Here are the covers and articles from that monumental week.

Rock's New Sensation
The Backstreet Phantom of Rock

By Jay Cocks, et al Time Magazine October 27, 1975

The rock-'n'-roll generation: everybody grows up by staying young.

Bruce Springsteen is onto this. ln fact, he has written a song about it:

I pushed B-52 and bombed 'em with the blues With my gear set stubborn on standing I broke all the rules, strafed my old high school Never once gave thought to landing. I hid in the clouded warmth of the crowd, But when they said "Come down" I threw up. Ooh... growin' up.

He has been called the "last innocent in rock." which is at best partly true, but that is how he appears to audiences who are exhausted and on fire at the end of a concert. Springsteen is not a golden California boy or a glitter queen from Britain. Dressed usually in leather jacket and shredded undershirt, he is a glorified gutter rat from a dying New Jersey resort town who walks with an easy swagger that is part residual stage presence, part boardwalk braggadocio. He nurtures the look of a lowlife romantic even though he does not smoke, scarcely drinks and disdains every kind of drug.

In all other ways, however, he is the dead-on image of a rock musician: Street smart but sentimental, a little enigmatic, articulate mostly through his music. For 26 years Springsteen has known nothing but poverty and debt until, just in the past few weeks, the rock dream came true for him. ("Man, when I was nine I couldn't imagine anyone not wanting to be Elvis Presley.") But he is neither sentimental nor superficial. His music is primal, directly in touch with all the impulses of wild humor and glancing melancholy, street tragedy and punk anarchy that have made rock the distinctive voice of a generation.

Springsteen's songs are full of echoes -- of Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley, of Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly. You can also hear Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and the Band weaving among Springsteen's elaborate fantasias. The music is a synthesis, some Latin and soul, and some good jazz riffs too. The tunes are full of precipitate breaks and shifting harmonies, the lyrics often abstract, bizarre, wholly personal.

Springsteen makes demands. He figures that when he sings

Baby this town rips the bones from your back It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap We gotta get out while we're young 'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Everybody is going to know where he's coming from and just where he's heading.

Springsteen first appeared in the mid-'60s for a handful of loyal fans from the scuzzy Jersey shore. Then two record albums of wired brilliance ("Greetings from Asbury Park. N.J." and "The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle") enlarged his audience to a cult. The albums had ecstatic reviews -- there was continuing and growing talk of "a new Dylan," -- but slim sales. Springsteen spent nearly two years working on his third album, "Born to Run," and Columbia Records has already invested $150,000 in ensuring that this time around, everyone gets the message.

The album has made it to No. 1, the title track is a hit single, and even the first two albums are snugly on the charts. Concerts have sold out hours after they were announced. Last Thursday Springsteen brought his distinctively big-city, rubbed-raw sensibility to a skeptical Los Angeles, not only a major market but the bastion of a wholly different rock style. It remained to be seen how Springsteen would go down in a scene whose characteristic pop music is softer, easier, pitched to life on the beaches and in the canyons, hardly in tune with his sort of dead-end carnival. Springsteen's four-day stand at a Sunset Strip theater called the Roxy was a massive dose of culture shock that booted everyone back to the roots, shook 'em up good and got 'em all on their feet dancing.

Even the most laid-back easy rocker would find it tough to resist his live performance. Small, tightly muscled, the voice a chopped-and-channeled rasp, Springsteen has the wild onstage energy of a pinball rebounding off invisible flippers, caroming down the alley past traps and penalties, dead center for extra points and the top score.

Expecting a monochromatic street punk, the L.A. crowd got a dervish leaping on the tables, all arms and flailing dance steps, and a rock poet as well. In over ten years of playing tanktown dates and rundown discos, Springsteen has mastered the true stage secret of the rock pro: he seems to be letting go totally and fearlessly, yet the performance remains perfectly orchestrated. With his E Street Band, especially Clarence Clemons' smartly lowdown saxophone, Springsteen can caper and promenade, boogie out into the audience, recite a rambling, funny monologue about girl watching back in Asbury Park or switch moods in the middle of songs.

He expects his musicians to follow him along. Many of the changes are totally spur of the moment, and the band is tight enough to take them in stride. "You hook on to Bruce on that stage and you go wherever he takes you," says Clarence Clemons. "It's like total surrender to him." A Springsteen set is raucous, poignant, brazen. It is clear that he gets off on the show as much as the audience, which is one reason why a typical gig lasts over two hours. The joy is infectious and self-fulfilling. "This music is forever for me," Springsteen says. "It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for."

He once cautioned in a song that you can "waste your summer prayin' in vain for a savior to rise from these streets," but right now Springsteen represents a regeneration, a renewal of rock. He has gone back to the sources, rediscovered the wild excitement that rock has lost over the past few years. Things had settled down in the '70s: with a few exceptions, like Paul Simon, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt, there was an excess of showmanship, too much din substituting for true power, repetition -- as in this past summer's Rolling Stones tour -- for lack of any new directions. Springsteen has taken rock forward by taking it back, keeping it young. He uses and embellishes the myths of the '50s pop culture: his songs are populated by bad-ass loners, wiped-out heroes, bikers, hot-rodders, women of soulful mystery. Springsteen conjures up a whole half-world of shattered sunlight and fractured neon, where his characters re-enact little pageants of challenge and desperation.

The "Born to Run" album is so powerful, and Springsteen's presence so prevalent at the moment, that before the phenomenon has had a chance to settle, a reaction is already setting in. He is being typed as a '50s hood in the James Dean mold, defused for being a hype, put down as a product of the Columbia promo "fog machine," condemned for slicking up and recycling a few old rock-'n'-roll riffs. Even Springsteen remains healthily skeptical. "I don't understand what all the commotion is about," he told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth. "I feel like I'm on the outside of all this, even though I know I'm on the inside. It's like you want attention, but sometimes you can't relate to it."

Springsteen defies classification. This is one reason recognition was so long in coming. There is nothing simple to hold on to. He was discovered by Columbia Records Vice President of Talent Acquisition John Hammond, who also found Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman and Bob Dylan, among others. Hammond knew "at once that Bruce would last a generation" but thought of him first as a folk musician.

Casting Springsteen as a rebel in a motorcycle jacket is easy enough -- it makes a neat fit for the character he adopted in "Born to Run" -- but it ignores a whole other side of his importance and of his music.

Born to Run is a bridge between Springsteen the raffish rocker and the more ragged, introverted street poet of the first two albums. Although he maintains that he "hit the right spot" on "Born to Run," it is the second album, "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle," that seems to go deepest. A sort of free-association autobiography, it comes closest to the wild fun-house refractions of Springsteen's imagination. In "Wild Billy's Circus Song," when he sings, "He's gonna miss his fall, oh God save the human cannonball," Springsteen could be anticipating and describing his own current, perhaps perilous trajectory. In case of danger, however, Springsteen will be rescued by the music itself, just as he has always been. "Music saved me," he says. "From the beginning, my guitar was something I could go to. If I hadn't found music, I don't know what I would have done."

He was born poor in Freehold, N.J., a working-class town near the shore. His mother Adele ("Just like Superwoman, she did everything, everywhere, all the time") worked through his childhood as a secretary. His father, Douglas Springsteen (the name is Dutch), was "a sure-money man" at the pool tables who drifted from job to job, stalked by undetermined demons.

"My Daddy was a driver," Springsteen remembers. "He liked to get in the car and just drive. He got everybody else in the car too, and he made us drive. He made us all drive." These two-lane odysseys without destination only reinforced Springsteen's already flourishing sense of displacement. "I lived half of my first 13 years in a trance or something," he says now. "People thought I was weird because I always went around with this look on my face. I was thinking of things, but I was always on the outside, looking in."

The parents pulled up stakes and moved to California when Bruce was still in his teens. Bruce stayed behind, with some bad memories of hassles with nuns in parochial school, an $18 guitar and random dreams of a phantom father for company. By the time he was 18, he had some perspective on his father. "I figured out we were pretty much alike," Springsteen says, by which he means more than a shared cool skill at the pool table and a taste for long car rides. "My father never has much to say to me, but I know he thinks about a lot of things. I know he's driving himself almost crazy thinking about these things... and yet he sure ain't got much to say when we sit down to talk." The elder Springsteen currently drives a bus in San Mateo, a suburb south of San Francisco. Neither he nor his wife made it to Los Angeles for their son's big show.

Bruce bunked in with friends back in Jersey and tried to make it through public high school. He took off on weekend forays into Manhattan for his first strong taste of big-city street life and began making music. He started writing his own because he could not figure out how to tune his guitar to play anyone else's material accurately. "Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around."

In 1965, while he was still finishing high school, Springsteen began forming bands like the Castiles, which did gigs for short money in a Greenwich Village spot called the Cafe Wha?. He met up with Miami Steve Van Zandt, current lead guitarist of the E Street Band, around that time. "We were all playing anything we could to be part of the scene," Van Zandt recalls. "West Coast stuff, the English thing, R&B and blues. Bruce was writing five or ten songs a week. He would say, 'I'm gonna go home tonight and write a great song,' and he did. He was the Boss then, and he's the Boss now."

Still, the Boss was sufficiently uncertain of his musical future to quit school altogether. He enrolled in Ocean County College. showed up in what is still his standard costume -- Fruit of the Loom undershirt, tight jeans, sneakers and leather jacket -- and was soon invited round for a chat by one of the guidance staff. As Springsteen tells it. the counselor dropped the big question on him immediately.

"You've got trouble at home, right?"

"Look, things are great, I feel fine," Springsteen replied warily.

"Then why do you look like that?"

"What are you talking about?"

"There are some students who have... complained about you."

"Well, that's their problem, you know?" said Springsteen, ending the conversation and his formal education.

Instead, he took his music anywhere they would listen. His bands changed names (the Rogues, the Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom) as frequently as personnel. "I've gone through a million crazy bands with crazy people who did crazy things." Springsteen remembers. They played not only clubs and private parties but firemen's balls, a state mental hospital and Sing Sing prison, a couple of trailer parks, a rollerdrome, the parking lot of a Shop-Rite and under the screen during intermission at a drive-in. A favorite spot for making music. and for hanging out, was Asbury Park.

"Those were wonderful days," says Springsteen's buddy, Southside Johnny Lyon. "We were all young and crazy." Bustling with music and the fever of young musicians, bands swapping songs and members, new jobs and old girls, Asbury Park sounds, if only in memory, like Liverpool before it brought forth the Beatles. Springsteen lived in a surfboard factory run by a displaced Californian named Carl Virgil ("Tinker") West III, who became, for a time, his manager.

Everybody had a band; not only Springsteen and Southside, but also Miami Steve, Vini ("Mad Dog") Lopez (who played drums on Bruce's first two albums) and Garry Tallent (now bass guitarist for the E Street Band). They all would appear at a dive called the Upstage Club for $15 a night, work from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m., then party together, play records and adjourn till the next afternoon, when they would meet on the boardwalk to check the action and talk music. For sport everyone played Monopoly, adding a few refinements that made the game more like the Jersey boardwalk they knew. There were two special cards: a Chief McCarthy card (named in honor of a local cop who rousted musicians indiscriminately) and a Riot card. The McCarthy card allowed the bearer to send any opponent to jail without reason; whoever drew the Riot card could fire-bomb any opponent's real estate.

Springsteen was a demon player and won frequently, according to Southside, because "he had no scruples." Nicknamed "the Gut Bomb King" because of his passion for junk food, he would show up for a Monopoly tourney with armfuls of Pepsis and Drake's cakes. Whenever anyone would get hungry and ask for a snack, Springsteen was ready with a deal: one Pepsi, one hotel.

Nobody was getting rich outside of Monopoly. In 1970 Asbury Park was the scene of a bad race riot. and the tourists stayed away. "The place went down to the ground. and we rode right down with it," says Miami Steve. There were jobs to be had in a few of the bars, playing easy-listening rock, but Springsteen and his pals disdained them because, as he says simply, "we hated the music. We had no idea how to hustle either. We weren't big door knockers. so we didn't go to New York or Philly." Adds Van Zandt, who lived on a dollar a day: "We were all reading in the papers how much fun rock 'n' roll was -- it seemed like another world. We didn't take drugs. We couldn't afford any bad habits."

A lot of the life Springsteen saw then and lived through found its way into his songs, but indirectly. Filtered through an imagination that discovered a crazy romanticism in the ragtag boardwalk life.

She worked that joint under the boardwalk, She was always the girl you saw boppin' down the beach with the radio, Kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of the cheap little seashore bars and I saw her parked with her loverboy out on the Kokomo.

Tinker, the surfboard manufacturer and manager, called Mike Appel on Springsteen's behalf. Appel, whose major claim to fame until then was the co-authorship of a Partridge Family hit called "Doesn't Somebody Want to Be Wanted," was smart enough to see Springsteen's talent and brash enough to spirit him away from Tinker. Appel got Springsteen to work up a clutch of new songs by simply calling him frequently and asking him to come into New York. Springsteen would jump on the bus and have a new tune ready by the time he crossed the Hudson.

Appel also called John Hammond at Columbia. The call was Springsteen's idea, but the come-on was all Appel. He told Hammond he wanted him to listen to his new boy because Hammond had discovered Bob Dylan, and "we wanna see if that was just a fluke, or if you really have ears." Hammond reacted to Springsteen "with a force I'd felt maybe three times in my life." Less than 24 hours after the first meeting, contracts were signed.

Even before Springsteen's first album was released in 1973, Appel was already on the move. He offered the NBC producer of the Super Bowl the services of his client to sing The Star-Spangled Banner. Informed that Andy Williams had already been recruited, with Blood, Sweat & Tears to perform during half time, he cried, "They're losers and you're a loser too. Some day I'm going to give you a call and remind you of this. then I'm going to make another call and you'll be out of a job." Says Hammond: "Appel is as offensive as any man I've ever met, but he's utterly selfless in his devotion to Bruce."

Appel and Springsteen understood each other. They agreed that Bruce and the band should play second fiddle to nobody. After a quick but disastrous experience as an opening act for Chicago, Springsteen appeared only as a headline attraction. That meant fewer bookings. There was also little to be done about the narrowing future of Bruce's recording career. Regarded as a pet of banished Columbia Records President Clive Davis, Springsteen was ignored by the executives who took over from Davis. "The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle" was not so much distributed as dumped.

For two years Springsteen crisscrossed the country, enlarging his following with galvanic concerts. Early last year, playing a small bar called Charley's in Cambridge, Mass., he picked up an important new fan. Jon Landau. a Rolling Stone editor, had reviewed Bruce's second album favorably for a local paper, and Charley's put the notice in the window. Landau remembers arriving at the club and seeing Springsteen hugging himself in the cold and reading the review. A few weeks later, Landau wrote, "I saw the rock and roll future and its name is Springsteen."

Some loyalists at Columbia persuaded the company to cough up $50,000 to publicize the quote. Columbia's sudden recommitment caught Springsteen in a creative crisis. He and Appel had spent nine months in the studio and produced only one cut, "Born to Run." The disparity between the wild reaction to his live performances and the more subdued, respectful reception of his records had to be cleared up. Landau soon signed on as co-producer of the new album and began to find out about some of the problems firsthand.

"Bruce works instinctively," Landau observes. "He is incredibly intense, and he concentrates deeply. Underneath his shyness is the strongest will I've ever encountered. If there's something he doesn't want to do, he won't." Springsteen would work most days from 3 p.m. to 6 a.m.. and sometimes as long as 24 hours, without stopping. Only occasionally did things go quickly. For a smoky midnight song, called Meeting Across the River, Springsteen just announced, "O.K., I hear a string bass, and I hear a trumpet." and, according to Landau, "that was it." Finally the album came together as real roadhouse rock, made proudly in that tradition. The sound is layered over with the kind of driving instrumental cushioning that characterized the sides Phil Spector produced in the late '50s and '60s. The lyrics burst with nighthawk poetry.

The screen door slams Mary's dress waves Like a vision she dances across the porch As the radio plays Roy Orbison singing for the lonely Hey that's me and I want you only Don't turn me home again I just can't face myself alone again.

If all this effort has suddenly paid off grandly, and madly, Springsteen remains obdurately unchanged. He continues to hassle with Appel over playing large halls, and just last month refused to show up for a Maryland concert Appel had booked into a 10,000-seat auditorium. The money is starting to flow in now: Springsteen takes home $350 a week, the same as Appel and the band members. There are years of debt and back road fees to repay. Besides, Springsteen is not greatly concerned about matters of finance. Says John Hammond: "In all my years in this business, he is the only person I've met who cares absolutely nothing about money."

Springsteen lives sometimes with his girl friend Karen Darvin, 20, a freckled, leggy model from Texas, in a small apartment on Manhattan's East Side. More frequently he is down on the Jersey shore, where he has just moved into more comfortable -- but not lavish -- quarters, and bought his first decent hi-fi rig. He remains adamantly indifferent to clothing and personal adornment, although he wears a small gold cross around his neck -- a vestigial remnant of Catholicism -- and, probably to challenge it, a small gold ring in his left ear, which gives him a little gypsy flash.

When he is not working, Springsteen takes life easy and does not worry about it. "I'm not a planning-type guy," he says. "You can't count on nothing in this life. I never have expectations when I get involved in things. That way, I never have disappointments." His songs, which he characterizes as being mostly about "survival, how to make it through the next day," are written in bursts. "I ain't one of those guys who feels guilty if he didn't write something today," he boasts. "That's all jive. If I didn't do nothing all day, I feel great." Under all circumstances, he spins fiction in his lyrics and is careful to avoid writing directly about daily experience. "You do that," he cautions, "and this is what happens. First you write about struggling along. Then you write about making it professionally. Then somebody's nice to you. You write about that. It's a beautiful day, you write about that. That's about 20 songs in all. Then you're out. You got nothing to write."

Some things, however, must change. Southside Johnny recalls that after "Born to Run" was released, "we had a party at one of the band members' houses. It was like old times. We drank and listened to old Sam and Dave albums. Then someone said my car had a flat tire. I went outside to check, and sitting in the street were all these people waiting to get a glimpse of Brucie, just sitting under the streetlights, not saying anything. I got nervous and went back inside."

These lamppost vigilantes, silent and deferential, were not teeny-boppers eager to squeal or fans looking for a fast autograph. As much as anything, they were all unofficial delegates of a generation acting on the truth of Springsteen's line from Thunder Road: "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night." Just at that doorstep, they found it. Growin' up.

Making of a Rock Star

By Maureen Orth, Janet Huck, and Peter S. Greenberg Newsweek October 27, 1975

The movie marquee in Red Bank, N.J., simply said "HOMECOMING" because everyone knew who was home. Out in the audience was Cousin Frankie, who taught him his first guitar chords. So were the guys from Freehold High who played in his early rock 'n' roll bands. They did not have to be hyped on Bruce Springsteen. This was the scruffy kid they had seen for years in the bars and byways of coastal Jersey. But Bruce was suddenly big time. The rock critics, the media, the music-industry heavies all said so. And in Red Bank, Bruce showed them just how far he had come. With Elvis shimmies and Elton leaps, Springsteen re-created his own electric brand of '50s rock 'n' roll magic. He clowned with saxophonist Clarence Clemons, hustled and bumped his way around the stage and gave a high-voltage performance that lasted more than two hours. When he leaned into the microphone, ripped off his black leather jacket and blasted, "Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run," the Jersey teeny-boppers went wild. After four footstomping encores they were ready to crown Bruce Springsteen the great white hope of rock 'n' roll.

The official investiture took place last week in Los Angeles at Springsteen's carefully staged West Coast debut, at the Roxy Night Club on Sunset Strip. At the kind of opening-night event that defines hip status for at least six months, new Hollywood and rock royalty embraced Bruce Springsteen as one of their own. In a rare ovation that lasted a full four minutes, Jack Nicholson, Ryan and daughter Tatum O'Neal, Wolfman Jack and Neil Diamond seconded Cousin Frankie and the boys from Freehold High in Red Bank. Bruce Springsteen was a superstar.

Bruce who? He is still not exactly a household name across America. In San Mateo, Calif. last week, his 13-year-old sister Pam said, "Only one girl at school has his record." The bus driver's son -- who bears a striking resemblance to Dylan, sports black leather jackets like Brando in "The Wild One" and wears a gold hoop earring -- was known to only a small coterie of East Coast devotees a year ago. But since the release last August of his highly professional third album, "Born to Run," which rocketed to a million-dollar gold album in six weeks, 26-year-old Bruce Springsteen has exploded into a genuine pop-music phenomenon. He has already been compared to all the great performers -- Elvis, Dylan and Mick Jagger. And rock critic Robert Hilburn of The Los Angeles Times called him "the purest glimpse of the passion and power of rock 'n' roll in nearly a decade." Springsteen's own insistence on performing in small halls and clubs has created a kind of cult hysteria and his emergence as one of the most exciting live acts in rock today has only added to the mystique. Springsteen buttons, T shirts, decals, key chains and three different kinds of wall posters are currently the hot rock paraphernalia. In fact, Bruce Springsteen has been so heavily praised in the press and so tirelessly promoted by his record company, Columbia, that the publicity about his publicity is now a dominant issue in his career. And some people are asking whether Bruce Springsteen will be the biggest superstar or the biggest hype of the '70s.

In a $2 billion industry that thrives on smash hits, the artist who grabs the public's emotions the way Elvis or the Beatles once did is the fantasy of rock critics and record-industry pros alike. Springsteen's punk image, his husky, wailing voice, his hard-driving blues-based music and his passionate, convoluted lyrics of city lowlife, fast cars and greaser rebellion recall the dreams of the great rock 'n' roll rage of the 1950s:

Well now I'm no hero That's understood All the redemption I can offer, girl Is beneath this dirty hood

But he also injects the images with a new sophistication:

The highway's jammed with broken heroes On a last-chance power drive Everybody's out on a run tonight But there's no place left to hide

Some critics, however, find Springsteen's music one-dimensional, recycled teen dreams. "Springsteen's lyrics are an effusive jumble," music critic Henry Edwards wrote in The New York Times, "his melodies either second-hand or undistinguished and his performance tedious. Given such flaws there has to be another important ingredient to the success of Bruce Springsteen: namely, vigorous promotion." Even some of his champions like disk jockey Denny Sanders of WMMS in Cleveland agree on that point. "Columbia is going overboard on Springsteen," he says. "He is the only unique artist to come out of the '70s, but because the rock 'n' roll well is really dry, they are going crazy for Springsteen."

As the real world has caught up with the record world, the penny-pinched economy has begun to erode the record industry. Album sales are down (Warner Brothers, for one, is off by nearly 20 per cent), the albums going to the top of the charts are getting there on fewer sales while advertising budgets are being drastically slashed. "Unless an act has a great potential for sales," says one record-company executive, "the companies won't spend the big dollars."

Too often, the companies have gotten burned when they spent their money on the sizzle and forgot the steak. Bell Records dished out more than $100,000 last year in parties to promote an act nobody ever heard of -- Gary Glitter -- and people are still asking who he is. Atlantic bankrolled the rock group Barnaby Bye for an estimated $200,000 but failed to turn up any album sales. MGM decided to promote a singer-songwriter named Judi Pulver. They sent her to a Beverly Hills diet doctor, created a Charles Schulz "Peanuts" ad campaign, rented a Boeing 720 to fly journalists to her opening in San Francisco and even got astronaut Edgar Mitchell to go along for the ride. When the evening was over, the inevitable truth set in. Judi Pulver just couldn't carry the hype. MGM's $100,000 experiment bombed.

Everyone in the industry is aware of the pitfalls of The Hype and insiders think that the current Springsteen mania might inflict damage on his career. "All the attention Bruce is getting now might hurt him later on," says Hilburn. "What I'm afraid of is that while Springsteen has all the potential everyone says he has, it's still chiefly potential. I just hope he's strong enough to stand up under the pressure." Warner Brothers Records president Joe Smith appreciates the "tumult" Bruce is creating for the industry but is dubious about the extent of his ultimate influence on the development of music. "He's a hot new artist now," says Smith, "but he's not the new messiah and I question whether he will establish an international mania. He's got a very long way to go before he does what Elton has done, or Rod Stewart or The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin."

Bruce himself is concerned about the effect the publicity campaign will have on his creative equilibrium. "What phenomenon? What phenomenon?" Springsteen asked in exasperation last week while driving up from Jersey to New York. "We're driving around, and we ain't no phenomenon. The hype just gets in the way. People have gone nuts. It's weird. All the stuff you dream about is there, but it gets diluted by all the other stuff that jumped on you by surprise."

Springsteen is experiencing superstar culture shock. He has never strayed far from his best friends like Miami Steve Van Zandt and Gary Tallent, who are in his E Street Band. He has spent hours hanging out on the boardwalk at Asbury Park, N.J., and listening to the barkers tell their tales. For gigs, he used to hitchhike to New York to play his guitar in Greenwich Village. In both places, he found the cast of characters who people his lyrics -- Spanish Johnny, the Magic Rat, Little Angel, Puerto Rican Jane. They inspired him but they didn't corrupt him. Springsteen rarely drinks, does not smoke, doesn't touch dope and never swears in front of women.

"I'm a person -- people tend to forget that kind of thing," he says. "I got a rock 'n' roll band I think is one of the best ones. I write about things I believe that are still fun for me. I love drivin' around in my car when I'm 26 and I'll still love drivin' around in my car when I'm 36. Those aren't irrelevant feelings for me." The feelings usually find their way to vinyl. "The record is my life," says Springsteen. "The band is my life. Rock 'n' roll has been everything to me. The first day I can remember lookin' in the mirror and standin' what I was seein' was the day I had a guitar in my hand."

Throughout his unconventional career, Springsteen has found people who felt he was born to star. From the moment he and his abrasive new manager, Mike Appel, walked into Columbia Records in 1972 to audition for the legendary John Hammond -- discoverer of Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan -- Springsteen was the object of high-pressure salesmanship. "I went into a state of shock as soon as I walked in, says Springsteen. "Before I ever played a note Mike starts screamin' and yellin' 'bout me. I'm shrivelin' up and thinkin', 'Please, Mike, give me a break. Let me play a damn song.' So, dig this, before I ever played a note the hype began."

"The kid absolutely knocked me out," Hammond recalls. "I only hear somebody really good once every ten years, and not only was Bruce the best, he was a lot better than Dylan when I first heard him." Within a week, Springsteen was signed to Columbia and although he and Appel had little previous recording experience, they insisted on producing their own album -- the uneven "Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J." released in January 1973. At the time Bruce had no band; he sang alone with an acoustic guitar. And because of the originality of his lyrics -- and perhaps the familiarity of their cadence -- he was compared to Dylan.

Oh, some hazard from Harvard Was skunked on beer playin' Backyard bombardier Yes and Scotland Yard was trying Hard, they sent some dude with a Callin' card He said, "Do what you like but don't do it here."

The comparison was so tantalizingly close that Columbia promoted the first album with ads announcing they had the new Bob Dylan. The cover letter on the records Columbia sent to the DJ's flatly stated the same thing. But the hard sell backfired. "The Dylan hype from Columbia was a turnoff," said Dave Herman, the early-morning DJ for WNEW-FM, the trend- setting pop station in New York. "I didn't even bother to listen to it. I didn't want Columbia to think they got me."

Without radio airplay -- the single most important ingredient in any hit -- a record dies. Though the Springsteen campaign was a special project of then Columbia president Clive Davis, who personally read Springsteen's lyrics on a promotional film, and even though Bruce got good notices from important rock publications like Crawdaddy, only a handful of the 100 or so major FM stations across the country played him. The record sold less than 50,000 copies. "He was just another media hype that failed," said Herman. "He was already a dead artist who bombed out on his first album."

Springsteen's personal appearance at the Columbia Records convention in the summer of 1973 was his biggest bomb. "It was during a period when he physically looked like Dylan," says Hammond. "He came on with a chip on his shoulder and played too long. People came to me and said, 'He really can't be that bad, can he, John?'"

That fall, Springsteen's second album, "The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle," was released. Again it got some terrific reviews -- Rolling Stone later named it one of the best albums of 1974 -- but it sold even less than his first LP. This time, accompanying a stack of favorable reviews, the DJ's got a letter from Springsteen's manager Appel saying "What the hell does it take to get airplay?" Meanwhile, Springsteen had a disastrous experience playing as the opening act for the supergroup Chicago on tour, and he refused to do what most new rock acts must do to get exposure -- play short, 45-minute sets in huge halls before the main act goes on.

Columbia began to ignore Springsteen because he couldn't make a best- selling album or hit-single. But Springsteen was getting better in his live performances and was starting to build followings in towns like Austin and Philadelphia, Phoenix and Cleveland. "The key to Bruce's success was to get people to see him," says Ron Oberman, a Columbia staffer who pushed hard for Springsteen's first album within the company. After a concert in Cleveland, says local DJ Sanders, "Springsteen was a smash, and requests zoomed up. We had played him before but now the requests stayed on."

ln April 1974, Jon Landau, the highly respected record editor of Rolling Stone, caught Bruce's act in Boston, went home and wrote an emotional piece for the Real Paper stating, "I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." Landau's review was the turning point in Springsteen's faltering career -- for the artist as well as the company. "At the time," says Springsteen, "Landau's quote helped reaffirm a belief in myself. The band and I were making $50 a week. It helped me go on. I realized I was gettin' through to somebody." Columbia cannily used the blurb in marketing Springsteen's second album and other critics began to take notice. It was the first time a record label used the prestige of a rock critic to push an artist so hard.

"His first two albums' not selling was the best possible thing for Bruce," says the 28-year-old Landau. "It gave him time to develop a strong identity without anyone pushing him prematurely. For twelve years he has had time to learn how to play every kind of rock 'n' roll. He has far more depth than most artists because he really has roots in a place -- coastal Jersey, where no record company scouts ever visit."

One month after the Landau review, Springsteen, alone with Mike Appel in a sparsely equipped studio in upstate New York, began to record his third album -- his last chance to make it. It took three months to record the title song, "Born to Run," and Columbia immediately sent it out to some key people to review for singles potential. The word came back: It's not top 40, forget it, it's too long. Then the ever-assertive Appel released a rough mix of the song to a handful of stations that had played Springsteen.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. The stations wanted the record. But the potential superstar was in the studio for the next six months unable to finish his masterpiece. "He told me he was having trouble getting the sound he heard in his head on record," says Landau. In April 1975, a year after his review, Landau became an adviser on the album and quit his job at Rolling Stone to be come co-producer. He moved them into a better studio, and helped shape the album into a heavily produced wall of pulsating sound.

Last June, a group of Columbia executives heard a rough cut of the album and decided to launch an unprecedented campaign. Building on the Landau quote and $40,000 worth of radio spots on FM stations in twelve major markets, they promoted the first two dud albums, mentioning a third was on the way. It worked. Sales for the first two LP's climbed back on the charts, more than doubling their original sales.

Columbia knew it had a winner; the question was how to showcase the act. Appel, without consulting Springsteen, thought big. He asked a booking agent to get 20,000-seat Madison Square Garden for an artist who had never sold more than 150,000 records. He finally settled on the 400-seat Bottom Line club in Greenwich Village for the week before the release of the third album last August. The tickets sold out in three and a half days, with Columbia picking up 980 of the 400O tickets for the media "tastemakers." "Columbia put it on the line," said DJ Richard Neer of WNEW-FM, "They said, 'Go see him. If you don't like him, don't play him -- don't write about him'." With the tickets so limited in number, the ensuing hysteria created more press coverage and critical acclaim for Springsteen -- who delivered topnotch shows -- than any recent event of its kind. "It was a very intelligent use of an event," says Stan Snadowsky, co-owner of the Bottom Line. "Columbia got all the right people down there." DJ Dave Herman, who refused to even play Springsteen's first album because of the hype, was completely won over. The next day he apologized on the air. "I saw Springsteen for the first time last night," he told his audience. "It's the most exciting rock 'n' roll show I've ever seen."

Orders for the new album, which had been given an initial press ordering of 175,000, came in at 350,000. The LP has sold 600,000 so far, and Columbia has spent $200,000 promoting it. By the end of the year they will spend an additional $50,000 for TV spots on the album. "These are very large expenditures for a record company; we depend on airplay, which cannot be bought," says Bruce Lundvall, Columbia Records' vice president. "What the public does not understand is that when you spend $100,000 on an album for a major artist, your investment is not so much on media as on the number of people you have out there pushing the artist for airplay." Now, for the first time, a Springsteen single, "Born to Run, has broken through many major AM stations, where the mass audience listens.

The stakes are enormous, since a hot album can earn up to several million dollars for the record company in a matter of a few weeks. Today Bruce Springsteen is still a promising rookie. Nobody knows whether he can sell like Elton John or even lesser publicized groups like Earth, Wind & Fire -- a group that will ship more than 750,000 initial orders with the release of its new LP. Because of his enormous build-up, Springsteen now has the awesome task of fulfilling everyone's fantasy of what a new rock hero should be. And most of the country -- which isn't even aware of Springsteen yet -- may or may not agree that he is born to succeed. "Bruce is undergoing a backlash right now," says Irwin B. Segelstein, President of Columbia Records, "but even his critics are treating him importantly."

Springsteen himself has not yet seen any big bucks. He keeps 22 people on his payroll. He maintains sophisticated sound and lighting equipment for his shows and has a video crew following him everywhere. He only plays small halls where he can barely cover his expenses, but that hasn't put a crimp in his style. He has just moved into his first home, a sparsely furnished cottage overlooking the ocean -- about a 10-minute drive from the Asbury Park boardwalk. His girl friend, 20-year-old Karen Darbin, a Springsteen fan from Texas, lives across the Hudson River in Manhattan. In Bruce's garage stands his prized possession -- a '57 yellow Chevy convertible customized with orange flames, the same color as his first guitar.

On the eve of his West Coast debut last week, Springsteen seemed to be down. "People keep telling me I ought to be enjoying all this but it's sort of depressing to me." He riffled through his beloved '50s records -- Elvis and Dion -- from stacks of albums on the floor, which also included Gregorian chants, David Bowie and Marvin Gaye. "Now this," Bruce announces in a faintly Jimmy Durante delivery, "is the sound of universes colliding." The room fills with Phil Spector's classic production of the Ronettes' "Baby I Love You." Springsteen swoons. "Come on, do the greaser two-step," he says, beginning to dance.

Although Springsteen is a German name, Bruce is mostly Italian, and he inherited his storytelling ability from his Neapolitan grandfather Zirili. "In the third grade a nun stuffed me into a garbage can under her desk because she told me that's where I belonged," he relates. "I also had the distinction of being the only altar boy knocked down by a priest on the steps of the altar during Mass. The old priest got mad. My Mom wanted me to learn how to serve Mass but I didn't know what I was doin' so I was tryin' to fake it."

He finally saved $18 to buy his first guitar -- "one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life" -- and at age 14, Springsteen joined his first band. He was originally a Rolling Stones fanatic but gradually worked back to early rock. "We used to play the Elks Club, the Rollerdrome and the local insane asylum," he says. "We were always terrified at the asylum. One time this guy in a suit got up and introduced us for twenty minutes sayin' we were greater than the Beatles. Then the doctors came up and took him away."

Springsteen's parents moved to California when he was 16, but he stayed behind scuffling in local bands. A year later he drove across country -- someone else had to shift because Bruce did not know how to drive -- to play a New Year's Eve gig at the Esalen Institute. "I've never been outta Jersey in my life and suddenly I get to Esalen and see all these people walkin' around in sheets," he says. "I see someone playing bongos in the woods and it turns out to be this guy who grew up around the corner from me." "Everybody expected Bruce to come back from California a star," says his old friend "Southside Johnny" Lyon who used to play with Bruce at the Stone Pony bar in Asbury Park. But according to Bruce, "nobody wanted to listen to a guy with a guitar."

They do today. Onstage Springsteen projects the same kind of high school macho and innocence that many young male fans, for whom glitter is dull, strongly identify with. Women think he's sexy and it's likely he'll end up with a movie contract. "He's able to say what we can't about growing up," said John Bordonaro, 23, a telephone dispatcher from the Bronx who traveled to Red Bank to see Bruce in concert. "He's talking about hanging around in cars in front of the Exxon sign. He's talking about getting your hands on your very first convertible. He's telling us it's our last chance to pull something off, and he's doing it for us." "The peace and love movement is gone," chimed in his friend, Chris Williams. "We have to make a shot now or settle into the masses."

The question is will Bruce Springsteen be able to reach the masses? "Let's face it," says Joe Smith of Warner Brothers Records. "He's a kid with a beard in his 20s from New Jersey who happens to sing songs. He's not going to jump around any more than Elton. His voice won't be any sweeter than James Taylor's and his lyrics won't be any heavier than Dylan's."

Springsteen's promoters would disagree, but they don't think it matters. "The industry is at the bottom of the barrel," declares Springsteen's manager Mike Appel, 32, as he paces around the Manhattan office once occupied by Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. "We've got people scratching around for new talent. There's an amazing paucity of talent because there hasn't been anyone isolated enough to create a distinctive point of view." He whispers dramatically, "What I'm waiting for, what Bruce Springsteen is waiting for, and we're all waiting for is something that makes you want to dance!" He shouts, "Something we haven't had for seven or eight years! Today anything remotely bizarre is gobbled up as the next thing. What you've got to do is get the universal factors, to get people to move in the same three or four chords. It's the real thing! Look up America! Look up America!" Appel sat down. Hypes are as American as Coca-Cola so perhaps -- in one way or another -- Bruce Springsteen *is* the Real Thing.

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