Music legend Bruce Springsteen, with a career spanning over 50 years, kicks off his 2024 tour this week in Phoenix. While E Street isn’t coming to Boston this time around, local fans can get their fix of “The Boss” at a new exhibit in the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame at the Wang Theatre, on view through April 6.
“Bruce Springsteen: Portraits of an American Music Icon” offers an intimate look at the life and career of the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer. Among backstage shots and polished promotional images are rare glimpses into the mundanity of life as a superstar, including images of Springsteen looking pensive at a bedroom window, and another of him strumming the guitar at a kitchen table with a plate of celery within reach.
“There’s six different photographers with six different viewpoints,” Boston-based photographer Ron Pownall, whose work is featured in the exhibit, told GBH News. “It’s a great take for a Springsteen fan to go see all that, all of those images.”
Pownall shared his own story about discovering Springsteen’s music.
“It was 1974,” he recalled. “We drove down to Providence, and I saw Bruce for the first time, and my socks were blown off. It was just so amazing. It was fun rock ‘n’ roll with so much energy. And so I ended up [photographing] every tour throughout all the ’70s.”
He saw Springsteen and The E Street Band a number of times in Boston, Worcester and Providence before the band’s explosion in 1984 with “Born in the USA.”
But Pownall isn’t the only local connection in the exhibit. The city itself is part of Springsteen’s success story, said Bob Santelli, executive director of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music in West Long Branch, New Jersey.
“Bruce always considered Boston one of his homes away from home,” Santelli told GBH News. “Boston embraced Bruce early on in the early 1970s, before the rest of the country and world caught on.”
One of the defining shows of Springsteen’s career was opening for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theatre in May 1974. It was at that show when Jon Landau — then a Boston-based journalist, now Springsteen's manager — famously declared the musician “the future of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Photographer Barry Schneier, whose work is also on display in the exhibit, was not only at that Harvard Square Theatre show, but as he shared on a recent episode of The Culture Show, he may have had a role in putting it all together.
“I was photographing for promoters at the time, working a lot with groups that were managing Bonnie Raitt,” Schneier recalled. He'd recently seen Springsteen perform in Boston. “I brought the act to him. I said, ‘You got to put this guy on the show again, because I just got to see him.’ [...] His experience was something I had never experienced before to that level.”
“The connection [to Boston] is there,” according to Santelli. “There’s these connections that enabled us to say ‘We’re going to start this tour in Boston.’ It makes a lot of sense. And because of Bruce’s deep connection to Boston, going on more than 50 years, this would be a great place to start.”
Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame President and CEO Joe Spaulding applauded the collaboration between the museum and the Bruce Springsteen Archive, and highlighted the importance of having the exhibit today.
“All of these artists that we celebrate and that we love today, all started basically as a folk artist. A perfect example of that is Bruce Springsteen,” Spaulding said to GBH News. “There are plenty of artists that are starting the same way, and they’re all getting their feet wet [in folk music] and becoming big stars.”
To him, exhibits like this showing the behind-the-scenes lives of behemoths of music history can help support music’s future by inspiring musicians.
“We need to celebrate that. We need to honor the past, and we need to build for the future,” he said.
