\n<\/p>\n
\n\thttps:\/\/variety.com\/2025\/music\/news\/bruce-springsteen-nebraska-deluxe-release-electric-sessions-1236507655\/Former and current bandmates, Columbia Records alumni, ex-managers, and a whole retinue of photographers, producers, engineers, and roadies who worked with Bruce Springsteen during the time he wrote and recorded his third album, \u201cBorn to Run,\u201d all gathered in front of a capacity crowd at Monmouth University on Saturday to share their memories and stores about the album that made the Boss a superstar. <\/p>\n
\n\tSponsored by the Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music (which is housed at Monmouth), the event \u2014 which arrived at a high-profile moment around a different Springsteen album, with the Telluride Film Festival premiere of the \u201cNebraska\u201d-era biopic \u201cDeliver Me From Nowhere\u201d and the announcement of the long-awaited expanded version of the album all taking place last week \u2014 was part of a multi-day series honoring the record\u2019s role in Springsteen\u2019s career and its place in American music history.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut this was still rock and roll, so there were special guests, audibles, arguments, agreements, reunions and surprises. One of the latter was the schedule slot labelled \u201cLIVE PERFORMANCE: 5:15pm.\u201d The schedule didn\u2019t list speakers or panel participants, but there was a line of large draped items along the back of the stage of Monmouth University\u2019s Pollak Theatre that looked suspiciously like amplifiers, drums and other musical equipment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe mystery grew larger during introductory remarks pointing out the 11 a.m. lunch break, and noting that everyone needed to be back at the theater in a timely manner so they could once again lock up their phones in Yondr pouches before the afternoon\u2019s events. This was a condition of the previous evening during a screening of rare film footage from the \u201cBorn to Run\u201d recording sessions, assembled by Springsteen\u2019s de facto video archivist, Thom Zimny. But no one in the audience was expecting that they\u2019d be singing along to \u201cBorn to Run\u201d and \u201cThunder Road\u201d with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (along with special guests\/former E Street bandmembers David Sancious and Ernest \u201cBoom\u201d Carter) by the end of the day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAn early conversation innocuously titled \u201cAt the Crossroads: Bruce Springsteen & Columbia Records\u201d gave the audience a jolt of early energy. Facilitated by musicologist\/DJ Rich Russo, the panel gathered three former Columbia employees (Peter Philbin, Paul Rappaport, and Michael Pillot) who had been staunch loyalists and supporters of Bruce Springsteen within Columbia when the rest of the label wasn\u2019t so sure about this new guy who wasn\u2019t selling as many records as they at first thought he would. They were joined by Mike Appel, Springsteen\u2019s manager at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe execs regaled the audience with endless stories about recalcitrant radio programmers, like a certain Los Angeles station\u2019s music director who offered the feedback \u201cI think he mumbles a lot,\u201d upon first hearing \u201cBorn to Run\u201d; Rappaport later sent that PD a telegram reading \u201cGuess who just mumbled his way into the top ten in the first f*cking week.\u201d Other radio stations may have found themselves the recipient of a Christmas stocking filled with actual coal courtesy manager Appel, who was dismayed at certain radio stations \u2014 like New York City\u2019s own WNEW-FM \u2014 who refused to play Springsteen on the air. Appel also regaled the audience with his strategy that resulted in Springsteen getting on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Apparently, he also turned down an interview request from Playboy because they wouldn\u2019t give Bruce the cover. \u201cI told them it would be more exciting.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAlso of note in the morning programs was the conversation between photographer Eric Meola \u2014 the man responsible for the images on the cover of Born to Run \u2014 and Springsteen\u2019s younger sister Pam, also a professional photographer. Pam Springsteen was an engaging interviewer who brought technical knowledge and understanding to the conversation as well as an unsurprising warmth for the subject of Meola\u2019s camera. (The archives are sponsoring an exhibit of Meola\u2019s work from the cover session in a gallery on the Monmouth campus that\u2019s open to the public until early December.)<\/p>\n
\n\tReturning from lunch break, the printed schedule was upended, pushing back a session entitled \u201cWriting \u2018Born to Run,\u2019 the Song.\u201d All was forgiven when two chairs were brought out and the center\u2019s executive director, Robert Santelli, introduced his guest, the person who would know the most about the topic at hand: Mr. Bruce Springsteen. Over the course of the next 40 minutes, Springsteen \u2014 clad in his usual onstage gear of black pants and vest over a gray button-down shirt, looking sharp and newly-coiffed \u2014 would willingly talk about how he still writes in spiral notebooks, and how he heard that he\u2019d sold 23,000 copies of his first record and wondered, \u201cWho are all these people buying that record?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tSpringsteen walked through the six months it took him to write the song, talking about listening to records at his \u201cshotgun shack\u201d at 7 \u00bd West End Court in Long Branch, and all of the individual ingredients he absorbed to inspire what he thought he wanted his next record to sound like: Duane Eddy, Phil Spector, the Beach Boys. \u201cGuys, cars and girls, the basic subjects of rock and roll\u201d \u2014 but he also knew he didn\u2019t want to sound like a retro act. He also talked about how he taught himself to play piano by figuring out how to transpose guitar chords into piano chords while visiting maternal grandmother\u2019s house, and that that Aeolian spinet piano ended up in his house in Long Branch, and it\u2019s what he wrote the record on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe next panel \u2014 \u201cWriting \u2018Born to Run,\u2019 the Album\u201d \u2014 brought Springsteen back out to sit with manager Jon Landau along with biographer Peter Ames Carlin. Springsteen shared that he\u2019d recently taken a drive in the car with Jimmy Iovine \u2014 who was a young and aspiring engineer as he lied his way into the session once it had moved to the Record Plant \u2014 and they\u2019d driven through Asbury Park and Springsteen\u2019s actual hometown of Freehold, NJ, ending their trip at the house the record was written in. Springsteen recounted that when he finished \u201cBorn to Run\u201d he brought the tape home to Long Branch and played it, and when it was done, he thought, \u201cYeah, that\u2019s how I fucking sound\u2026it\u2019s still one of my favorite recordings.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe relationship between artist and manager was best illuminated with this exchange, whether or not one agrees: \u201cWe were gonna make the greatest rock and roll record of all time,\u201d Springsteen said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we did,\u201d answered Landau, quietly.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe symposium proceeded to take things to 11 with the next panel, promising a roundtable discussion on the making of the record. Landau and Springsteen returned to the stage along with ex-manager Appel, producer Jimmy Iovine, and the surviving members of the E Street Band from that time period: guitarist Steve Van Zandt, bassist Garry Tallent, pianist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg. For fans, it was fascinating to watch each person on the stage paying attention to the others as they talked \u2014 the facial expressions, the smiles, the nods of acknowledgement and understanding. Garry Tallent remained steadfast that he did not remember specifics of anything he was asked; Roy Bittan had nothing but good and positive words to say about every person he played with.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tSteve Van Zandt got to retell the legendary story of the moment he joined the band. He had been hanging out in the studio, and the highly-paid professional session horn players that had been brought in for \u201cTenth Avenue Freeze-Out\u201d were not playing what anyone wanted them to play because no one in the studio knew how to tell them what they wanted, especially Springsteen. He asked Steve what he thought; Steve told his friend that he thought it sucked. His friend demanded that he go in and fix it. Van Zandt walked into the studio, told the horns to throw their charts away, and sang them their parts. \u201cThose guys are screwing up my friend\u2019s record,\u201d is how he viewed the situation.<\/p>\n
\n\tConversely, this was Garry Tallent\u2019s contribution to this panel:<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cGarry, do you have any perspective from the bass player?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tTallent turned on his microphone. \u201cIt took forever.\u201d He turned it back off. When pressed, he turned the mic back on. \u201cIt had to be done, so I did it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThat\u2019s the bass player,\u201d Springsteen exclaimed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tRoy Bittan: \u201cHis playing was spectacular.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIovine was possibly the most visibly emotional during the roundtable, explaining how he\u2019d never really mixed an album on his own before, but that he was sure he could do it. He did a dead-on imitation of what Springsteen sounded like standing behind him night after night: \u201cNo. Again. Again. Again.\u201d Iovine explained that he had no idea who Springsteen was \u2014 \u201cI never been in New Jersey!\u201d he joked \u2014 and that he had never seen anything like the intensity offered by Springsteen and E Street in their recording sessions, but that he owed them everything because they taught him \u201chow to be a person.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tBut the final moment of the panel had clearly been planned, as there was an electric guitar adjacent to Van Zandt. Springsteen prefaced it by saying, \u201cThis is the greatest contribution Steve Van Zandt has ever made to my career.\u201d On one of his visits to the studio, Van Zandt pointed out that he liked a certain minor chord on a riff in \u201cBorn to Run.\u201d But he had an advantage in that he hadn\u2019t heard the song several hundred times already, so he heard the chords more clearly and it was not what Springsteen had intended. \u201cIt would have been a total failure,\u201d he insisted, had Van Zandt not pointed it out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThere\u2019s a shop in Asbury Park that sells a now-infamous t-shirt that reads, \u201cI HEARD BRUCE MIGHT SHOW UP.\u201d Springsteen\u2019s appearance at the symposium hadn\u2019t been guaranteed, but his active, open participation on the panels was delightful and a little astonishing. And once he was there, it wasn\u2019t out of the question that he\u2019d pick up an acoustic guitar. But to get the entire E Street Band onstage \u2014 along with Boom Carter and David Sancious, who both played on \u201cBorn to Run\u201d (their only released E Street Band recordings) \u2014 playing a full and loud rendition of both \u201cThunder Road\u201d and \u201cBorn to Run\u201d in a 700-seat theater was absolutely glorious.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Springsteen Archives have staged previous symposia in honor of the first two Springsteen records (\u201cGreetings from Asbury Park\u201d and \u201cThe Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle\u201d) but those events were smaller by comparison to this year\u2019s. According to Santelli, one of the goals of this year\u2019s event was to \u201calso demonstrate the kinds of programs the public can expect from the BSACAM once our brand-new home opens next year.\u201d This year\u2019s symposium has set a high bar to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
https:\/\/variety.com\/2025\/music\/news\/bruce-springsteen-nebraska-deluxe-release-electric-sessions-1236507655\/Former and current bandmates, Columbia Records alumni, ex-managers, and a whole retinue of photographers, producers, engineers, and roadies who worked with Bruce Springsteen during the time he wrote and recorded his third album, \u201cBorn to Run,\u201d all gathered in front of a capacity crowd at Monmouth University on Saturday to share their memories and stores<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[5173,294,2493,2642,295,4885,12124,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-19740","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-born","9":"tag-bruce","10":"tag-performance","11":"tag-run","12":"tag-springsteen","13":"tag-surprise","14":"tag-symposium","15":"tag-talk"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}