Springsteen Challenge Day 5: Favorite Bruce Photo

It’s day five, and today’s Bruce challenge prompt is: your favorite Bruce photo.

This is another prompt that I’m going to choose to define on my own.  I’ve been to more than a dozen Bruce shows in my lifetime.  I’ve been up against the stage, I’ve been in what I assume to be the furthest possible seat from the stage at Madison Square Garden, I’ve been three rows from the top of the Gund Arena in Cleveland, and I’ve been front and center on the Oval at Ohio State as Bruce was introduced by former Senator and Astronaut John Glenn.  I’ve seen Bruce close up and far away enough that I’ve got some phone pictures.  In fact, there is one phone picture that, when I sent it to my wife, who was working for the newsmedia in New York at the time, she had a friend make a comment “My friend may actually kill himself if he sees that photo.  Let me send it to him.”  But, that’s a story for another prompt.

There are plenty of iconic Bruce photos.  There’s him, wearing the worn out plain white t-shirt, a leather jacket on him, looking bemused at the camera on the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town.  There’s his ass on the cover of Born in the USA.  That bizarre out of focus cover of The Rising (still the greatest musical response to the September 11^th terror attacks!  Screw you, Gawker!) of which I don’t fully gather the symbolism.  Bruce is a heavily photographed man.  He even wound up in some engagement photos of a young couple who were conducting an amateur shoot on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore.  My wife and I were not that couple.

In my estimation, the most iconic photo of Bruce Springsteen is the one taken by Eric Meola, of Bruce, laughing in his leather jacket, grasping the neck of Excalibur, leaning on the Big Man’s shoulder as Clarence stares into the eye of the camera. Scraggly and unkempt, Bruce portrays the vagabond who’s story Born to Run traces in broad strokes.  Meola published a book of the unused photographs from that session, and Backstreets.com has poached a few for their annual Christmas card.  There are some where it’s just Bruce, laughing with the Guitar.  Some more serious, some in which Bruce has his back to the camera, and Clarence is more prominently featured.  But the millisecond captured by Meola’s camera is what became the cover of the album that rammed through our doors, busting them off the hinges and screaming so loud to be heard in the far reaches of our minds and souls. 

Given everything that could’ve happened in that millisecond – it’s mere happenstance.  It’s a mitzvah, a once in a lifetime shutter click, a serendipitous confluence of luck and the photographer’s gifted eye that snapped that shot.  Studying the photo, I notice new things each time. I compare what I know of the guitar – that beat up, well oiled Fender Telecaster with the Esquire neck with what is recorded in 1975.  I only recently realized Bruce is wearing his Elvis fan club button.

 

The button itself is turned away from the light source, bathing it in shadows, obscuring it from the lens. I love that photograph.  Born to Run is the first album I owned on vinyl (purchased in 2006.  I was born in 1984.  It was not the first Bruce album I’ve owned, just the first on vinyl) and I studied it like the zapruder film, every square inch of it. I made sure it was an original press copy* before I bought it on eBay for 8 bucks.

*-Original pressings of Born to Run misspelled Jon Landau’s name on the back of the record sleeve as “John Landau.” In order to correct this, Columbia Records printed a small, correct sticker to cover the misspelling. Mine has this sticker. Again, eight bucks on eBay.  Boom goes the dynamite.

This is my favorite photograph of Bruce Springsteen:

But this prompt is for my favorite Bruce photo.  It doesn’t say it’s for my favorite photo of Bruce Springsteen.  Again, that’s another story for another day.

As many of my yarns go, this one unravels back to my wife.  She has put up with my Springsteen fandom despite being the most casual of fans of Bruce.  She puts up with me talking incessantly about new albums, tours, GA tickets, Backstreets.com, BTX, and hopefully set lists to Springsteen concerts I’m about to attend with my buddy Erik, who introduced me to Springsteen’s music.  She even went out and bought me a bunch of Springsteen 45s a few years ago for Christmas. It was one of the greatest presents she could’ve gotten me.

When we got engaged, we insisted on doing something for our save the date that was memorable.  We wanted it to be something that reflected our personalities.  We both love laughing, and said to one another a long time ago that we want to have fun with life. We tease and needle each other, and we race to make a joke. So, when I suggested we make our wedding picture an homage to Springsteen, she was open to it, despite the fact that everyone would know it was more my doing than hers.

I must say, she hopped right on board – the graphical effects are all hers.  She would not rest until we had the pencil thin font that was on the cover of Born to Run.  We looked at each photo after we took them.  We were painstaking in our search for the right one.  As soon as we took this one, we knew it was the one:

Obviously, it’s not a one-to-one comparison.  My wife is not a large African American man. And I’m not wearing a leather jacket (we tried - it didn’t work.)  I also have a guitar hero guitar in my hand there.  But, like with the Born to Run cover photo, in which Eric Meola describes it as a random click of the camera – Bruce grasping his guitar, and Clarence giving just the right look, this was the golden shot of the day – the photos before and after are just a bit off.  The one that ended up on the cover was the one. 

I always receive two comments on this “Save the Date”:

A)   Awesome, man. You nailed it. How’d you get your wife to go along?

and

B)   Her bemused face makes the whole photo.

And they are right.  She couldn’t deny that the face, the image, the framing of the shirt (my Elvis fan club button – so many people look right past it!) all make this a serendipitous shot. We had a digital camera taking timed photos, so we got one shot, with no feedback as to how we looked.  We just nailed it. She may not have liked that she wasn’t smiling on our save the date, but we knew our friends would know that this photo was exactly what they could expect from us. And I thank her for this leeway – this was a concession, no doubt, another agreement to allow Bruce to wedge his way into our relationship. But, just like our relationship, we captured lightning in a bottle.  We are a one in a million snapshot, and that’s why this photo, not of Bruce, unless you count my shirt, is my favorite “Bruce Photo.”

Tomorrow’s prompt: Favorite Bruce Album (Studio)