As the famous story goes, Southside Johnny Lyon rarely won the Monopoly game, because Bruce Springsteen cheated. The rules weren’t exactly conventional — they had a “Chief McCarthy” go-to-jail-twice card, in honor of the Middletown, N.J., police chief who busted up Springsteen shows in the late ’60s, and they had a destroy-your-opponent’s-property “riot card,” marking the 1970 Asbury Park race riots. To beat his musician/friends Lyon and Steven Van Zandt, who lived in an Asbury Park slum apartment, Springsteen sold his mother’s cookies for Monopoly money. “It was very much a no-holds-barred game of Monopoly,” Lyon recalls.
Almost every rock fan knows what happened next. Springsteen became one of the most famous singers of all time, Van Zandt joined him as lead guitarist in his EStreet Band, and Southside Johnny embarked on a long but more obscure career leading his bluesy big band, the Asbury Jukes, who’ve had nearly 150 rotating members over the years.
“People come and go,” says Lyon, 66, by phone while driving near his New Jersey home. “It’s just the way this band works: If you can get a substitute to do the job, you can get a better-paying gig. Bruce has been a Juke. (New Jersey native) Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Van Zandt — all those guys have played with us.”
Lyon’s career choice was essentially preordained. His father played bass in bands of his own; his mother went into labor with him, the veteran bandleader once said, at “some seedy New Jersey club.” His parents had a big record collection and played blues and jazz around the house. Lyon grew up with a taste for Billie Holiday and T-Bone Walker and a distaste for pop music. By 1974, he and Van Zandt founded the Jukes, living together in their cheap apartment and scrounging for gigs around Asbury Park. The next year, with Lyon’s support, Van Zandt departed to permanently join their friend Springsteen, who was on the brink of putting out his breakthrough album, “Born to Run.”
“Bruce needed someone he could rely on,” Lyon recalls. “A lot of sharks came swimming around, and he needed his own shark, and that was Steve Van Zandt.”
At first, Lyon had successes of his own — the Jukes signed to major label Epic Records, then put out a strong debut, 1976’s “I Don’t Want to Go Home.” Their specialty was bar-band party music, containing a happy horn section to offset the lonely blues lyrics (as in “I Don’t Want to Go Home,” “Broke Down Piece of Man” and Springsteen’s “The Fever”). The Jukes managed one classic rock album, “Hearts of Stone,” which provided Lyon with signature hits such as “Talk to Me” and “Trapped Again,” but they never sold many records, and Epic dropped them by the late ’70s.
The Jukes’ record executives at the time, Ron Alexenburg and the late Steve Popovich, also signed the Jacksons, Cheap Trick, Boston and Meat Loaf. Lyon never met Michael Jackson, but he knew the others. “We were all kind of in the same boat — until they started selling millions of records, and we didn’t sell millions of records,” Lyon says.
The Jukes soldiered on, recording albums regularly but mostly building their reputation (and making money) off live gigs. Although well-known for his enthusiastic stage patter, Lyon is an introvert who avoids crowds and hobnobbing.
“I knew that early on. I wasn’t a great hanger-outer,” he says. “It’s only when I’m on stage — I’m in control there — (that) I like being in the crowd. When I’m alone, I like to think, I like to read, I don’t like to be bothered with a lot of extraneous stuff.”
By phone, Lyon is jolly and humorous. He exults in telling war stories, like the one about how he and Van Zandt had a good day at Monmouth Racetrack in the Jukes’ early days and used the money (in addition to borrowing some) to make their first album. He says the Jukes’ next studio album, the first in five years, should come out this summer. Lyon won’t describe the album. “You write these things, and you have ’em in your mind, and the band gets ’em, and they go, ‘How about this? How about that?’ And they change ’em,” he says.
“I don’t want to give my hand away. But it’s soul music. I can say that.”
Twitter @chitribent
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Arcada Theatre, 105 E. Main St., St. Charles
Tickets: $30-$60; 630-962-7000 or oshows.com
