Gary U.S. Bonds Interview: Still Partyin’ After 6 Decades
Bruce Springsteen Jumpstarted the Classic Rocker’s Career
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In the early 1960’s, Gary U.S. Bonds burst onto the scene with party hits like “New Orleans,” “Quarter to Three” and “School’s Out.” This was the Norfolk Sound, born at that Virginia port city’s Legrand Records, an independent label owned by aspiring calypso singer Frank Guida.
Guida, frustrated by his tiny label’s poor distribution network, cooked up a scheme to generate airplay for Bonds’ first record. When he sent copies of “New Orleans” to local disk jockeys, Guida marked the envelopes “By U.S. Bonds,” hoping the tune would be mistaken for a public service announcement and gain some airplay. The ploy helped make “New Orleans” a Top 10 hit.
The ruse inspired the title of Bonds’ autobiography, By U.S. Bonds: That’s My Story, published in 2013.
The book recounts Bonds’ early musical partnership with saxophonist Gene Barge. A high school teacher, Barge reinvented himself as Daddy G, front man of Legrand’s house band, the Church Street Five. Bonds and Daddy G worked together on a string of early hits that featured a rough and raucous sound; no silky doo wop harmonies of the era here.
Despite Bonds’ mercurial success, the hits dried up after the Beatles and other members of the British Invasion took over the charts. Bonds soldiered on, playing oldies shows on what he called the “Holiday Inn circuit.” Then one night in 1976, Bruce Springsteen stopped in unannounced at a Bonds show in Hazlet, New Jersey. Bonds writes that he knew nothing about the guitarist who’d asked to join him on stage.
Dead serious, I brought him up by asking the crowd to welcome “a local talent,” as if he had just won a high school singing competition. My band members knew who he was as did the crowd, and except for me, he did not need an introduction. I was also unaware that Bruce had been doing “Quarter to Three” during many of his encores. We found him a guitar and we shared a microphone and did 40 minutes of my biggest hits. He was familiar with them all.
Bonds recounts how Springsteen and the E Street Band’s Steven Van Zandt produced Dedication, his 1981 comeback LP that featured the hit “This Little Girl.” Members of the E Street Band, including saxophonist Clarence Clemons, performed on the album. A second album produced by Springsteen and Van Zandt, On the Line, followed and Bonds has not looked back, continuing to record and perform his trademark party music.
We talked with Bonds in 2013 about the evolution of his house rocker sound over five decades.
How would you describe the Norfolk Sound?
I don’t know how to describe it. There was no big plan that we had in recording. You’ve got to realize that we were in Norfolk, Virginia, we weren’t in Chicago or New York or LA. So we didn’t know how people recorded. We’d never been out of that town. We didn’t know how the big guys did it. We were just doing what we had to do to make it sound right to us.
We’d just sit around and try to create what we thought was good and luckily we’d come up with something that a lot of other people liked.
It sounded like a house party or a low down club.
Basically that’s what we knew so that’s what we did. To tell you the truth, I had about a quart of bourbon hidden in the men’s room. That was my vocal booth. So I used that to my advantage. And I’d share every now and then.
It was really a party. We were having a party. Everything we did involved alcohol.
How did those recordings come together?
Daddy G and I would write some lyrics down when we had time available. We’d hang out at a place called the Blue Nile, which was our favorite watering hole near where we lived. So we’d hang there and write lyrics, sitting at the bar in one of the booths. And we’d go into the studio. Most of the time we went in at night. Sometime after six o’clock, we’d go into the studio and record up ‘till early in the morning. There were no charts. Most of the older guys worked. That’s why we went in late because we’d wait until they got off of work.
And it lasted all night until the guys got tired and had to go home or we ran out of beer, one or the other. And that was it. As far as charts, we’d just say, “Hey, it goes like this.” And Daddy G would whip a couple of notes around and everybody would pick up on it and then we’d just start singing.
Tell me about your working relationship with Daddy G.
Yeah, we would sit up at the Blue Nile and just laugh at each other and share different anecdotes and whatever to make a song. He was a high school teacher in Suffolk and I’d just gotten out of school . . . when I did go. And that was it. He had a lot of stories, being a school teacher. And that’s why we got a lot of “School Is Out” and “School Is In” and “No More Homework” and all that stuff involved because that’s what he was doing at the time. And it’s what I hated so it worked out well for us as a team.
Tell me about the conversations you and Bruce had about what you wanted the new songs to sound like.
He had started recording the “Dedication” album himself. And that’s when he called me and he said, “Bonds, I’ve got this song man, it sounds so much like you, man. You should come in and do it because this sounds exactly like your kind of stuff. So I went down to the studio and I listened and I said, “Yeah, that’s kinda it all right.” Only sounding better but the whole feel and everything was there and that was the first thing we recorded together. When he asked me, he said, “You should do this.” I said, “OK, let’s go.”
And we recorded that one and that came out great and that night he said, “You know man, we should do more, we should do more stuff. Let me grab some more stuff and we’ll do it.”
Did Bruce and Steven ask you how those Legrand sessions were done?
Both of them were interested in how we did it down there. We talked about it but we didn’t try to implement it into any of the songs. Recording is too good now to try and do what we did back then. It would just be ridiculous.
For example, the piano and upright bass used the same mic. The back of the piano was miked and then he would stand around the back of the piano and play bass. The horn players and Daddy G and the background were all on the same mic with me. It was weird like that. The guitar and whatever else, percussion or anything that we had, basically everybody shared a mic.
So you were singing live with the band, there was no overdubbing the track?
No, it was live all the way except when I had to do the double voice. Then I’d do that on the other track by myself. There were only two tracks, you know.
How did Bruce and Steven produce you? How did they help you with the songs?
Most of the time, we had the E Street Band. Bruce and Steven would go in and just rehearse them. And I would come in a little earlier just to see how it goes and Bruce would sing it and I’d go, “OK Bruce, shut up, I got it now” [laughs]. And then I would do it my way. He loved that. And that was it.
You put your own stamp on it.
Oh yeah, because it was easy for me. I feel what I feel and I think I know what he wants a lot of the times because I never once had him say, “No, that’s not right.” So that’s cool, it was, “Man, you blasted that one.”
Were there any similarities between Daddy G’s band and the E Street Band?
Clarence was down there from Virginia. He lived about four miles from me. We kind of grew up on the same kind of music. And then Bruce and his boys at one point tried to emulate what I was doing. They were trying to get the fun part of it and they seemed to have conquered that pretty well. And it worked out good. It was a nice, fun atmosphere. Party time, let’s go.
Frank Mastropolo is the author of the 200 Greatest Rock Songs series and Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock Music Forever.
