Conversations

In Studio With Danny Clinch, A Conversation About One Record

PhotographerDanny Clinch’s Asbury Park is filled with colorful characters scraping by on the margins. There’s crazy Janey and her mission man, back in the alley trading hands; young Scott with a slingshot and his lover in the sand; Wild Billy with his friend G-man all duded up for Saturday night, to name a few. They’re the twisted autobiographies comprisingGreetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Bruce Springsteen’s 1972 debut album.

The M1 record console inside Transparent Clinch Gallery stacked with records for an upcoming listening session.

Now a celebrated rock photographer, in the ‘70s Clinch was a local boy who grew up a stone’s throw from Asbury Park in Toms River, NJ, intimately familiar with the characters that populate Springsteen’s records. He calls one of them Dad.“My dad was only four years older [than Bruce] and they grew up in the same area,” he says. “They were both people of limited means. And I look at these characters, and literally, they’re my dad’s story.” For Clinch, these stories aren’t voyeuristic, they’re memories of his youth, reflections of his father. “My dad was kicked out of school in eighth grade. That line from ‘Growin’ Up’: ‘You told me to sit down and I stood up.’ I mean, that’s what my dad did his whole life. This record has such a resonance with me for so many reasons. I would just sit and listen to it over and over again.”

Springsteen wrote the songs forGreetings from Asbury Park, N.J.on an old Aeolian spinet piano parked in the rear of an Asbury Park beauty salon. The music was a mix of solo acoustic ballads and raucous barroom singalongs that would form the blueprint for his transition from underground hard rocker into New Jersey’s answer to Bob Dylan. The album wasn’t a runaway success—it took nearly three years to crack the Billboard chart—but it’s as important an entry in the Boss’s discography as any other album, a love letter to the place that bore the voice of a generation.The grit and grime of Springsteen’s Asbury Park has mostly been replaced with glitz and gentrification, the once desolate waterfront now gleaming with steel and glass condominiums. But for the past eight years, Clinch has been doing his part to counter those effects with community, hosting exhibitions and live-streamed concerts atTransparent Clinch Gallery, an intimate clubhouse space just steps from the boardwalk where he sells fine art prints, records, modern design furniture, and Wrensilva consoles. What started as a three-month pop-up has become a creative hub for artists and musicians in a town full of them. “Back in the day, Bruce, Danny Federici, Garry Tallent, Steve Van Zandt, Southside Johnny… they all met at this place called the Upstage, which was alcohol-free, so it was all ages,” he explains. “These bands would play their regular gigs, and after they’d come to the Upstage and jam until 2, 3, and 4 in the morning. I feel like we’re carrying on that tradition of giving musicians a place to come and play, and their friends come out and hang with them. There’s so many great young bands around here.”

” ‘Growin’ Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. It reminds me of my father.”

Danny Clinch

There’s a spot in Transparent Clinch Gallery where, sitting on the couch and listening to records on the Wrensilva, you can flip through Clinch’s book,Still Moving.Inside is a two-page spread of a photo taken just around the corner on 4th & Kingsley, from the backseat of a classic ‘51 Hudson, a couple of grizzled characters looking back from the front seats without a care in the world. Those characters are Springsteen and Clinch’s dad, Maxted; the Boss was a spry 60 years old, the same age Clinch is now. In this place, you can feel the record, the artists, and the setting converge into a synthesis of the hopes and dreams that music inspires. “When Bruce saw that photo,” Clinch recalls, “He was like, ‘Look at these two guys. They’re ready to go anywhere.”

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.marked Springsteen’s graduation from those late-night jams into the major label record industry, but in choosing the album’s title, he made sure everyone knew where he was coming from, and who he came up with. Of course for Clinch, these songs hold special significance to his memories of one person in particular. “‘Growin’ Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time,” he says. “It reminds me of my father. Then, of course, ‘It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City’ also reminds me of my dad. ‘I had skin like leather in the diamond heart look of a cobra. I was born blue and weathered. I burst just like a supernova…’”

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