I first heard Bruce Hornsby when I was 10 years old, back when I would spend hours on end hanging around my father’s doomed retail store because he couldn’t afford a babysitter. His small leather goods business boomed in the early half of the 1970s, but by the turn of the new decade, the belts and purses he crafted were falling out of fashion. Dad’s short-lived business, the Leather Shop, happened to be a block away from a seaside bar named the Cave, where Hornsby’s band rehearsed during the day and played to sweaty crowds in the evening. It had a molded concrete exterior, like the fake boulders one might find in a mini-golf course, and the cavernous aesthetic extended into the interior.
The Cave was located on 17th Street, a few steps from Atlantic Avenue, which ran parallel to the boardwalk and ocean. It catered to a rough locals-only crowd, and my father regularly brought me there after he closed up the Leather Shop, probably to drown his financial woes. I’d drink Shirley Temples on a barstool while he got hammered with regulars like Biker Bob and a country boy named Donny who inadvertently gave Hornsby’s current backing band its name.
“Our rehearsal time was in the daytime, around happy hour,” Hornsby told me, “and Donny would be sitting at the bar. He was not a fan of our jazz-rock Steely Dan stylings, so when we would load in, he’d derisively say, ‘Here come the noise makers!’ We thought that was hilarious, and we used that phrase for years. When our first live record was coming out, we decided to call it Here Come the Noise Makers. At that point, there was no band name. It was just billed as Bruce Hornsby, so I think a lot of our fans started referring to the band as the Noise Makers because that was the title of that album. If only Donny were still around to verify his distaste for our music.”
In 1980, when Hornsby had a residency at the Cave, Virginia Beach had sunk deep into an economic malaise that left many a storefront empty. This sandblasted tourist town was both a conservative religious stronghold and a New Age hippie mecca, home to Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and the Association for Research and Enlightenment, which was founded by a famous mystic named Edgar Cayce. This made for a combustive cultural mix, and many sparks flew at the Cave.
“It was a dark bar that really did feel like a cave,” Hornsby recalled. “There were a couple of little alcoves in the back — one to our left looking out from the stage, and one to our right — and then the bar lined the right wall. We played Steely Dan and Michael McDonald-era Doobie Brothers, and also a lot of Grateful Dead, because my brother Bobby Hornsby was a big Deadhead and I had played in his Dead cover band before I fled to music schools.”
Fast-forward to 1990, when Hornsby began touring with the Grateful Dead after longtime keyboardist Brent Mydland tragically died that year. He played over 100 shows with them until 1992, and sat in with the Dead every year until Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, then continued to perform with other spinoffs in the years that followed.
“My main memory of the Cave is the cook getting his ass beat by some biker who didn’t like the way the cook made his steak. Whenever a fight broke out, my brother would reach up and turn the stage lights around to spotlight the fight. I remember we were playing an old traditional tune, ‘Big Railroad Blues,’ the way the Dead played it. So, we were playing that song while poor Wayne Dagel, the cook at the Cave, was getting his ass beat by Biker Bob. This big 300-pound behemoth was having his way with the poor young sad-sack chef while we were playing a Dead song, which seems appropriate.”
Across the street from the Cave was Headgear Unlimited, a head shop that sold blacklight posters, smoking paraphernalia and other counterculture novelties. Around the corner from that, on Atlantic Avenue, was a not-so-excellent diner named Excellent Restaurant, and two blocks to the north was my father’s arch nemesis, Mr. Buckle & Mrs. Hide, a more upscale leather goods store. Next door was Sambo’s Restaurant, whose racist name and blackface logo proudly invoked the Jim Crow South’s “good old days.” The Atlantic strip was also dotted with souvenir stores, cheap hotels, sordid T-shirt shops, low-rent seafood restaurants and a slew of bars like Chicho’s, where fistfights spilled out onto the sidewalk.
The air smelled like sea salt, spilled beer and despair in the neighborhood where I grew up. Further down Atlantic Avenue was Sambo’s Pancake House #2, which could have served as a music video location for the “The Way It Is,” Hornsby’s breakthrough 1986 hit. That song was a lament about entrenched racism that was written by a young white man who bristled at the South’s uglier sides (“He said, ‘Son, well, that’s just the way it is / Some things’ll never change’ … Ah, but don’t you believe them”).
When I first heard “The Way It Is” on local FM stations, back when I listened to equal parts Top 40 radio, punk rock and rap, it filled me with hometown pride. By the 1990s, I was much more deeply invested in the latter two genres, so Hornsby’s music felt a little too middle-of-the-road for my tastes. As it turns out, he shared my assessment.
“I remember first listening to the mastered version of my first album in the home that I shared with my wife in Van Nuys, California. I feel the same way about it now as I did that day that she came home to this dark house and I’m sitting there on a couch that faces two old JBL speakers. She walks in and asks, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I say, ‘I hate my record.’ That was a really rough place to be. I was this guy who has spent seven years trying to get a record deal and finally achieved that, made the record, and that’s my reaction to the finished product. I thought it was un-fucking-listenable because of the singer, who was me. I just thought that singer was so straight and not soulful.”
In the liner notes to his Decades anthology, Neil Young wrote, “‘Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.” That’s essentially what Bruce Hornsby did after “The Way It Is” made him a star. He traveled the country playing keyboards with the Dead, made forays into bluegrass and jazz, scored films for Spike Lee, and developed an eclectic two-dozen-plus-deep album discography.
I became a reborn Bruce Hornsby fan after he released Absolute Zero in 2019, the first of a wildly adventurous trilogy of albums that also included 2020’s Non-Secure Connection and 2022’s ’Flicted. During this period, he began working with a younger generation of musicians like Justin Vernon, who featured Hornsby on Bon Iver’s 2019 album i,i. Vernon also guested on Absolute Zero, and ’Flicted includes contributions by Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and Haim’s Danielle Haim, among others.
“To me, this has been my most fertile period,” Hornsby said. “It’s the best part of my career, so it sounds like you are with me on that, and I very much appreciate it.”
Hornsby’s creative run culminated this year with his masterpiece Indigo Park, a kaleidoscopic meditation on memory and mortality. Among other highlights, it features a duet with the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, who sang words that Dead lyricist Robert Hunter sent Hornsby in 2008. “Might As Well Be Me, Florinda” was recorded with guitarist Blake Mills, bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Chris Dave — Indigo Park’s core musicians — then Hornsby sent it off to Weir and waited … and waited.
“It’s basically a blues shuffle with chromatic Schoenbergian 12-tone music-esque melodic content. I’m interested in finding new combinations, new ways of writing, trying to make a sound that I haven’t heard before. Bobby finally got around to sending us his vocals in May of ’25, and we all flipped out. It was a great unhinged weird version, in the best way. Then we didn’t hear from him, and there were rumors about health issues and then boom, he was gone in January of this year. So, ‘Florinda’ feels really special.”
Indigo Park spans generations with guest spots that range from Weir and Bonnie Raitt to Ezra Koenig. The Vampire Weekend frontman sings backup on “Memory Palace,” a breezily haunting song built around shimmering guitars, an earworm melody, and do-do-doot harmony vocals.
“It’s so freakin’ rewarding to be able to do this in my older age,” Hornsby said. “When I was younger and coming up, I started being reached out to by my heroes, you know, the Robbie Robertsons and Bob Dylans and the Dead. And now, when I’m older, a younger crowd started reaching out to me. So, lucky me. I just feel so lucky.”
