Streets of Fire: Bruce Springsteen in Photographs and Lyrics 1977–1979

By Eric Meola and Bruce Springsteen

"On a day like this, I remember—I'm the President, but he's The Boss."

—President Barack Obama, 2009 Kennedy Center Awards ceremony
Compiled by accomplished photographer Eric Meola—who knew "the Boss" when he was just an unknown Jersey kid with big rock and roll dreams—Streets of Fire is an intimate photographic look at Bruce Springsteen during a pivotal year in his life and career. In 1977, Springsteen was coming off the enormous success of his album, Born to Run, and in the studio working on his fourth record, Darkness on the Edge of Town—and these breathtaking candid photos are portraits of a master musician finally coming into his own.  A stunning collection of photographs—some never before published—of Bruce and the E-Street Band combined with the haunting lyrics of some of Springsteen's most unforgettable songs, Streets of Fire offers fans a privileged and rarefied look at one of rock's most legendary and beloved icons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062133441

Book preview

The Geography of Our Youth: After Born to Run

TUNE TO ANY RADIO STATION IN THE SUMMER OF 1965, and your odds were great of hearing Keith Richards’s opening chords signaling Mick Jagger’s frustration: "I can’t get no, no satisfaction! Or, just as likely, Al Kooper’s organ announcing a new dawn, as Bob Dylan’s howling wail of disenfranchisement posed a question as pertinent today as then: Awwwwwwwww, how does it feel, to be without a home? I remember hearing Like a Rolling Stone" for the first time as I was driving along South Salina Street in Syracuse, New York.

I pulled into a parking lot and let the words wash over me—chrome horses, diplomats, and Siamese cats. In July I drove six hours to the Newport Folk Festival to hear Dylan stun the crowd by going electric. I was reading books with titles like The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. Soon, I would walk into an induction center and refuse to step over the imaginary line on the floor.

A few years later, after graduation from college, I moved to New York, where I camped out in a friend’s flat on the Lower East Side while trying to get a job as a photographer’s assistant. Studying literature wasn’t the best preparation for commercial photography, but after a while I caught enough breaks to open my own studio and support myself. I devoted most of my time to photographing in my bare-bones studio on lower Fifth Avenue. A short walk away, however, was the Fillmore East, CBGB, and Max’s Kansas City.

In late 1975, Bruce Springsteen’s breakthrough album, Born to Run, was released. If you had caught him in the small clubs around the city and in New Jersey in those years, you knew he would become famous. Then in October he did just that, appearing on the covers of Newsweek and Time in the same week. Seldom do you have your beliefs and convictions confirmed publicly and with such authority.

Just as suddenly, his sellout/standing room only shows at The Bottom Line confirmed the brilliance of Born to Run; shortly thereafter he was off to Europe, touring London, Stockholm, and Amsterdam. With the exception of a gig at The Roxy in Los Angeles, he finished that year touring near his East Coast fan base, spending New Year’s Eve at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.

Then, there was the lawsuit with Mike Appel, his first manager. And then … nothing.

In the middle of 1977, I became aware that a new album was being recorded, and I heard a few lyrics from it, including a song called Darkness on the Edge of Town. When I first heard the words, I knew that Mary, the protagonist’s girlfriend in the song Thunder Road, had split:

Tonight I’ll be on that hill ’cause I can’t stop

I’ll be on that hill with everything I got

Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost

I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost

For wanting things that can only be found

In the darkness on the edge of town

During that summer and into the fall, Bruce was holed up at the Navarro Hotel on Central Park South. I had been lucky to get the Born to Run cover photo—I was in the right place at the right time. Yes, I had nailed it, but now there was a new album, and the sense that Bruce had to prove himself again was palpable. I felt that too, but I had trouble adjusting to this new Springsteen. The beard was gone, and along with it, most references to the Jersey shore. And, like most of his fans, I was stuck metaphorically in the haunts of characters such as Wild Billy and the Magic Rat, who he had so vividly portrayed in the songs on his first three albums.

When Bruce and I got together to discuss ideas for his next album, I brought