The plan going up was that Popovich and his partner Marty Mooney would produce the album, as they had the first one.
“The first record we were playing our stage show,” Grushecky says. “Steve and Marty produced it, but they weren’t really music guys. They didn’t know how to dissect a song and arrange the parts and talk to musicians in musical terms that you can really translate into workable ideas. They were more feel guys: ‘This feels good,’ ‘that feels good,’ you know. So we had really no experience with people deconstructing our songs.”
Enter the Spider from Mars.
Live footage of David Bowie with Mick Ronson on guitar.
Cleveland International was working with Hunter, the former Mott the Hoople frontman who in 1979 had released “You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic” (the one with “Cleveland Rocks”). That record had been co-produced by Ronson and featured members of the E Street Band.
“So either the first or second day of rehearsal, [Popovich] shows up with Mick Ronson, you know, a world-class musician. We would practice all morning and take a break for lunch. After lunch one day, Popovich shows up with Steve Van Zandt. He brought them both in, sort of unannounced, and they jumped right in and started working with us.”
Which raises the question: What exactly was the budget for this record?
Grushecky doesn’t even know.
“Steve Popovich was the ringmaster of the whole thing and how he even got them all to agree to do it, I haven’t the slightest idea,” Grushecky says. “I was still living in Mt. Washington, driving a 20-year-old car. I wasn’t going to the bank too often.”
By this point, Grushecky hadn’t met future friend and writing partner Bruce Springsteen, but he had met Van Zandt before. When Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes were out touring with Boz Scaggs, Popovich had brought Van Zandt to the Gazebo on West Liberty Avenue to see the Houserockers.
Bruce Springsteen, left, and E Street Band member Steve Van Zandt perform at Asbury Park, N.J., in 1999. (Associated Press)
“Steve had found Joe and thought he had something special, so I came in and helped out with the arrangements, helped out as a friend,” Van Zandt told the Post-Gazette last year. “Once we got to know Joe, he was such a joy, and the whole band were great guys. It became missionary work to kind of establish this bar band idea everywhere we could.”
To Grushecky, there were some aesthetic differences in their concepts of what bar rock was.
“We weren’t horn-driven here because the environment was way tougher than the Jersey Shore. They had the beach, the ocean, the boardwalk, the sand, girls in bikinis. Here, you had the steel mills, the rivers and [expletive] bubbas in babushkas, you know what I mean?”
As fans know, Van Zandt has a particular fondness for soulful and garage-y rock ’n’ roll as now heard on his Sirius channel Little Steven’s Underground Garage.
“He’s one of these guys that’s ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus,’ ” Grushecky says.
Van Zandt guy put a new stinging riff on “Don’t Let Them Push You Around” and turned it into the almost thrashy punk song it deserved to be.
Similarly, Ronson took “Struggle and Die,” which Grushecky saw as his epic “Free Bird”-type jam, and turned it into the churning rocker “We’re Not Dead Yet.”
“I was resistant to a lot of stuff,” Grushecky says, “but I kept my mouth shut. I was trying to be a team player and, plus, you know, I was low man on the totem pole as far as experience and knowledge about everything. I can remember being mortified when ‘Struggle and Die’ went down, like ‘Oh my God, they’re ruining my songs.’ ”
Part of him knew that wasn’t true and fans can now hear the transformation on the new “Have a Good Time” reissue, which features the 12 songs plus 16 tracks of demos, outtakes and bonus material.
Some of the 1980 album’s highlights were more or less created on the spot. Working with Grushecky’s lyrics based on an idea from pianist Gil Snyder about TV mind-control, Hunter would take charge of the funk workout “Hypnotized.”
Highlighting side two would be the future fan favorite combo of “Old Man’s Bar” and “Junior’s Bar.” Most fans would guess that “Junior” came first, but that wasn’t the case. During the three-week stay in New York, pianist Gil Snyder and soundman Bob Boyer brought in “Old Man’s Bar,” a grizzled paean to the Decade, into the studio and Ronson liked the way Snyder sang it in that rough voice.
Joe Grushecky And The Houserockers playing ''Junior's Bar'' at the New Hazlett Theater in Pittsburgh.
“A little bit later, maybe even later on that day,” Grushecky recalls, “Steve Van Zandt came in and said, ‘We could rock that.’ So he came up with that signature guitar riff,” and the strange key modulation that Grushecky says “theoretically, shouldn’t work.”
The words didn’t fit the tempo, so Grushecky went off and wrote new lyrics about a younger man on the prowl. The night he did the vocals, Popovich brought in Ellen Folly, who sang on Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” and with her was Mick Jones from The Clash.
“He was a big Mott the Hoople fan and Ellen was dating him at the time, so he came and hung out,” Grushecky says.
Now, they had two different similar songs — one slow, one fast — and there was debate about which one to use. “At first I wasn’t sold on ‘Junior’s Bar,’ to tell you the truth, but I had my head twisted because everything was coming at me quickly.”
The Houserockers showed up at the studio with “Charlena,” which turned into “Blondie,” a bitter rocker about the New York punk band that played off the track “Angela.” The making of that song led to a defining moment in Grushecky’s career as a songwriter.
“We were having this discussion,” Grushecky says, “and [Steve Van Zandt] said, ‘Why are these lyrics so good over there, and these lyrics are not so good here?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s just the rock song,’ and he said, ‘Nah, nah, nah. Every lyric you put forth has to be good. You have to make every lyric count.’ ”
The next day they met for breakfast and spent nearly three hours at a restaurant poring over all the lyrics to the album with Van Zandt, who was in the midst of making “The River” album with the E Street Band four blocks away at The Power Station.
Says Grushecky, “I remember what he said: ‘What are you going to say? How are you going to say it? And, at the end of the day, is it worth saying?’ That was a moment in my becoming a writer.”
And then Grushecky went and left the lyric book at the restaurant.
“We get back to the hotel, and I don’t have the lyrics,” he says. “We’re in the lobby, and I’m like ‘Oh my God.’ You know, I felt like an a–hole. We spend all this time and I lose everything.
“So I’m heading back to the restaurant, walking through the streets of New York, and you know how they have those metal garbage receptacles attached to parking meters you can see through? About a block from the restaurant, I see the lyrics lying in a garbage can.
“It was a minor miracle, so Steve said this record is going to be something special because that was a miracle in itself.”
