I didn’t know that
…for a few months, between late 1974 and early 1975, there was also a violin, in the darkness on the edge, adding heartrending poignancy to ballads like the debut album’s sparse “Lost in the Flood,” the sprawling “Incident on 57th Street,” the gangland drama “Jungleland,” and the ever-mutating take-a-chance-on-me saga that became “Thunder Road.”
It was a violin played by Suki Lahav, a young girl in a flowing white dress from Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar in the Upper Galilee, barely out of the army, barely married.
“Yes, I went from kibbutz harvest music to rocking with Bruce,” Suki Tzruya-Lahav reflects wryly now, from a 32-year distance, from the Germany Colony in Jerusalem, where she’s since raised her two sons, written several acclaimed books, taught creative writing and penned lyrics for much of Israel’s musical big league – Rita and Yehuda Poliker and Gidi Gov and Rami Kleinstein and Ricky Gal and Yehudit Ravitz.
And how did it start?
Her first husband, Louis, she recalls, switching sunglasses for spectacles with pretty floral frames, was the sound engineer at 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt, New York, favored by the likes of Blood, Sweat & Tears, Melanie, Janis Ian and Springsteen’s early ’70s manager Mike Appel. So Bruce and the band recorded their first album there and were working on the second. “They worked nights; they were the main event in our musical lives. We were all young. He wasn’t the big star. Not yet. Just a unique artist.”
Springsteen had hired a church children’s choir for a song called “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” but they didn’t show. “And I was around. And I had this high, pure clear voice. So that was my first time,” says Lahav – singing, uncredited, on the track that appears on the second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.
Then Springsteen decided he wanted a violinist on stage with him, to complement the guitars, the sax and the keyboards. “Louis sent me along to audition. There were others. Surprisingly, he took me.” Surprisingly because, she says disarmingly, “I didn’t think I was very good… You have to practice for hours a day. I was never a big practicer. But maybe,” she allows, “maybe I did have my own thing…”
Others in the band were changing too. She auditioned with Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan, drummer and pianist with Springsteen to this day. And there then unfolded seven glorious months on the road and in the studio with “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” as his career ascended from small clubs to stadia, en route to what would become, a few months after Lahav left, his grandiose heralding as “the future of rock and roll” with simultaneous cover stories in Time and Newsweek on October 27, 1975.
The irony is that Suki Lahav’s real love was writing, not playing, music.
Springsteen has recently brought a violinist back into his band but Lahav, the original, never touches the instrument anymore. Never. “It’s not like a piano, which sounds fine even if you really can’t play. The violin played badly sounds awful. They were doing a show of my songs three years ago in Tel Aviv, and I thought ‘wouldn’t it be great if I picked up the violin again and played on a couple of them.’ So I took it out at home, and it was awful. My husband pretended he was asleep. My older son, who’s a musician” – a jazz guitarist – said, ‘Go for it.’ My younger son said, ‘Stop, it’s painful.'”
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
