It was a late spring night in 1971 and David Sancious had walked from his home on E Street in Belmar, New Jersey to the Upstage club in Asbury Park. He was 17 and he had been playing piano and guitar with local bands for four years. “I had walked to the Upstage because I wanted to play,” he says, “and as I’m coming in I see Garry Tallent, a bass player who I already knew from other gigs.” Tallent was with a fellow New Jersey musician, a 21-year-old guitarist called Bruce Springsteen, “the local guitar hero”, says Sancious, “very famous locally.” Springsteen told Sancious he was having a jam session and invited him to play. “I said: ‘Absolutely.’”
The band played until 5am. As they were walking out of the club, Springsteen told Sancious he was breaking up his current band Steel Mill to form a new one: would he be interested in joining? Sancious said yes. He went on to record with Springsteen on his first three albums, but left the group before Born to Run transformed Springsteen and his bandmates into superstars. As that album approaches its 50th anniversary next month, I have wondered whether Sancious regrets walking away.
He was five years old when his family moved into 1105 E Street in Belmar. The previous owners had left their piano in the house. “The day we moved in, my mum sat down and started playing Chopin and Beethoven,” he says. “It blew my mind.” Sancious started playing piano and later guitar and was in local bands in his early teens, giving illegal underage performances at local bars. “The police used to raid these places and card everyone,” he says. “One night I’m on stage with Bruce and the cops are hanging out at the front door.” The band hatched a plan to get Sancious off stage, sandwiched between Springsteen, saxophonist Clarence Clemons and two others. “I was in the middle moving slowly, trying not to draw any attention.”
Sancious and his bandmates sometimes rehearsed in his mother’s garage, but mostly in a surfboard factory owned by an early manager of Springsteen’s. “You don’t know enough to be self-conscious because you haven’t had that much experience yet,” he says about those early days. Sancious contributed keyboards, piano and delicate jazz textures that enriched the early E Street sound on songs such as New York City Serenade and Incident on 57th Street. “The thing about Bruce is that musically he was always open to a good idea. If I came up with a certain chord or inversion, he was very open to that.”
Around 1974, Sancious and Springsteen were back in Belmar, by Sancious’s childhood home. “We were coming home from somewhere,” he says, “turning on to E Street from 12th Avenue. There were these white obelisks with the street names painted on them. Bruce saw it and just said, ‘E Street … E Street Band.’” How did it feel to have his address inspire this iconic band name? “Pretty cool – quite an honour.”
Sancious worked on Springsteen’s debut Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and its followup The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, and also toured with the band. “We didn’t have private planes back then,” he says. “We had a station wagon, three of the guys in the front and three in the back. You’re doing everything with these people. Eating, laughing, crying with them if something really bad happens. It’s a great life.”
He was the first Black member of what became the E Street Band – Clemons joined shortly after. “You are constantly, completely, 100% aware of being Black – full stop – in any situation,” he says. He recalls one incident. “I was at the beach and there were two guys making threatening gestures and saying inappropriate racial stuff. Clarence comes along and sees what’s going on. He sat down right next to me and then Bruce comes walking by. Bruce found a piece of driftwood and he kept hitting it in his hand like he was saying: ‘I’m not going to let you hurt our friend.’”
Sancious continued playing with Springsteen but during breaks from touring he was working on his own music. When CBS heard his demo they offered him a three-year contract that would launch his solo career. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse, and shortly after playing on a song for Springsteen’s third album – a little number called Born to Run – Sancious left the E Street Band.
How did it feel, I ask, to see Born to Run become a massive hit album, and Springsteen on the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously? “I felt very happy for him, honestly,” he says. “I knew it was going to happen for him.” How did he know? “We did shows in Texas in 1974 and the crowd went nuts. We finished the show and the audience wouldn’t leave. Bruce used to end the set with a song called For You that he would play by himself on piano and we would go off stage and watch. I remember standing there looking at him and thinking as soon as everybody finds out about this guy he’s going to blow up. It’s going to go crazy.”
In 1975 came the release not only of Born to Run but also Sancious’s first solo album Forest of Feelings – a fusion of jazz, rock, funk and classical that suggested he had travelled far from E Street. Of the numerous albums that followed, both solo and with his band Tone, the most successful “got to No 78 in the Top 100 for one week. But my sense of self as an artist isn’t diminished because I didn’t sell a million records. That’s a narrow definition of success and I don’t resonate with that.”
In the early 80s, Sancious paused making his own music. “The phone kept ringing with artists asking me to go on tour,” he says. “I toured with Peter Gabriel and then Sting and later Eric Clapton and Santana. They have more in common than you might think: none of them had a plan B, they all did it out of a love for music.” Sancious got to play the lead guitar riff to Clapton’s Layla as well as the song’s final piano coda when he toured with him – “such a thrill because I love that song and I love his playing”.
Sancious didn’t return to the studio until 2000; he continues to record and tour today. He always remained in contact with Springsteen – he joined him on stage during the Human Rights Now! tour in 1988, and played on 1992’s Human Touch album and 2019’s Western Stars. He was part of the live band that backed Springsteen when he performed on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in November 2022. “We love each other,” he says. “We love working together and whenever the situation allows we do it and we get fantastic results to this day.”
On the night I speak to Sancious, Springsteen and the E Street Band are on stage in front of 60,000 people in Berlin. It feels appropriate to ask: with hindsight, would he have still walked away? “There is a whole life I would have missed out on,” he says. “Working with all these other artists and making my own music. If I had to do it again would I do the same thing? Absolutely. Because I didn’t walk away from anything – I walked towards something.”
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