steve Van Zandt (who curiously never mentions this episode at all in his Unrequired Infatuations<\/em> autobiography) recruited Southside Johnny to take Bruce’s place and reclaimed the name of the previous group that most of the band had been members of. Under the name The Sundance Blues Band, the Bruce Springsteen Band soldiered on without Bruce.<\/p>\n For a month.<\/p>\n Because as Bruce admits, “I was going to build a new life in California, three thousand miles away from the pain. But it didn\u2019t take long before my luck ran out and my money ran out. And it just wasn\u2019t gonna happen.”<\/p>\n So Bruce came home to New Jersey, and for a few nights he sat in with the band he’d been the leader of only weeks before. On his first night back with the band, Bruce and the Sundance Blues Band played The Captain’s Garter in Neptune, just outside of Asbury Park. Southside and Steve provided lead vocals for much of the night, while Bruce hung back on rhythm guitar. But when it came time to play Walter Brown’s “Confessin’ the Blues,” Bruce stepped up to the microphone and resumed his former position with the band.<\/p>\n With “Confessin’ the Blues,” the Sundance Blues Band was living up to their name. The song dates back to 1941, when Brown recorded it with the Jay McShann Band.<\/p>\n