Bruce Does the E Street Shuffle

A Rare Springsteen Photograph by Peter Cunningham

I might have mentioned my first job after college was as associate editor of CBS Records’ Playback magazine, which published twice a month. It had a square format, as an answer to Warner Brothers Records popular and witty Circular. Our monthly issue came with a 7-inch, 33 1/3 rpm disc (like British singles), to which the public could subscribe. I was hired by the late Bob Sarlin, a newspaperman before he became a music and then advertising executive. Bob died in January 2021, after some years of poor health following a stroke. I owe him a lot.

Bob knew his way around bureaucracies, how to leverage corporate necessities such as expense accounts. He was eager to use our travel budget for our first issue, so he went to Cambridge, Mass., to interview Columbia’s next big thing, a singer named Andy Pratt. I stayed home and got Bruce Springsteen. The first Playback disc had Pratt’s “Avenging Annie” on one side, Springsteen’s “Blinded By the Light” on the other, with the full “Binded” lyrics on the facing page. We were both at the weekly singles meeting at which Clive Davis, still very much in charge, recited the entire lyric to “Blinded By the Light” to a disbelieving, skeptical group of sales and marketing and merchandising VPs and department managers, before he signaled to the union worker in an adjacent room to put the needle down on the turntable to play the song.

Our photographer was Peter Cunningham, who has been one of the best in his field for many decades. Peter and I exchanged emails last week, communicating for the first time since the days when he was a house regular shooting at the New York showcase club, the Bottom Line. He sent me along an interesting photograph. Since Sarlin was in Boston when I did the first Playback issue, I have a feeling this shot, in a CBS Records conference room, came when we both spoke to Bruce about The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. That would have placed this photo in fall of 1973. The song on the Playback disc from that time was “Wild Billy’s Circus Story.” The record got no support from the label (Clive had been fired a few months earlier), but I had won over Sarlin and he wanted to meet the kid.

I still have a few notes from one of those early interviews. Springsteen’s press attention for Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. had talent scouts seeking out other bands playing the Stone Pony and other regional clubs. I asked him, what’s so great about Asbury Park?

“Nuthin’. Nuthin’ at all. It’s a terrible place! I got a telegram from the Mayor saying ‘Best of luck to one of Freehold’s finest.’ And it was signed by Barney’s Army and Navy, Porky’s Luncheonette, Igor’s Records...practically every business in town.”

In the photo below, Cunningham might have asked Bruce to show us a little E Street Shuffle, on a table in the CBS Records conference room. Sarlin, taking it all in, is at the left, with glasses and mustache. On the right is me, age 23. I think I finally got rid of that sweater about two years ago.

Photograph by Peter Cunningham, used with permission, copyright and all rights reserved by the photographer.