Classic Rocker John Cafferty Returns with a New Album after 37 Years — “Sound of Waves”

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 08 May 2025 20:00

Written by Brad Balfour

For many bands having a song in a film can boost one’s career. But for John Cafferty and his Beaver Brown band, they not only wrote and performed songs for the soundtrack to “Eddie And The Cruisers,” but they provided all the musical content performed by actors in the film. The music was a hit and established John Cafferty as a force to reckon with.

Nonetheless, Cafferty and band continued writing, recording and performing for years. After a string of records that came out in the ‘90s, he continued on without releasing anything new as an album.

On April 10, 2025, John Cafferty and his band released their first album in 37 years, “Sound of Waves,” a 13-song collection of original songs written by Cafferty. This milestone was celebrated with a media industry release party at the legendary Cutting Room in New York City. Radio DJs, music writers, influencers, and fans attended the SRO event. iHeart New York’s Q104.3 afternoon drive DJ Ken Dashow was the MC.

Cafferty and band achieved mainstream success in the ‘80s with the music recorded for the “Eddie and the Cruisers: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.” A 1983 American musical drama film directed by Martin Davidson with the screenplay written by the director and Arlene Davidson, “Eddie and the Cruisers” was based on the novel by P. F. Kluge. A sequel “Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives!” followed in 1989.

Music Supervisor Kenny Vance asked Davidson to describe his fictitious band and their music. Initially, Davidson said that the Cruisers sounded like Dion and the Belmonts but with elements of Jim Morrison and The Doors.

However, due to the fact that the Cruisers were essentially a Jersey bar band, Davidson thought of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The filmmaker told Vance to find him a band that could produce music that contained elements of these groups. The director was getting close to rehearsals when Vance called and said that he had found the band — Providence, Rhode Island’s John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band.

When Davidson met them, he realized that they closely resembled the band described in the script, right down to a Cape Verdean saxophone player, whom he cast in the film. Initially, Cafferty was only hired to write a few songs, but he did such a good job of capturing the feeling of the ‘60s and ‘80s that Davidson asked him to score the entire film.

After successful screenings on HBO in 1984, the album suddenly climbed the charts, going quadruple platinum. The studio re-released the soundtrack in the fall of ’84. Nine months after the film was released in theaters, the main song , “On the Dark Side”, went to number one in the country on Billboard’s Mainstream, Rock, and Heatseeker charts; and #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Another single from the film, “Tender Years,” peaked at #31 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The album sold over three million copies and went on to become certified triple platinum by the RIAA. Their hit single “On the Dark Side” maintained the number one position on Billboard and HBO for five consecutive weeks.

The band saw further success when their 1985 follow-up album “Tough All Over” made the Top 40. “Voice of America’s Sons” was the featured theme song of Sylvester Stallone’s action movie “Cobra,” while Cafferty’s solo track “Heart’s on Fire” was featured in “Rocky IV.”

Over the years John would continue to place over 30 songs in major motion pictures, including “There’s Something About Mary” and “Dumb and Dumber To.”

Today, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band continue to tour and bring their live shows to fans around the world. In 2012, they were inducted into the Rhode Island Music Hall Of Fame.

In order to reestablish his presence in the world at large, Cafferty spoke with the press about his re-emergence. In the course of this interview, Cafferty revealed his Irish roots and how he connected with this on a trip to Eire.

Q: How have you managed to maintain your love of rock and roll for this long and yet not put out an album for 37 years?

John Cafferty: We had a wonderful opportunity for a few years in the ‘80s to be able to make records and to be in sync with what was going on with both radio and MTV. And as you know, music sort of moves on. It evolves and revolves. Styles and trends change. When that happened with us in the late ‘80s, we just went back to what we’d been doing before. We were a band that had been together for like 10 plus years before we made records. We went back to being a band for many years after we made records. We never stopped. We never stopped playing; we just weren’t in the record business anymore.

Q: All this time, you’ve survived by touring and obviously doing things that ended up in albums, in movies?

John Cafferty: When we went back to playing after the hit records, it was a bit easier because we had songs people knew. We weren’t playing civic centers anymore, but we played small theaters, showcase clubs, doing what we knew how to do. Every Saturday night we’d be in a crowded room, watch the dance floor fill up and see smiles on the people’s faces.

Q: Your music has been in a number of movies, obviously with “Eddie and the Cruisers.” When showcasing your music, were you meeting the actors? Did you meet the director? How did that work?
 
John Cafferty: It was a double-edged sword. It got the music out there to the point where 40 years later the songs are still being played on radio. That’s a wonderful thing that happened, but it didn’t necessarily shine a spotlight on the band for any length of time.

Q: It led to people putting you in other movies. Movies sometimes have a longer shelf life than an album as a way to keep the cash coming in.

John Cafferty: It was a very unexpected surprise and turned into our career. We were a bar band extraordinaire. We were very good at what we did and still are. We have the history of rock and roll at our fingertips and that magic wand in our hands every Saturday night. That’s what we set out to do. 

I look over my shoulder at 74 and see a life of my choosing. I see days and nights spent doing what I wanted to do. The movie stuff was something that we never saw coming. It was just an unexpected surprise. It wasn’t anything that we pursued before “Eddie and the Cruisers.”

It was just that we’d had some success in a very unusual way. Not necessarily in the theaters, but on cable television when they played a film we provided music for. All of a sudden, we sold a million records from people watching it on television. Probably our little quirky footnote in the history of rock and roll was that we sold platinum records before they’re being played on HBO. To my knowledge, that didn’t happen before or it hadn’t happened to that extent at that particular point.

Q: It led you to other big films. That’s the craziest thing. It doesn’t always happen that way. You did “Rocky” and these other films.
 
John Cafferty: [chuckles] Sly was always wonderful to us. He was in a film called “The Lords of Flatbush” many years ago with Henry Winkler. You got Rocky and the Fonz before those characters were even created. The director of that film was Marty Davidson, who went on to direct “Eddie and the Cruisers”. 

Sly was aware of us, or at least of the project. When that film became a hit, especially the music, he was very happy with it. He was instrumental in finding a company to put out the soundtrack album. Somebody gives them a chance and they record a soundtrack. Their music comes out of the mouths of actors, but then goes on to triple platinum success and Top 10, number one records. You could write that story.

Q: What did you think of the story of “Eddie and the Cruisers?” 

John Cafferty: Marty made a very honest attempt at telling the story of a band. It wasn’t a big budget project, and he had a history of working with unknown talent, but talent nonetheless. The people who were in that movie went on to major successes, us being part of that.
 
I wasn’t really involved in the movie, so much as I was involved with the music. I didn’t really have a say in the film. I didn’t really have much input into it, other than every time Michael Pare opened his mouth on screen, my voice came out to the audience. I wish he had a guitar in his hand.

Q: Had you known the music producer/supervisor for the film, Kenny Vance, before the movie? Vance is in the movie.

John Cafferty: Kenny Vance went on to become one of my closest friends and one of my mentors in life. Not just for the music business, but how to become a man in this world. I always appreciated him. No, we didn’t know one another. I did know of him or his band anyways, because we were very steeped in the history of rock and roll. His band, Jay and the Americans, had just great songs and their producers were Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — the famed producers and songwriting team. 

To have Kenny welcome us into a family tree that traces back to Lieber and Stoller is a big honor. He’s a guy you need to talk to. That guy has more stories than you can believe. He opened for The Beatles and the Stones. He was on Ed Sullivan. He lived in the whole rock and roll fantasy.

He just made a documentary called “Heart & Soul” that’s unbelievable. It’s about the Doo-Wop era and some of the people in it. It got picked up by PBS. It’ll bring a tear to your eye. It’s just unbelievable.

Q: In the beginning, you had that association with Bruce Springsteen (whose sound was the inspiration for Eddie) coming out of that same sort of Roots Rock experience.

John Cafferty: It’s not a bad association. It’s a good association.

Q: It’s a great association. Your songs work just as well as many songs that Bruce Springsteen has produced. Just as that same association was laid on a bunch of other writers, songwriters like Elliot Murphy. It’s a great school to be in, or a great crowd to be a part of.

John Cafferty: The fact that he was a friend and offered so much encouragement both in the early days and even in recent years. I mean, you’re talking about a one in a billion songwriter. The guy plays stadiums in front of people who know every word to every song that he’s written. 

He’s an immense talent. For him to come and sit in with us and be on stage with us and talk to me about songwriting, talking shop, talking old rock and roll records. What we liked about ’em and, “Hey, do you remember the words to this? You remember the chords to that? And the drum sound to this?” It’s so much fun. I always saw it as a wonderful thing for us.

Q: This new album carries on your legacy. The opening song is fabulous and it leads right into a lot of great stuff.

John Cafferty: I didn’t really realize that people would think of it as being New York and New Jersey. It was actually California that I was talking about. My wife and I were living out there in the early eighties and I wrote a song about the reawakening of wanting to dream or continue to dream: let’s dream like young lovers out on the Palisades. It was about that moment of my life, and I guess it’s a good thing that people would hear East Coast in it as well. But that was a song about the West Coast.

Q: Talk about the songs on the album, some of their origins. I think of you as a purely East Coast band and a real grassroots guy when you’re coming out of Rhode Island as opposed to say LA or New York. You have these LA connections, as well. So, tell me a little more about the album.

John Cafferty: About the LA connection, you are correct in assuming that we’re an East Coast, born and raised in rock and roll band. That’s absolutely true. But when we tried to get a record deal for many years, one of the reasons that we took the Eddie and the Cruisers job was to hopefully attract record company interest in what we were doing. After I wrote all those songs, I went out there. My wife was going to school out there. 

We weren’t married at the time; she was out there studying photography. I told the band that whatever’s going to happen with our career, it’s probably going to happen out there. I don’t think they’re coming to Rhode Island to look for us. I’m going to go out there and if someone likes the film, maybe they’ll like what we do. That ended up being the case, and my wife and I spent a few years out there at that point.

Q: How did that influence further songs? Where did some of the other songs come from? Did you reconnect your East Coast past, or were the songs about specific people? 
 
John Cafferty: Musically, the whole album is sort of a reflection of the music that we grew up with. It’s colored by much of the ‘50s and ’60s music that inspired us to put instruments in our hands. We wear our influences on our sleeves. There’s bits and pieces of, or colors, not necessarily musical ideas. But there are colors from that music, sounds from that music or production styles that pay homage to the music we grew up with. 

We come from a tradition of rock and roll based in R&B and blues, and that’s how that tradition was passed on. People heard it, they picked it up, put their spin on it and left the breadcrumbs so that the person next in line could hear what you did and then find what influenced you. 

The record is very much that, musically. We’ve been going for 37 years, or at least we haven’t recorded new music in 37 years. We played new music in the clubs, and in the concert halls we played new music. I’ve written new music over the years, but we haven’t recorded it. It’s just that we’ve been out of the record business, so to speak. 

I always thought I was going to write. I always thought I was going to record the songs that I had written in the interim. But when I sat down to do it, all these new songs came out. It was a reflection of how I feel now. When I look over my shoulder, I see a life spent on doing something of my choosing. 

I’m blessed to have had that choice. And I’ve thought about where that choice came from and the people who made the sacrifices for me to be able to have the life that I’ve lived. It starts with me writing a song called “Palisades.” It’s about the reawakening of that dream, of wanting to creatively share what I was thinking about.

There’s a story being told that’s not really told sequentially. It’s just bits and pieces of things. I’m 21 in one song, I’m 47 in another song, I’m 13 in another. And when I look over my shoulder, that’s what I see. I think of my life in bits and pieces. I don’t see straight lines, I see moments of reflection, and that’s what the record is.

Q: At least three of the songs were written in 2023. Were they any reflection of the Pandemic — written during the pandemic — or is this all in the last year?

John Cafferty: We’ve been working on the record for three years. We had a 50th anniversary that came about. We’re still blowing out the candles and celebrating. Right around that same time, we had a Greatest Hits record come out on Iconoclassic Records.

My friend Jeremy Holiday, who had worked for Sony for many years, was familiar with our career. He called and asked me if I wanted to put a greatest hits record out. Our career is so entangled with films and different record companies and whatever. 

I didn’t think that it was possible, but he did. He put together a package that just said, “Here’s a band and these songs. These are the best of what they did.” He was able to put together a greatest hits package that doesn’t so much reflect on how the songs were used. They were reflecting that this is the work of a songwriter and his band. 

That was wonderful because that’s how we view it when we play these songs at night. I don’t think about …. well, this song was in “Eddie and the Cruisers” and this song was in “Something About Mary” and this song was in “Rocky.” I just think of it as: they’re all our songs that I wrote and were recorded by my band.

Q: In light of this association with movies, have you gotten to meet some of the actors either before, during, or after? Stallone is someone you’re friends with.
  
John Cafferty: I know the Farrelly brothers who are directors and writers; they’re Rhode Island guys. We’ve had a few songs in their films. They’ve been very kind to us over the years by putting our songs in there. They used to come, and rumor has it, sneak into the clubs when they were young and follow my band around. 

I can’t really say that I know a lot of the actors that were in the films that we did. I got a call a couple years ago, the guy looked up my phone and said, “Sylvester Stallone.” I said, “This can’t be real.” I picked it up and he said he was checking on my schedule. He saw that I was playing down in Atlantic City and that his brother, Frank, was playing down there at the same time. He wanted to know if I wanted to open the show for him at the Hard Rock Casino. They would film it for the “Families Stallone” show that they have on Paramount. 

We went out to dinner with those guys and hung out and had a ball. It was so fun. we’re still a Rhode Island band, so I’m not really involved with Hollywood on a day-to-day basis. Once in a while, I’ll get a call looking for something that I’ve done that they wanted to use in a film.

Q: You left LA and came back to Rhode Island. Have you ever come back to New York?

John Cafferty: We wanted to raise a family, and do it back here on the East Coast where our families were. We had a lot of fun living out in California for a brief time. And then we wanted to come home and bring up a family on the East Coast. We’ve had a wonderful life doing that. I got to be a little league coach during the week. Got to be a rock and roll star on the weekends. It was tremendous.

Q:  You’ve been with your wife all along. How many kids do you have? They’re probably adults now.

John Cafferty: It seems like more, but there’s just two of them. I have two sons. They both have their degrees from the University of Rhode Island in business. My oldest son, Shane, is in Hollywood. He’s a comedic actor and improv guy working with the UCB –– Upright Citizens Brigade. My youngest son, Jackson, is a great songwriter about to get signed to a record deal and you’ll probably be talking to him sooner than later. They’re both so talented, and I’m so happy that they’ve found a creative life.

Q: When you moved back to Rhode Island, was it Providence you’re in? Or did you go more out in the country?

Cafferty: It’s a pretty small place. You’re only a half hour from everything. So we’re down at the beach, the “Ocean State,” so we headed south. We’re down at the beach down by the University of Rhode Island. It’s very much a college town and a beach community. It’s wonderful down here.

Q:  The boardwalk is not so far away, like the Palisades. Is there a boardwalk for you?

Cafferty: I’m a half a mile from the ocean as the seagull flies, but yeah, it’s really beautiful here. I wouldn’t come in February, but other than that, it’s beautiful.

Q: Talk about the night of your recent The Cutting Room show where you premiered the album.

John Cafferty: Oh man, it was a very fun night. I have a great friend of mine, Tom Cuddy, who I knew when he was running Pro-FM here in Providence. He stayed in touch with me all these years and came to see me play up at Daryl Hall’s place in Pauling, New York. He heard about the greatest hits record coming out and came to touch base with us.
 
I told him that we were working on a new album and he said, “When you make the new record, we’ve got to have a night in New York to release it.” He followed through with that and put together this wonderful night at The Cutting Room. We just had so many friends and guys from the New York radio, and it was just unbelievable.

Q: Now that you’ve established your presence in New York, you’re going to come back and have a concert just so I can see you live.

John Cafferty: Steve Walter, the guy who owns The Cutting Room, said we have an open invitation. We’re going to take him up on it. It was a great spot. We haven’t played in the City in a long time. The last time I played in the City I was playing with South Side Johnny at Gary, US Bond’s birthday party at BB King’s. We went down and sang a few songs with Gary.

It’s not too big, it’s not too small. Steve, the guy who owns it, is a musician himself. He’s a Berkeley-educated guitar player. We had him up on stage with us. He plays his ass off. It was a very, very fun night.

Q: The next time you come, you get some of the classic people that you’ve worked with over the years. Get Kenny Vance in town.

John Cafferty: I was talking to him and he just played at Mohegan Sun. He did a thing over there with … I’m trying to think. I think Joey D was there, too. He does Doo-wop revival packages that he gets involved with. I know he did that with Bowser for quite a few years, and they were great shows. I always go to see it, but I couldn’t go because he was there last week.

Q: You’ve always been John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, but actually the Beaver Brown Band is really, basically you. It’s changed and evolved obviously for sad reasons that some of your original band mates have passed. Why did you maintain the Beaver Brown element and not just be John Cafferty?

John Cafferty: We’re very much a team, a family unit. We still have three of the original guys and myself. There’s Gary Gramolini, our guitar player who produced a record with me and Michael Antunes, who’s a sax player extraordinaire, was actually the sax player in “Eddie and the Cruisers.” He was in the film.

The guys who came in to keep the thing going with us, they’re guys that we’ve known for many, many years. It’s a small community of musicians here in Rhode Island and Southern Massachusetts, and we just kept it going.

Q: Now that you’ve kept it going and you’re on a roll and performing, do you see another album coming up in the near future? You’re not going to wait for another 37 years, in other words?

John Cafferty: To be honest with you, I didn’t even think that we were going to make this record. I had a bunch of songs before this record that I thought I was going to record but didn’t. We still had that, and I had a bunch of the songs that didn’t make the record. Not because they weren’t good enough –– they were every bit as good as the songs that came out –– but there just wasn’t room on the record. The record is so long, an hour and 10 minutes as it is. I didn’t want to make it longer. This album went through a lot of molding and shaping. 

There were different versions of it, and there were newer songs that I’ve written since I started mixing this record. We put a period at the end of the sentence and said, “Okay, this is the record.” I ended up breaking the record into chapters, little three-song chapters.

There’s four three-song chapters in it, and the songs are grouped together either musically or thematically. At the very end of the record is actually the prologue, which is a story about how I came to discover music in the first place as a kid. It found a very beautiful home at the end of the record.

Q: What was the first record you heard? And what was the first record that made you want to be making records?

John Cafferty: My parents grew up in the ’30s and ‘40s. They were very much radio people. Their entertainment came from a radio, so there was always a radio on wherever I was, whether it was in the kitchen or in the car or on the beach. There was always music in the air. I was drawn to it. I remember walking by my cousin Allen’s beach house — he’s a few years older than me — I had the baseball bat on my shoulder with the gloves sticking off the handle by his house. He was sitting on his porch with a suitcase, but it was a record player. He had a stack of 45s and he was playing “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy. 

The sound of that, the echo on the guitar and the sound of the drums and saxophone coming in to bring the excitement to it: it stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t really know why. I was a kid and got interested in playing the guitar, like a lot of musicians my age.

We went to the movie theater one day and saw the look on the faces of those guys from Liverpool and said, “Boy, does that look like fun?” [chuckles] Next thing I knew, me and my cousin Stevie were starting the band. We’re both in our 70s now and still going strong at it.

Q:  Do you remember the first record you bought?

John Cafferty: Boy, it might have been “Heartbreak Hotel” –– something like that. My mom really liked Elvis. She used to take me grocery shopping and I didn’t ask for anything. At the end of the cash register where you checked out, they had a wall with these spools on it, and there were 45s hanging on the spools. If I didn’t ask for anything, she would buy me a record. It was like the era of Elvis, he was making records and the Everly Brothers.

Those guys were part of the big bang of rock and roll. When we played at The Cutting Room, my wife and I took a walk and ended up out by the Brill Building [it housed offices and studios where some of the most popular American songs were written and was the center of the music industry that dominated in the early 1960s]. I had her take my picture in front of the Brill building. It seemed like in every interview I was doing, I was talking about how much I loved the music that came out in that era. That was the hotbed of it, right there in that building. All that magic that came out of there.

Q:  Of all the songs on the new record, which one do you think of as the most personal record and which one do you think of as sort of the potential hit?

John Cafferty: The most accessible song as a single would be “Day in the Sun,” because that song just sounds like it’s already on the radio. But I’m not really sure. I know that when people hear it, they’re singing it back to you with big smiles on their faces and jumping up onto the dance floor. “Day in the Sun” would be the single.

There’s a song called “Blue Moonlight Drive” that’s one of the most beautiful records that we ever made — a throwback to “Pet Sounds” in a way. Not that my voice sounds like the Beach Boys, but just the sort of the sparseness in the romanticism of it. I really liked that one. Personally, the title track (“Sound of Waves”) means a lot to me and my family. It’s pretty heartfelt.

Q: “Palisades” is a great rock and roll, kick-out-the-jams kind of start of the album. I thought that was fabulous. That worked for me.

Cafferty: That song is very welcoming. It’s got that feeling to it that it seemed like an obvious choice to open the record because it’s a very welcoming song. I mean, there’s a lot of our influences in there of R&B and guys who were influenced by songwriters that I look up to –– like Van Morrison, Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen. 

It’s about reawakening the feeling of wanting to recapture a spirit that we had in the days of old when the world was bright, shiny and new. It’s saying that I want to dream again of my life’s partner. Let’s dream just like young lovers out on the Palisades. I’m thinking I’m driving down or driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, with the top down in my Mustang and with my beautiful bride by my side.

Q:  Did you have a Mustang?

Cafferty: I did. I’m from Rhode Island. I wasn’t going to be out in California without being able to put the top down. I froze my ass off up here in Rhode Island. To be able to get out there and put the top down in February was pretty fun.

Q:  What is your background? Irish?

John Cafferty: Irish and French Canadian.

Q: Do you know where your family is from in Ireland?

John Cafferty: They’re from Cork, but my wife is full Italian. We grew up in a community where it’s around here. There’s a lot of mills and small towns that serviced those mills. A lot of the immigrants came over and met each other across the machines and the pews of the churches and the schools. A lot of those cultures intermingled and grew up with beautiful traditions and great food.

Q: Your family has a Catholic background. The kids have gone to a Catholic school –– that kind of thing, or not?

Cafferty: My kids didn’t, but I grew up in Catholic schools. My cousin Betty organized a trip for about 30 of us. We went over there, a bunch of cousins and took a little tour of Southern Ireland. It was so wonderful. I found myself drawn to the pubs. Not so much for the Guinness, although that was wonderful, but for the sound of the pubs.

I would find myself listening. It wasn’t the big ballads that I was listening for. It was the sound of the instrumentation, the reels that they would play. You would go into one bar and the guy would be playing piano with a guy who would be playing guitar. Another guy was playing a banjo and somebody had a fiddle and somebody had a flute. 

It was just the sound of it all. It was unbelievable. I was so drawn to it. There’s a song on our record called “The Hearts of the Mighty.” It has a bit of that in there, this big storytelling ballad. I don’t mean a slow song by the word “ballad.” I mean a storytelling song. 

A lot of the album “Sound of Waves” comes from that idea. It was just a big, long story of where my life came from. And it’s a story about the courage that people had in order to leave everything they knew and everyone they loved so they could get on a boat and follow a dream and a story.

They just took the boat into the setting sun and followed it to see where it would lead. There was no internet back then. It was just based on stories of a promise, or stories of a dream that they would hear. And they left their countries and came over here.

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