Bruce Springsteen's 'Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.': The 45th anniversary

If you drive down 5th Avenue to the Asbury Park boardwalk, it's hard to miss what's written in lights on the side of the Paramount Theatre on the boardwalk.

“Greetings from Asbury Park”

The debut album by Bruce Springsteen, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” was released 45 years ago on Friday, Jan. 5. It's become a classic of the Springsteen canon, a starting point that would take the Freehold native around the world, to the White House and now to Broadway. For locals in Asbury Park, it's a signifier of importance, of our stories forever captured for time immemorial.

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Much has been made of Springsteen's formative years at the former Upstage Club on Cookman Avenue in the city. The Upstage, opened from 1968 to '71, was owned by Tom and Margaret Potter, and their nurturing of the scene was vital. But the Upstage wasn’t the only Potter business to have a major impact on Springsteen’s creative life. The future Boss wrote the music for “Greetings” at the Potter’s Studio 6 Salon, located near the Upstage, in 1972. The record was released on Jan. 5, 1973.

“Those songs were written on a piano in the back of a second floor beauty salon in Asbury Park,” said Springsteen during “A Conversation with Bruce Springsteen,” hosted by Bob Santelli, last January at Monmouth University in West Long Branch. “It was an abandoned beauty salon, it was Tom Potter’s. Tom and Margaret Potter were, in their day jobs, beauticians. She played in a rock band and he ran the Upstage.”

Springsteen, after coming of age as a musician at the Upstage, had landed a record deal with Columbia Records.

“At the time I was very influenced by (Bob) Dylan and a lot of other writers, Tim Buckley, and a lot of the other writers of the day, so I said I’m going to be a poet — I hadn’t read any poetry, but I’m going to be a poet,” Springsteen said. “So, I started to write the lyrics without writing the music first, which is something I don’t do much of these days. But a lot of ‘Greetings from Asbury Park’ I wrote the lyrics, initially, and then put music to those words.

“I’d write on the bus, I’d write anywhere I found myself and I was using this very intense poetic imagery, which now, looking back on it, doesn’t feel like poetry but rather an insane, crazed sort of lyricism that I had going. I had a rhyming dictionary and I was going with it 100 percent. I was devoted to my rhyming dictionary and the entire ‘Blinded by the Light’ came from those pages.”

Springsteen had the lyrics, but he needed the music and that’s where the Potters’ beauty salon, recently closed, came in. Springsteen was living in an apartment in the building at the time.

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“So when (the Potters) left, they left this beauty parlor with all of these hair dryers that the women used to sit under, and it was abandoned except for all this equipment,” Springsteen said. “I had an Aeolian piano in the back, spinet piano, and I’d go down there at night when it was quiet. It was a little spooky, but I would start to work on these songs. To that point, I hadn’t had any luck with the band, so I trimmed this down to myself, my voice and the guitar. My voice was at best OK, my guitar playing was pretty good, so the songs were going to have to be fireworks. I simply worked until I had a small group of songs that I felt I could sing anywhere with just myself and a guitar if somebody gave me a chance to play. It was the only period of my life where I survived for a while without playing in the clubs and without a band.”

During this period, Tom Potter had moved to Florida but Margaret Potter was still in Asbury Park. The story, from the Potter’s perspective, is told in “For Music’s Sake: Asbury Park’s Upstage Club and Green Mermaid Cafe, The Untold Stories” by the Potters’ grand daughter, Carrie Potter-Devening. It’s available via www.authorhouse.com.

“I’m proud that they were close enough to Bruce, that the abandoned parlor and apartment gave him a comforting space to find solace and inspiration for his composing,” said Potter-Devening via email. “One can only hope that we each live the kind of life that has that effect on others, through the love, kindness, and compassion we show.”

Margaret died in 1993 and Tom in 1997.

Once the album was recorded at 914 Recording Sound Studios in Blauvelt, N.Y., a cover image was needed.

“I was walking down the boardwalk in Asbury,” Springsteen said. “A little postcard was there in the postcard stand, and I pulled it out, ‘Yeah, Greetings from Asbury Park. Yeah, I’m from New Jersey. Who’s from New Jersey? No one. It’s all mine!’

“With that in mind, I brought the card to the art designer (at Columbia Records) and I said I want this to be my album cover and, amazingly enough, he said, 'Yeah, I like that.' And that’s where it started.”

Portions of this story were previously published.

Chris Jordan: cjordan@app.com