Greetings from Asbury Park
Near Asbury Park, New Jersey
Around nineteen sixty-nine, a twenty-year-old guitar player from Freehold drifted into Asbury Park after his family moved west and left him behind. His name was Bruce Springsteen, and this faded resort became his workshop. He fronted bands with names like Steel Mill, and haunted an after-hours, alcohol-free jam club called the Upstage on Cookman Avenue.
Because the Upstage served no liquor, it became a gathering place for Jersey Shore musicians, including some who would join the E Street Band and the Asbury Jukes, such as Danny Federici, Steven Van Zandt, and Southside Johnny Lyon. When Columbia Records released his debut album on the fifth of January, nineteen seventy-three, he put the town's name right on the cover. He titled it Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey, and dressed the front in a vintage large-letter souvenir postcard, the kind sold in boardwalk shops for decades.
The record was not a hit at first, but it announced a place. Later, Manfred Mann's cover of one of its songs, Blinded by the Light, went all the way to number one, the only chart-topper Springsteen ever wrote. The town on the postcard would follow him for the rest of his life.
