SPRINGSTEEN IS A SOUL MAN

Soul Classics To Bruce: Cover Me!

In 1973, I went to see Jerry Butler sing at the Copacabana, then the fading dowager of big time, big spending New York nightlife. (I reviewed the show, and interviewed Butler, for the April 1973 issue of Creem.) But from 1941 through the 1960s, the Copa was the place to see and be seen.

The nightclub itself was a movie star: it was a featured setting in numerous films, most memorably, perhaps, in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. In one famous scene, Ray Liotta (Henry Hill) is wooing his future wife, Lorraine Bracco's South Shore princess, Karen. In a long single shot, mobster Hill and Karen cut through the crowd in line outside, down the stairs and through the Copa's kitchen, to the club floor. The maitre'd immediately hauls out a table, as a team of waiters hurriedly put a tablecloth and place settings and a pair of chairs at the front of the stage for Hill and his date.

"What do you do?" she asks, wowed but skeptical by the special treatment. "I'm in construction," he replies. Mobsters w…