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Bruce Springsteen in 1973 with a copy of "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J."(Photo: Art Maillet/Shore Fire Media)

, @ChrisFHJordan2:56 a.m. ET April 28, 2017

Bruce Springsteen made national headlines when he made a surprise appearance during the Upstage Club legends jam Friday, April 21 at the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park.

The night, part of the Asbury Park Music and Film Festival, saluted the legacy of the Upstage Club of Asbury Park, the spot, open from 1968 to ‘71, where Springsteen and the  E Street Band would emerge to deliver to the world the Sound of Asbury Park. A new movie about the Upstage and the city at the time, “Just Before the Dawn: Riot. Redemption. Rock ‘n’ Roll.” by filmmaker Tom Jones, was also premiered on Friday.

The Upstage 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 his debut album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” at the Potter’s Studio 6 Salon, located near the Upstage, in 1972.

“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, in 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, 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.

 
The Upstage Jam with Upstage All Stars including Southside

 

http://www.app.com/story/enter...backstory/101016076/

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The SPL Rocks!

Prego che tu stia danzando con San Pietro alle porte perlacee del cielo





Pulled up to my house today
Came and took my little girl away!
Giants Stadium 8/28/03



Oats

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