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.

Film Reviews: New Musical Biopics, ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ and ‘Blue Moon’

Don’t expect either Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere or Blue Moon to resemble past musical biopics. Leave aside the issue of fidelity to fact. (Virtually all movies in this genre diverge from historical accuracy at least to some degree.)

What unites these glimpses into the careers and psyches of The Boss and American Songbook lyricist Lorenz Hart is a preference for a different kind of life story: not broad, years-spanning overviews of their subject, but ones focusing intently on narrow time frames.

You don’t have to look any further than Jamie Foxx in Ray or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody to know that such films can be Oscar bait, and the two films I’ll examine—with performances by Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen and Ethan Hawke as Hart—promise to be contenders at awards time, too.

Although Hawke effects more of a physical transformation than White, both actors ultimately aim to capture their subjects at turning points, when it’s a real question whether they will succumb to depression.

Based on Warren Zanes’ nonfiction account of the making of Nebraska, an instrumentally spare LP recorded on a 4-track recorder in Springsteen's New Jersey home, the title of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere strongly hints at the heavy psychic baggage he was carrying following the January 1981 conclusion of the tour to promote The River.

With the hurly-burly of the road over, Springsteen experienced a nervous breakdown, sparked by memories of a childhood shadowed by a father afflicted with then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder. At the same time, the rock ‘n’ roller was restless about Columbia Records’ demands for a blockbuster that would take his career to undreamed heights.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere does not dispense completely with all conventions of the biopic: there is a composite character, Springsteen’s waitress girlfriend (played movingly by Australian actress Odessa Young). 

But its sense of authenticity seems earned, not just in New Jersey towns like Freehold where Springsteen lived but also in considerable fidelity to the facts of his life in the period leading up to the September 1982 release of Nebraska.

Some conservative commentators on social media have chortled that the movie hasn’t enjoyed commercial success. (“Born To Flop” was one inevitably unimaginative encapsulation of this mindset.) 

Others, more charitably disposed to Springsteen, have wondered why the film couldn’t have picked a more upbeat period in his career, such as the epic recording sessions for his Born To Run breakthrough or the blockbuster Born in the USA.

I doubt if this was how screenwriter-director Scott Cooper viewed it, however. The period he depicts marked a point when, despite Columbia’s pressure—and even the puzzled acquiescence of manager and friend Jon Landau (an especially good Jeremy Strong)—Springsteen stayed true to his artistic vision with Nebraska, a spare LP that plumbed the depths of recession-battered Middle America.

Moreover, his decision to seek counseling for his longstanding depression—and his resulting closeness with his troubled father (played by Stephen Graham)—meant that he would step away from his private abyss and not become a rock ‘n’ roll casualty like Elvis Presley.

In contrast, we know from its opening scene that Blue Moon will be a show-business post-mortem, as a drunken Lorenz Hart stumbles on a street alone on a rainy night, and, we’re informed, dies of pneumonia. 

The film then flashes back eight months to March 1943, on the opening night of Oklahoma!—a project inaugurating a 17-year collaboration between Hart’s partner, composer Richard Rodgers, and a simpler, more dependable lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II.

Blue Moon (named, of course, for one of Rodgers and Hart’s most memorable hits) is, unlike Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, a talk-fest, taking place in the famed Manhattan restaurant Sardi’s on the post-premiere party for Oklahoma! The lyricist, conveying his congratulations to the new songwriting team, can’t help but snipe at their subject matter, so removed from the contemporary urban sensibility he cultivated.

Director Richard Linklater and screenwriter Robert Kaplow had a low bar to surmount in terms of cinematic treatments of Hart. With Words and Music (1948), MGM trotted out some of their more glittering stars of the time (Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh, and June Allyson), but by necessity remained silent on whether Hart was gay (a common assumption among his associates).

That kind of sanitization is not a problem in Blue Moon, which is far more forthright about Hart’s sexual orientation, alcoholism, friction with Rodgers (and the latter’s extramarital dalliances), and the songwriting team’s Jewish roots.

Linklater has had prior experience with narrowly framing the career of a show-business legend with his 2008 adaptation of Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles. 

But the task that the two collaborators set for themselves this time is considerably more difficult, as the camera is almost exclusively confined to a single room, without resorting to the unusual camera angles and other visual tricks employed by Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, in Dial M for Murder.

Implicitly, they trust that their potential audience—the kind that snaps up every bit of movie and Broadway musical lore (there are briefly, possibly apocryphal, appearances by E.B. White, "The Sting" director George Roy Hill, and a predictably precocious "Stevie" Sondheim)—will be as intoxicated by the quips of Hart ("a little touch of Larry in the night") as the lyricist was with alcohol. 

In this, they are helped enormously by the presence of Hawke, in a performance unlike any he has given before in his 40-year career.

Viewers will latch onto the radical physical changes (e.g., shaving his head and using what he calls “stagecraft” to appear shorter) that transformed him into the balding, gnomish Hart. But they’re likely to overlook how he virtually inhabited the witty but self-loathing character in virtually every frame of the movie.

Hawke conveys a whole range of emotions that often belie Hart’s surface bravado: self-consciousness, defensiveness, sensitivity, generosity, irresponsibility. This is a genius as unpredictable with his words as his work habits, leading to fissions in his relationship with the more organized Rodgers.

It's not a surprise that, in their ninth collaboration, Linklater has elicited such a strong performance by Hawke. 

But he has also found strong supporting players in Andrew Scott as Rodgers, Bobby Cannavale as the sympathetic bartender Eddie, and, donning a blond wig, Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth Weiland, Hart's "protegee," a Yale student and aspiring production designer.

 (Kaplow bought from a bookseller carbon copies of her letters to the lyricist, inspiring much of the movie's dialogue.)

Neither Blue Moon nor Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has been a box-office success. Neither is what might be called a crowd-pleasing feature. But with time, both will find wider audiences on streaming platforms for their piercing looks at the loneliness lurking behind so many of the famous.

Quote of the Day (Flannery O’Connor, on the Direction of a Life)

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”—American novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor (1926-1964), Wise Blood: A Novel (1952)

I was glad to see, in the new film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, not only that The Boss is reading a Flannery O'Connor book, but also that his producer and manager Jon Landau recalls this quote for him.

 I hope that more readers will be curious enough to seek out more work by this startlingly original voice in American fiction.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, on ‘When All the Summers Have Come to an End’)

“I’ll see you in my dreams
When all the summers have come to an end
I’ll see you in my dreams
We’ll meet and live and love again.” —American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, “I'll See You in My Dreams,” from his CD Letter to You (2020)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, on Flannery O'Connor and ‘The Intangible Mysteries of Life’)

“[T]he short stories of Flannery O'Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.”—American rock ‘n’ roll legend Bruce Springsteen, “By the Book: Bruce Springsteen,” The New York Times Book Review, Nov. 2, 2014

Flashback, January 1973: Springsteen’s Debut LP, ‘Greetings From Asbury Park,’ Released

Fifty years ago this month, a 23-year-old rock ‘n’ roller, crafting songs more than an hour outside New York City, sought in his first album to gain a national following and shake what an earlier New Jersey singer would call “these little town blues.”

At that time, despite the commitment of the Columbia Records label, Bruce Springsteen did not measure up to initial expectations with Greetings from Asbury Park. Only 25,000 records were sold then—the result of absent guitar solos, failure to fit into then-current pop music trends, a sound that lacked the tightness and electricity of his live shows, and a musician who had not found his unique voice yet.

But two and a half years later, when Born to Run gave Springsteen an across-the-board radio breakthrough at last, fans like me flocked to record stores for his two other albums to that point, including Greetings.

Ensuring the collection’s continuing longevity, other artists would cover several of its songs, and Springsteen would incorporate all 11 songs into his epic concerts over the following half-century, with varying degrees of frequency.

In a David Brooks piece 11 years ago, the New York Times columnist cited Springsteen as exemplifying “artists who have the widest global purchase [being] also the ones who have created the most local and distinctive story landscapes. 

The work in which the musician began to create that landscape was Greetings—with the album titled and designed like a postcard, unapologetically proclaiming the musician’s New Jersey roots.

Isolation from music centers like New York, Los Angeles, Nashville, and Detroit both hurt and helped Springsteen. It meant that he would start without a network of influencers and fellow musicians who could have boosted his career.

However, plying his trade as a rising bar-band presence, he would not be unduly limited by a single genre, and could gauge, on a micro scale, how to bring audiences to their feet again and again.

Springsteen’s firm embrace of his Jersey Shore roots did more than just mark him as a unique musical personality. It also gave exposure to other local musicians, such as good friend and future bandmate “Miami Steve” Van Zandt and “Southside Johnny” Lyon, and ensured that the fate of Asbury Park—a shore town that had fallen on hard times—would not be forgotten by those who encountered the community through the music.

To their credit, Columbia Record executives John Hammond and Clive Davis recognized that Springsteen had talent. But they weren’t sure what to make of it, or him.

The dominant template for the music scene of the time was the confessional singer-songwriter movement—not just Bob Dylan, but newly ascendant stars like James Taylor, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Jackson Browne. Coming from the folk music scene, they could operate solo with a single instrument—a guitar or piano.

All songs have to start from somewhere, and Springsteen’s came together in particularly unprepossessing conditions. 

Several of them were written on a piano in an abandoned second-floor beauty salon in Asbury Park, while sessions took place at 914 Studios in Blauvelt, N.Y. There, Springsteen and his musicians could record cheaply and, because the studio was adjacent to a Greek diner, eat cheaply, too.

(In contrast to later Springsteen albums, there was little time to perfect the product—only two weeks for the 11 songs, unlike for the marathon Born to Run sessions two years later, which took 14 months—with six devoted to the title tune itself.)

Hammond, the legendary record producer who had signed such acts as Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Leonard Cohen, wanted what he heard at Springsteen’s audition: a solo act. So did Springsteen’s manager and producer at the time, Mike Appel. 

So Springsteen could forget about having his band as an integral part of his first release. He was lucky he could get any of them onto half of the songs originally submitted. (Even best friend “Miami Steve” only got onto one song, “Lost in the Flood”—Springsteen would be the lone electric guitar player on the album.)

Greetings from Asbury Park, then, wasn’t the album Springsteen wanted to make but the one he could make. 

Clive Davis, then head of Columbia Records, rejected Springsteen’s first group of songs, insisting that he couldn’t hear a hit in any of them.

In response, the two songs that Springsteen came up with, “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night,” introduced into the mix Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, the charismatic saxophonist who would become the indispensable on-stage foil for “The Boss” for the next three decades.

Clarence’s “cool saxophone,” Springsteen wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run, “made a big difference”: “This was the most fully realized version of sound that I had in my head that I would get on my first album.

Still, for all the pleasure that Springsteen took in seeing his work out in the market, Greetings faced significant headwinds. Even with the likes of Dylan and Neil Young paving the way, Springsteen’s vocals were unusual for these times—and it could be tough for some listeners to get past his raspy tones in order to decipher his lyrics about boardwalk bohemians, dreamers, hangers-on, and misfits. 

Moreover, the label’s “New Dylan” label did no favors for Springsteen. It opened him up to criticism that he was derivative, a creature of hype, while ignoring the host of other influences that would soon become apparent in his work: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Gary “U.S.” Bonds, Roy Orbison, Van Morrison, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Hank Williams, Pete Seeger, and Phil Spector.

Nevertheless, for those who came to the album and its creator later, there was something distinctive about what Wall Street Journal contributor Marc Myers termed earlier this month Springsteen’s “brand of machine-guy storytelling peppered with unmoored characters and seedy imagery.” It was raw and alive.

The LP just needed the conditions that would be in place for Born to Run two years later: a band of brothers forged under fire—their leader’s pushing himself and them to their creative and physical limits—and the desperate sense, in the studio and even in the lyrics, that life was riding on this moment.

For many of  us venturing outside the state, The Boss was giving us something we didn't have before: not an embattled identity but a source of pride. And, instead of Tony Soprano's "family" of not-so-good-fellas or the reality-show party animals of "Jersey Shore," Springsteen was demonstrating the wonders that could be created from local color.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, for Those We’ll ‘Meet and Live and Love Again’)

“I'll see you in my dreams
When all the summers have come to an end
I'll see you in my dreams
We'll meet and live and love again.”—American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” from his Letter to You CD (2020)
 
Bruce Springsteen, my favorite musician, was born 72 years ago today in Long Branch, New Jersey. My favorite album of his nearly five-decade career remains the first one I encountered by him as a high-school sophomore, Born To Run, a song collection revolving about youth, yearning and searching and running for a place in the world.
 
But over the last year, I have also felt an emotional tug towards the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer’s Letter to You. Inspired partly by the loss of former bandmate George Theiss, it is not about lives in motion, but those at eternal rest. Rather than the summers of Springsteen’s youth, heated by the desires for love and all his music could achieve, he is now, as in the attached photo, accepting that winter is here.
 
Like many other people—and particularly those in my baby boomer age group—I’ve lost more than the usual number of relatives and friends in the last year, to both COVID and non-COVID-related issues. So, whenever I’ve listed to The Boss’s mournful meditation on loss and mortality, their images come to mind with insistent poignancy, along with the assurance I share with Springsteen that we’ll rejoice again in the afterlife.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Sopranos,’ With a Plausible Excuse for a NJ Traffic Jam)

Christopher Moltisanti [played by Michael Imperioli] [to Uncle Tony and Silvio, on why he’s late]: “The highway was jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.”— The Sopranos, Season 5, Episode 12, “Long Term Parking,” original air date May 23, 2004, teleplay by Terence Winter, directed by Timothy Van Patten

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, Paying Tribute to a Stock-Car Legend)

“James Dean in that mercury '49

Junior Johnson runnin' through the woods of Caroline.”— Rock 'n' roll \singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, “Cadillac Ranch,” from his LP The River (1980)

I have just quoted from one song where Junior Johnson, who died this past week, is alluded to fleetingly but explicitly. But the NASCAR driver inspired another tune released several years before in which, though he is not specifically mentioned, the lyrics refer to his against-the-odds career: “I Got a Name,” written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, which became a posthumous hit for Jim Croce.

“I Got a Name” is the theme for the 1974 movie The Last American Hero, based on a 1965 essay by Tom Wolfe. In its way, that piece went against the odds, too. Johnson had long been wary about speaking to reporters about how he got his start outrunning the law as a moonshiner in North Carolina.

But, as Michael Lewis recounted in this November 2015 profile of Wolfe for Vanity Fair, the novelist—at that point, still writing for editor Clay Felker—won Johnson’s confidence and came up with a pioneering example of The New Journalism. At one stroke, it cemented the legend of both its subject and author.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, on the Meager Comfort of ‘Murder Incorporated')

“No matter where you step you feel you're never out of danger

So the comfort that you keep's a gold-plated snub-nose thirty-two.”—Bruce Springsteen, “Murder Incorporated,” from his Greatest Hits CD (1995)

The news of the hit on reputed Gambino crime family boss Frank Cali brought to mind for me—and, I suspect, many other people—memories of the last big rub-out of such a high-ranking chieftain, Paul Castellano in 1985. It represented an eerie reminder of the continuing relevance of Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, which became a publishing sensation this month 50 years ago.

It also brought to mind what remains, I think, one of the most ferociously powerful songs in the entire catalogue of Bruce Springsteen. His concise lyrics summon, quickly and effectively, the fear and loss of soul of the “made men” who go mad in organized crime. 

For a particularly blistering performance of this classic, I urge you to view this YouTube clip of Springsteen on David Letterman back in 1995, when The Boss made the most of his first appearance with The E Street Band in God knows how long.

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)