Exhibit Review: "‘Born To Run' at 50," Passaic County Arts Center, Hawthorne NJ

Fifty-one years ago this month, when Eric Meola came to photograph Bruce Springsteen for the upcoming song collection, Born To Run, the Columbia Records singer-songwriter had two albums under his belt that attracted little interest. It was a real question how long the label would retain this young musician whose talent hadn’t yet registered with the public.

That sense of everything riding on the present moment permeated the studio where Springsteen had been reworking his songs for months. Not surprisingly, Meola found “someone who had put his soul on the wire for the better part of a year to make eight songs.”

The intensity of one artist was matched by the one viewing and capturing his image. “I had a sense of the history unfolding in front of my camera,” Meola remembered. “I wanted to photograph that history more than anything I have ever worked on.”

The product of that session featuring Springsteen and saxophonist and onstage foil Clarence Clemons is at the heart of “Born To Run at 50,” an exhibition at the Passaic County Arts Center (PCAC) in Hawthorne, NJ, containing a sampling of items from the recently opened Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music at Monmouth University.

Three months ago, at the time the exhibit opened, I clipped an article out of my local paper, The Bergen Record, about this commemoration of that landmark album’s cultural impact and the aftermath of its success.  The other day, picking up that piece again, I wondered when I should see it.

At that point, a lyric from another Springsteen LP went through my mind: “Summer’s here and the time is right.” There was no doubt that I had to see this.

One photo plucked out of the Meola session, folded in half and wrapped around, ended up on the cover of Born To Run and found their way, Springsteen noted, in “the windows of every record store in America”: the one with him leaning on the cover of Clemons—“the big man with the big smile,” in Meola’s words.

But in truth, almost any of the more than two dozen outtakes displayed on the walls of the PCAC would have made for a compelling visual image of this turning point in The Boss’s life.

My favorite shows the same Springsteen attire (black leather jacket, tweed cap) as the album cover, but with sneakers hanging off the guitar and an “Elvis Fan Club of NYC” button on his jacket.

In addition to the evocative Meola photos, the exhibit contains other artifacts documenting Springsteen’s time in New Jersey in the two-year period between Born To Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, such as:

*A handwritten note addressed to the “landlordess” of the cottage where he composed Born To Run, apologizing for a later payment of a water bill (two humorous postscripts ask, “Do you like my classy writin’ paper?” and “I’m practicing my autograph. Whadya think?”

*An artistic recreation of the customized guitar featured on the cover of the album;

*A video from his acclaimed 1978 performances at the now-defunct Capitol Theatre in Passaic;

*A now-ragged sweater worn by The Boss thrown into the audience at one of these shows, then caught—and now displayed, like a precious relic, all these years later.

For longtime fans like myself, the exhibition (which runs through July 19 at the PCAC (in the John W. Rea House, 675 Goffle Road, Hawthorne) offers the opportunity to relive when the New Jersey rock ‘n’ roll scene (including good friend Southside Johnny) burst with vitality and the seemingly endless promise of being young and alive.

For later generations, it tells a story of how music was recorded, promoted, and performed long before the digital era utterly transformed how the industry reached millions of listeners worldwide.

The exhibit has whetted my interest in seeing what other events may be sponsored by PCAC. And, at some point, I’ll have to drive down to Monmouth County and spend a few hours at the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music.