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.

Quote of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, on the ‘Heart of Rock’)

"The heart of rock will always remain a primal world of action.” —Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (2016)

Quote of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, Defining ‘A Good Song’)

“A good song gathers the years in. It’s why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it’s been written. A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.”—Bruce Springsteen, on “Born to Run” and other chestnuts in his massive catalogue, quoted in David Kamp, “The Book of Bruce,” Vanity Fair, October 2016

The new memoir by Bruce Springsteen is called—surprise, surprise!—Born To Run. But what seems to have emerged as a true surprise is the news that The Boss suffers from depression.

This really shouldn’t have come as a shock—as far back as the early 1990s, after the breakup of his first marriage, he had disclosed that he’d been in therapy, and more recently New Yorker editor David Remnick and Springsteen biographer Peter Ames Carlin have already revealed that the legendary singer-songwriter sensed a darkness not only at the edge of town but within himself. But I guess many people find it hard to believe that a performer with so much energy and joie de vivre in concert could feel such letdowns offstage.

The megabursts of attention for Springsteen lately—not just for his books, but for concerts that are setting records for length even for him—have sparked a reaction in some quarters. In the most polarizing election of my lifetime, I suppose it’s inevitable that even Springsteen is coming in for criticism, especially after terming Donald Trump "a moron."

A few of my Facebook friends, primarily conservative, have taken him to task for a variety of real or imagined sins—for instance, the declining quality of his songs, past infidelity, and even the nature of his philanthropies. (One especially vociferous person, offering no real evidence--how could she?-- suggested that he had B.O.!)

I could offer an extended defense of The Boss, but I doubt that it would change the minds of these people or others like them. Bitterness and skepticism run deep in our time, even among those we have learned to regard for yours with affection.

No rock ‘n’ roller gets through life without wounding or being wounded in turn, any more than you or I do. In any case, the best defense of Springsteen does not come from Springsteen's interviews, his new book, or even his life. It comes, as he indicates above, from the songs. A good song, as he says, “gathers the years in,” reminding us of the first time we heard them and taking on unexpected meaning with time.

And so, “Born To Run” endures, the same way that “Yesterday,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Fire and Rain,” and “Landslide” do, issuing from the deepest wellsprings of the heart, reminding us that we are not alone in times of tumult and trouble.

Quote of the Day (Bob Dylan, on Roy Orbison’s ‘Olympian’ Range)

"He [Roy Orbison] could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business."—Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume 1 (2004)

Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run is a kind of summation of all his musical influences. But, in the 1975 LP’s eight songs, there is only one reference to these idols: “Roy Orbison singing for the lonely,/Hey, that’s me and I want you only,” he serenades the object of his desire in the album’s classic opening track, “Thunder Road.”

A dozen years later, inducting his hero into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Springsteen encapsulated the quicksilver quality he sought on the album that made his reputation: “I wanted to make a record with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector. But most of all, I wanted to sing like Roy Orbison.” 

It was a natural—indeed, inevitable—desire, as attested to by another artist who rose to prominence in the Seventies, Tom Waits: “When you were trying to make a girl fall in love with you, it took roses, the Ferris wheel and Roy Orbison."

Roy Orbison, who suffered a fatal heart attack at age 52 at his mother’s Hendersonville, TN home on this date 25 years ago, knew all about the desperation and exhilaration summoned by The Boss. They came not just from his thrilling, three-octave range, but from a career packed with success and heartbreak.

Between 1960 and 1964, Orbison recorded nine Top Ten hits. These and other songs of his from that time will probably play, and be covered, so long as rock 'n' roll continues to exist: “Only the Lonely,” “Running Scared,” “Blue Angel,” “Crying,” “Dream Baby,” “In Dreams,” “It’s Over,” and “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

Unlike so many American artists who went into eclipse after the British Invasion, his star only grew more luminous: On one appearance at a 1963 tour with The Beatles in the U.K., just as Beatlemania was gathering momentum, he did 14 encores before Paul, John, George and Ringo could even get on stage. 

(On Slate, Forrest Wickman had a marvelous post earlier this year on the friendship and creative competition that resulted when the solo artist and the rising young group shared the bill. In the succinct words of Ringo Starr: “It was terrible, following Roy. He’d slay them and they’d scream for more.”)

What brought a downshift in his career were not any failings of his own, but simply fate. What looked to be a good shift to MGM turned out to be unfortunate, as his new label wanted a certain number of albums produced, no matter the quality. 

Worse were searing personal losses: the 1966 death of wife Claudette in a motorcycle accident, followed two years later by the death of two of his three children when his home in Hendersonville burned to the ground.

At least by the time of his own death, Orbison was able to bask in renewed appreciation of his work. The following was occurring within the last few years before his demise:

*Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame;

*David Lynch’s use of his music in the film Blue Velvet;

*A high-profile collaboration with Dylan, George Harrison, and Tom Petty in the supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys;

*New versions of his single “Crying” featuring Don McLean and K.D. Lang, in a Grammy-winning duet with Orbison himself;

*A magnificent concert (preserved on video as Roy Orbison and Friends–A Black and White Night Live), with appearances by Springsteen, Lang, Waits, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Warnes, T-Bone Burnette, Jackson Browne, and J. D. Souther;

*A recording of the CD Mystery Girl, which, when posthumously released in 1989, became the biggest- selling album of his career.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, on “The Hungry and the Hunted”)

“The hungry and the hunted explode into rock 'n' roll bands

That face off against each other out in the street down in Jungleland”—Grammy and Oscar-winning American rock 'n' roll singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, “Jungleland,” from the Born to Run LP (1975)

Thirty-five years ago today, amid breathless hype that some momentarily feared might cause a harmful backlash, Columbia Records released Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen. 

It was, of course, his make-or-break moment, when he leapt from being one of the “hungry and the hunted” artists—the kind who are one step from being dropped by their labels—to the performer who appeared simultaneously a few weeks later on the covers of Time and Newsweek.

The album can also be thought of as his transition point. Rock critic Jon Landau, brought on board to help bring order to the frustrating recording sessions and to help Springsteen better realize his vision, pressed for shorter, tighter songs. 

Soon, he was clashing with the singer’s producer-manager, Mike Appel, who found himself on the outside looking in, then pressed a lawsuit that sidelined Springsteen for a couple of years.

On “Jungleland,” the final song and dramatic peak of the album, Landau and Appel combined to produce something unique in Springsteen’s career. The tight, cohesive production owed much to the molding of pianist Roy Bittan, drummer Max Weinberg and rhythm guitarist Steve Van Zandt into the rest of the E Street Band—an aim of Landau’s.

But the long, suite-like structure of the song was the type of work Appel favored on Springsteen’s prior two albums—and you’ll not see anything of this kind again on any of the artist’s subsequent work (particularly Clarence Clemons’ majestic, magical two-minute sax solo, still a highlight of any Springsteen concert).

Born to Run made me a Springsteen fan for life. For myself and for many others, it remains his seminal work.