A Winter Dream Of The Jersey Shore

We are now in what is indisputably the worst time of the year. The holidays are over, it is ass-cold, and the days are still short. When it gets cold, New Jersey Transit trains start breaking down. Two days this week I have had to stand the whole way to New York because of shortened trains and having to take on passengers from other broken trains. Stepping into that hell after waiting on a freezing platform is a wretched way to start the day. Today it was packed to the gills on a broken down old train short two cars on my way back home from the city. That's a rotten way to end a day. (Also was pleasant to brown bag a beer standing up. It's been that kind of week.)

Some winter days, to dispel the tired and angry thoughts in my head, I dream a dream of the boardwalk on the Jersey Shore in the summer time. I sit (or stand) on the train, imagining I can smell the salt air, that I can feel that combination of warm sun and cool breeze, and hear the gulls calling out. 

In fact, that's what I am doing tonight, in the midst of my fatigue and seasonal depression. Last night I was feeling so angry about so many things that I worried that I was in danger of just not giving a damn anymore as a defense mechanism. Today that level of anger went off the charts. I found out that one of my sister's former students, who came here from El Salvador as a toddler, is now in danger of deportation. I read the president's "shithole countries" comment. I was once again overwhelmed with nausea thinking about all the people I know who voted for this.

To keep my thoughts from killing my will to resist, I dream again of the Jersey Shore to soothe and distract me. Here's some Shore artifacts that can help you do the same.

Here's a video of Bruce Springsteen performing "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" from about ten years ago. To me it is the greatest poem ever written to the Shore, the place where the Boss first launched his career. The accordion makes it, played by Danny Federici, the E Street Band's organist. This was actually his last performance, and evidently the song he chose to go out on. Listen, and you will understand why. The longing is almost unbearable, much like my current longing for spring.

I am a fan of Shore towns that are hip (like Asbury Park) or quiet and quaint (like Ocean Grove and Cape May.) However, when I want to have the true Shore Experience of deep fried oreos and t-shirts with vulgar slogans, I go to Wildwood. I also love the town for its beautifully tacky mid-century commercial architecture.

Philly teen idol rocker Bobby Rydell was one of the many musical artists who played the Wildwood region of the Shore, and this song, "Wildwood Days," is a fun ode to the town.

The King of Marvin Gardens is one of my favorite obscure 1970s movies. It shows Atlantic City, the land of Monopoly, in all its brokedown glory before the casinos came. It also explores the Shore as a site of the death of the American dream.

1980's Atlantic City looked at that town after the casinos came. It is a great portrait of America as it entered the Reagan years, with its casinoization of the American economy. Desperate dreamers always seem to find a way to the Shore, one thing that makes it irresistible to me.

Asbury Park has a beautiful carousel house, but the carousel itself got sold off to someone in South Carolina when the town hit hard times. Not sure what exactly the metaphor is, but it perfectly matches the faded glory that is Asbury Park.

Here's another Springsteen song, "Tunnel of Love," which uses a cheap boardwalk ride as a metaphor for a troubled relationship. His music on the album of the same way was an interesting left turn from the arena sound he had embraced in the mid-80s. It is more personal and introspective, like the Shore-based music of his first two albums. There are also some great shots in the video of the Shore in 80s, when it was rougher than it is now. The song has a kind of melancholy edge to it, which makes it the right place to end.

A Jersey Shore Playlist

Clip from a doc about the Shore from the 90s, during the Shore's scuzzier days

Tomorrow I'm heading off to the Jersey Shore with my family, including my parents, who are in town this week. I am relishing turning my parents on to the magic place that is the Jersey shore, a place that makes me inexplicably happy. As a child of the Great Plains, nothing consoles my soul like wide vistas, whether they be the ocean or the broad expanses of the prairies. But on the Shore I also get a sea breeze, cool water, and the carnival atmosphere of the boardwalk. I have assimilated myself to New Jersey in so many ways, and not just out of the need to make peace with the fact that this is the place I have chosen to settle down. I do love so much about this wrongly maligned place, and the Shore is near the top of the list.

Driving down to the Shore is an experience in itself. There's the beauty of the Parkway once you cross the Perth Amboy bridge and the industrial grit gives way to trees that become increasingly pinier and more foreign as you keep moving south. There's also the anticipation of soon being able to bask in a summer that is more summer. (It's the only way I can explain the Shore this time of year.) Key to relishing that anticipation is a good soundtrack. Here's some of my favorite Shore songs.

Bruce Springsteen, "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)"

Okay, I am going to get the obvious pick out of the way first. Not only is The Boss from Jersey, he cut his teeth as a musician in Asbury Park, a shore city that had fallen on hard times in the 1960s and 1970s. When you go there, you immediately understand his early sensibility. It is a ragtag place with a few monuments to its faded glory, a visible symbol of the realities beneath the shining, false propaganda of the American Dream, perhaps Springsteen's most potent theme. This song is the most direct one of his about The Shore, describing bands playing at the Casino (not a gambling casino, btw) on Asbury Park's boardwalk. It is an unjustly forgotten song of longing from The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, perhaps his most Shore-centric album. (His previous record may have been called Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, but more of the songs seem to be about New York City.)

Tom Waits, "Jersey Girl"

Tom Waits has different modes, from the weirdo street poet to the cracked bluesman, to the wacko mad scientist of odd sounds. It's easy to forget his skills as a balladeer, and this song is probably his greatest ballad. It's about falling in love with a Jersey girl, something both he and I did in real life. It expresses so well the feelings of newfound love, the ecstasy that almost seems too good to be true, along with the anguish about being separated from the person that makes you so happy. The key line for our purposes here is how he expresses the ecstasy "Down the Shore everything's all right/Just you and your baby on a Saturday night."

Journey, "Don't Stop Believin'"

Don't judge me. On the Shore some things have never gone out of style, and that includes the big hair and big music of the 1980s. Folks there sorta decided around 1989 that they liked things how they were and were not too keen on changing it all that much. This song, as cheesy as it is, represents the kind of chance romantic meeting between two lost people that the Shore was made for. Also it doesn't hurt that it's associated so strongly with The Sopranos.

The Drifters, "Under The Boardwalk"

Wildwood, New Jersey, had its heyday as a Shore town in the 1950s and early 60s, when folks could motor on over from Philly for some fun in the sun. The amazing number of tacky mid-century motels in the town are called "doo-wop architecture," in honor of the music that dominated the Shore at the time. The Drifters sang the ultimate song about romance on the beach, about making out under the boardwalk. It's been covered many times, but nothing beats the original.

The Shirelles, "Dedicated To The One I Love"

And of course, some of the great vocal R&B music being played on the boardwalks during the Shore's boom times came from right within the Garden State. The mighty Shirelles hailed from Passaic, and pioneered the "girl group" sound well before Phil Spector came around. There's the boardwalk and all that on the Shore, but sometimes it's good just to relax and let the beauty of the ocean wash over you, just as these harmonies do.

Bruce Springsteen, "I'm A Rocker"

Okay, I just couldn't help myself with a second helping of The Boss. This is not one of his more famous songs, but just you see if you can find a better one to blast from your car as you shoot down the Garden State Parkway into the heart of summer on the Shore.

Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes, "The Fever"

Not all of the Shore musicians got as famous as Springsteen, but many still cut some great tracks mining the same shaft of rocking riffs mixed with old-school R&B grooves. It's a sound that fits the Shore's imperative to dance and let the good times roll. I still want to see Southside Johnny play a show.

A Nebraska Boy Falls In Love With The Jersey Shore (the place, not the TV show)

I have written for a few days since I was on a short vacation with my family down to Cape May, on the southern tip of the Jersey Shore.  It was a great time, and has only enhanced my growing love affair with the Jersey Shore.  I say improbably because I grew up in Nebraska, about as far away from the ocean as you can get.  I also happen to be a redhead with the attendant problem that the sun makes my skin cry with pain if I am exposed to it for any length of time.  You can couple that with some body image problems on my part, and the fact that most beaches are crammed with backwards cap-wearing douchebags blasting stoopid music as a mating call to braindead woohoo girls.  The beach is not my natural habitat.

All that being the case, there is little more I love than being in the presence of the ocean, in all of its massive, surging, limitless glory.  Coming from the Plains, I grew up in a landscape where the flat, empty land stretched out horizon to horizon underneath an impossibly huge sky.  I miss that feeling of open-ness, of being able to sense the curve to the earth.  I only get that nowadays when I go to the ocean.

The great thing about the Shore is that it easily accommodates my need to walk by the ocean while avoiding the beach with its greatest feature: the boardwalk.  My favorite is probably Asbury Park's, a faded jewel with honest to goodness ruins but some hardy new businesses sprouting up, including a pinball arcade full of vintage machines.  It is a broken place, but full of poetry and ghosts, a great muse to those willing to listen.  Bruce Springsteen got his start there, as the title of his first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey, attests.  The bands no longer play in front of the gutted Casino referenced in his song "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," but you can hear their faint echoes if you listen hard enough.

Of course, most people go to the Shore for fun in the sun, not to meditate on mortality.  If you want the living spirit of the shoreline boardwalk, then go to Wildwood, a boardwalk so wide and long that tram cars take people up and down it, since walking the whole distance is not advised in the summer heat.  When Springsteen sings of Asbury Park, it is wistful and full of longing.  Those emotions are practically banned in Wildwood, where the representative song is the exuberant, poppy "Wildwood Days" by Bobby Rydell.  Here, as in other spots, like Point Pleasant or Seaside Heights, there are innumerable arcades, tattoo parlors, cheap t-shirt shops, and sideshow attractions.  Of course, there's also the amusement park rides on the pier, rising above the water in the crisp ocean air.  It's no mistake that the submerged roller coaster in Seaside Heights after Sandy brought it crashing into the briny deep became the iconic symbol in this state of what the storm hath wrought.

Wildwood is the place to be for cheap, tacky entertainment and fun, and in that respect mirrors New Jersey's ability to maintain some of life's smaller pleasures that have faded away elsewhere.  The Garden State has a bad reputation, stemming mostly from its proximity to a major media capital whose residents are some of the most smugly self-satisfied folks on the planet earth.  Of course New Jersey is not Manhattan, but what is?  In any case, Manhattan is quickly becoming a giant strip of Duane Reade stores, Starbucks, Bank of America outlets, and prohibitively expensive apartments.  New Jersey has managed to maintain a culture of small-time enterprises, despite corporate America's best efforts.  The highways are dotted with local diners, like they used to be in the Nebraska of my youth.  Only idiots order pizza from one of the chains, rather than one of the panoply of amazing local places.  That spirit is visible in Wildwood, from the rinky-dink arcades with skee balls as old as your grandparents to the famous range of small, mid-century hotels in all their neon-encrusted glory.

While I like cheap thrills as much as the next person, when we went to the shore this time we visited Wildwood while staying at a hotel in the much statelier Cape May, which had its origins first in whaling, and next as a seaside retreat for the Victorian bourgeoisie.  Here the ghosts are of a different sort than in Asbury Park, donning corsets and tweed rather than leather jackets and engineer boots.  The restored, lushly decorated homes from the 1880s sure are nice, but nothing beats my favorite part of being there: sitting on a hotel balcony, feeling the full, cool force of a nighttime sea breeze after a long hot day of family fun.  Maybe it's because I grew up feeling the prairie winds blast down the Rockies across the arid Plains, but that ocean breeze puts my mind at ease like nothing else, and I can't wait to get back.