Still Rockin’: The Sound of the Shore

A brotherhood of early Springsteen-era musicians continues to attract crowds to the Jersey Shore club scene.

Brothers in Arms: From left, Billy Walton, Billy Hector, Paul Whistler, Tony Amato, Vini Lopez, Lance Larson and Bobby Bandieri.
Photo by Frank Veronsky

There is a moment preserved on YouTube from Bon Jovi’s 2012 Bamboozle performance in Asbury Park when the music stops, and the charismatic front man, looking far younger than his then 50 years, gathers the audience up for a nostalgia trip.

“I’ve got a lot of memories coming back to me,” begins Jon Bon Jovi. “In 1979, all the legends were here.” He proceeds to name Lance Larson and the Lord Gunner Band. “There was nobody bigger,” he says, pausing to pay respects to Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny Lyon for fear that if he doesn’t, “Jesus will strike me dead in New Jersey.”

What Bon Jovi neglected to mention in that Bamboozle reverie is that few of the legends ever left. Springsteen, Southside and Bon Jovi himself, sure; through grit and great songwriting, musicianship and kismet, they moved on to far wider audiences than the Jersey Shore could offer.

But their earliest bandmates? They played on—and continue to play. Often in those same clubs. Check the summer listings at more than a dozen clubs from Sandy Hook to Cape May, and you’ll find their names are a constant presence.

Some laughingly call themselves the brotherhood—but their commitment to music is no joke. When it comes to gigging, these guys bring their A games. Because that, they say, is what you have to do when you play the Jersey Shore.

“It doesn’t matter who the players are, whether they’re 16 or 60. There’s an expectation of high-quality music that’s still here,” says Tim McLoone, a local legend for his philanthropy and business acumen as well as his music. In addition to playing in area rock and R&B bands for the last 45 years—currently as front man of Tim McLoone & the Shirleys—McLoone is the founder of Holiday Express, a volunteer group of more than 100 professional musicians that delivers holiday cheer to raise money for multiple causes between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. He may be best known for his restaurants—McLoone owns eight, including Tim McLoone’s Supper Club in Asbury Park, where he and the Shirleys play about 20 nights a year. Three more restaurants are in the works.

“I think Bruce ignited the high quality,” says McLoone, 66. “But Bruce was also created by it. That was sort of the code at the Shore. When you played here, you better be good. You definitely felt the pressure to be committed and to be a little different. The first time I saw Bruce play, I went back and said, ‘I’m not trying hard enough.’”

The Little Silver resident has been trying harder ever since, and making a point of showcasing on his restaurants’ Shore stages only those who try hard, too.

There’s Bobby Bandiera, 60, a guitar player in Bon Jovi’s band and a Shore regular who started playing the clubs when he was 16. He still plays, almost exclusively at McLoone’s places, when he’s home in Atlantic Highlands.

“When you cut your teeth around the guys who play here, like I did, you’ve got to be great, you can’t just be okay,” says Bandiera. The crowds “know you came up in the backyard of Bruce and Southside and Jon Bon Jovi.”

The Jersey Shore sound has its own Wikipedia page, but the entry doesn’t mention high-caliber playing as a characteristic. It does ascribe an R&B influence that, depending on whom you ask, still exists.

“Some people think, Let’s get three horns and we’ll put them in a band, and that will be the Jersey Shore sound,” says Lance Larson—the same Lance Larson from Bon Jovi’s Bamboozle soliloquy. Larson, a resident of Deal, is now 62 and helps manage the Wonder Bar, across the street from McLoone’s Supper Club in Asbury Park. His Lord Gunner Band is no more, but Larson still plays the Wonder Bar every couple of weeks when he’s not in the studio with his songwriting partner, Marc Ribler, another Shore veteran.

“You know how Liverpool had its sound? The Jersey Shore has that too, but it’s more what you don’t play than what you do. You stay in the area of R&B, but you don’t go too heavy into it. It’s rock’n’roll with an R&B touch,” says Larson.

Like his cronies, Larson doesn’t consider himself a Jersey Shore purist. He plays country, covers and “basically whatever.” A point of pride, though, is that he has never stopped playing his own material.

“A lot of other places you couldn’t play original music,” says Larson. “You’d have to play top 10.” But at the Jersey Shore, audiences are “used to great, original music.”

The refusal to capitulate to the kind of cover bands ubiquitous elsewhere may be why rock fans—and not just Springsteen tourists—flock to clubs like the Wonder Bar and the Stone Pony to see the locals.

“People make a pilgrimage from other countries to come here for the original music,” says multi-instrumentalist Tony Amato, 59, of Asbury Park, who plays the Shore circuit every couple of weeks with his current band, Boccigalupe and the Badboys. Amato’s first band, the early 1970s group Ecstasy, was formed with singer Patti Scialfa, who later married Springsteen. Springsteen tried to get a later Amato act, Cahoots, a deal with Columbia Records. That fell through. “But I kept making music and playing around the area like the rest of the guys. It’s in our blood,” Amato says.

“Things are a little different down here,” says guitarist and bluesman Billy Hector, who plays Marlin’s Café in Point Pleasant and other Shore-area clubs. “Original music is sort of ingrained in the culture.” The 57-year-old Spring Lake resident has been playing Shore clubs since he was 14. Hector missed out on gigging with Southside and Springsteen when they were ascending, but still considers both friends.

The Shore wasn’t always burning up with incestuous original rock bands and the venues that showcased them, and it’s still not the hotbed it was in the 1970s, when Springsteen and Southside were breaking through nationally. “In the 1990s it was forgotten, believe me,” says Hector. “But now people are starting to look at Asbury as a shrine again. There are places to play where you can actually earn a living, not just in Asbury but all around the Jersey Shore.”

Remarkably, guys like the singer/songwriter/guitarist Sonny Kenn, who started playing in 1963 and is still in regular rotation in clubs like Giamano’s in Bradley Beach, have managed to keep playing without seeming like nostalgia acts.

Kenn, 65, who lives in Red Bank, formed one of his first bands in the late 1960s with Southside. “There’ve been dozens of bands around here, and it’s like, the same band, different members through the decades,” he says. Kenn recalls a night a couple years ago when Springsteen came to watch him play at the now-defunct Asbury Blues club. “He called up and said he was going to come down. We were like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ But he came, and we sat around and bullshitted until the crowd started getting a little too friendly,” says Kenn. “When he gets around us he just becomes one of the guys.”

“The guys” who play the Shore these days aren’t all old enough to buy discounted movie tickets. And they’re not all guys. One of McLoone’s Shirleys, Layonne Holmes, of Aberdeen Township, has made a name for herself as a funk/R&B singer beyond the Supper Club. And Billy Walton, a singer/songwriter/guitarist who took over as guitarist in Southside’s band when Bandiera left to join Bon Jovi, is a 38-year-old from Egg Harbor Township. His band draws crowds to clubs like Cabana’s Beach Bar and Grill in Cape May. Clubs like the Wonder Bar, Jenkinson’s in Point Pleasant Beach, and Asbury’s Stone Pony book national touring acts too. And then there are the younger locals bashing out original music at the clubs. “You see them sort of off to the side when you’re playing, watching what you’re doing to see what they can pick up,” says Kenn.

Inspiration is liable to come not just from Kenn, but from any of his longtime comrades and other Shore fixtures they bump into on and offstage: Michael Scialfa, Springsteen’s brother-in-law and one of Amato’s former bandmates in Cahoots; the singer/songwriter Paul Whistler; singer/songwriter John Eddie, who recently moved from the Shore to Nashville but returns for gigs; bluesman Kenny “Stringbean” Sorensen; and the singer/songwriter Pat Guadagno.

But perhaps the most widely known player on the scene is Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez, newly inducted in the 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early member of Springsteen’s E Street Band.

Lopez, 65, of Jackson, was the drummer on Springsteen’s first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. But if there were a Hall of Fame for Jersey Shore musicians who keep tabs on their brethren, he’d likely be the first inductee.

“Vini’s the guy who always looked at us like we’re a team,” says Larson. To that end, Lopez recently corralled Hector and Kenn to guest on an album with his band License to Chill. (License to Chill plays clubs including River Watch, in Brick, and Bum Rogers, in Seaside.) “He’s got that nickname ‘Mad Dog,’”—supplied decades ago by music mogul Clive Davis, who pegged Lopez as a tough guy. “But he’s a team player with a heart of gold.”

And a determination not to let his team be forgotten. “No one in this group of guys who’ve been playing together the last 30 years is trying to compete with each other,” says Lopez. “We’re just trying to keep our footprint out there because this is what we love to do. It keeps us young. And as long as people keep coming out to see us at the Jersey Shore, we’ll be there, all of us. Playing hard, I hope.”

Tammy La Gorce is a frequent contributor.

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