Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run cover is still iconic 50 years on – but it could’ve looked very different
The Rolling Stones blasting on the radio, The Boss on his guitar, and a couple of wooden crates for props. Photographer Eric Meola tells Sarfraz Manzoor how he made music history one fateful morning in June 1975
It is one of the enduring images of rock history: a black and white portrait of a tousle-haired, leather jacket-wearing Bruce Springsteen, his Fender Telecaster slung over his shoulder as he leans against his bandmate and sax player Clarence Clemons. The portrait, snapped by Eric Meola, is featured on the cover of Springsteen’s breakthrough album Born to Run, released 50 years ago this week. It helped elevate Springsteen to rock’n’roll superstardom and forever ensured Meola’s place in music history.
It was the summer of 1973 and Meola was 27, a successful commercial and editorial photographer whose work had already been featured on the cover of Time magazine. “I used to live near a venue called Max’s Kansas City in midtown,” Meola recalls now, “and one day in the summer of 1973, I happened to walk by and it said that Bruce Springsteen was appearing the next evening supported by Bob Marley and the Wailers.” He went along to check it out and was instantly captivated: “I said to myself I’m going to photograph Bruce no matter what.”
The following year, Meola had run into Springsteen during a summer rain shower. “I was standing on the corner of Central Park West and 5th Avenue under an awning and I looked up and there was Bruce,” he says. They only exchanged a few words – but the chance encounter only made Meola more determined to photograph him. “In person, he was real shy and quiet but there was also something hypnotic about him,” he says.
Inspired by the postcard cover of Springsteen’s debut Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, Meola sent him a postcard of his own. On the back was a simple plea: “Bruce – I’m back in town for a couple of weeks ... Would like to get together sometime soon and take some shots – either at your place in Asbury or here at my studio. What are the chances?”
From the distance of half a century, the cover of Born to Run, is indelibly associated with the music on the record – it embodies the album’s grand cinematic ambition and provides a visual shorthand for the optimism and camaraderie that defined Springsteen’s music – but in an alternate universe the cover of Born to Run would have been very different.
Originally, Meola wanted to shoot at Ellis Island in a nod to the “runaway American dream” lyric of the album’s title track, but it had been shut for decades and his pleas to reopen it temporarily for the shoot fell on deaf ears. In the end, it ended up taking place on 20 June 1975 at Meola’s studio loft on the fourth floor of 134 Fifth Avenue.
Meola had made his name as a colour photographer; he had begun his career assisting the legendary Pete Turner, whose vibrant use of colour strongly influenced his own style. For this session, though, he eschewed his regular style for a monochrome look inspired by fashion photographer Richard Avedon.
As for the rest of it, Springsteen brought along his guitar and leather jacket, onto which he had pinned an Elvis button. Meola shot using a Nikon F2 camera – which he later sold – and a 105 Nikon lens set to the F8 setting to guarantee that the images would be crisp. The only props Meola used were a couple of wooden crates to help address the height difference between the 5ft 10in Springsteen and Clemons, whose nickname, “The Big Man”, was a reference to his 6ft 4in frame.
Loyal to his bandmate and keen to get him recognition, Springsteen insisted that Clemons be included in the shot. “The band’s lineup had changed enormously and Clarence was one of the earliest members,” says Meola. “And also he just really loved Clarence.” The cover of Born to Run was designed as a gatefold sleeve, so when fully opened, Springsteen’s lean into Clemons stretches across both panels, turning a single photograph into a panoramic statement of friendship and brotherhood.
Setting the mood, Meola, knowing that Springsteen was a fan of Van Morrison and The Rolling Stones, made sure Astral Weeks and December’s Children (And Everybody’s) was playing at the start of the shoot. He wanted something natural, instructing them both to pretend they were playing on stage. Standing back-to-back with Clemons, Springsteen looked backwards at his bandmate with an impish grin. “I got three or four frames,” Meola says, “but I swear we all knew at that moment that was going to be in the running for the cover.”
The whole shoot took less than two hours. Springsteen and Clemons arrived at the studio around 10 in the morning and were in a cab back to the recording studio by noon. Meola processed the film and presented it to John Berg, the Grammy-winning art director for Columbia Records. He loved it. And so did everyone else. “Everyone crowded around the desk and they were all saying, ‘This is unbelievable,’" recalls Meola. “I felt great.”
In many ways, Born to Run was the last roll of the dice for Springsteen. He had been signed in 1972 and heralded as the new Bob Dylan, but his first two albums, while critically praised, had sold modestly. His record company was losing patience – if Born to Run failed, it was entirely possible that he would be dropped. Happily, that was not how things panned out. As Clemons was leaving the photoshoot, he turned to Meola and told him that “in 30 years they’re going to write books about this album”, and he was right.
Bruce and I never had a falling out but it just became this thing of, how am I ever going to do anything better than Born to Run?
I first heard the Born to Run record when I was 16. There were many weeks when I would spend my nights staring at that cover while listening to the record on repeat. The cover communicates so much of what I love about that mid-Seventies Springsteen era – that mix of rock’n’roll myth-making, layered with friendship, brotherhood and a subtle nod to racial harmony. It is no accident that one of the most memorable scenes in Blinded by the Light, the film adaptation of my memoir Greetings from Bury Park – about growing up as a British-Pakistani teenager in Luton in the Eighties – is a recreation of when I broke into my Sixth Form College radio station to play, what else, but “Born to Run”.
On later albums – such as 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and 1980’s The River – Springsteen’s face would stare blankly into the lens, or in the case of 1982’s Nebraska, not be there at all. Those albums were darker and starker explorations of the distance between the American dream and the American reality. On the cover of Born to Run, Springsteen is smiling – as if he still believes.
Over the years, he and Springsteen would go on to recreate the poses from that studio session on stage at concerts. Cheap Trick paid homage to it in the cover art for their 1983 album Next Position Please. Its influence was felt as far as Sesame Street, where Bert and the Cookie Monster took on the parts of Springsteen and Clemons.
Meola shot Springsteen a second and final time two years later. “We stayed in touch but he was out on tour and my own career was really in full bloom,” he says. “Bruce and I never had a falling out but it just became this thing of, how am I ever going to do anything better than Born to Run?”
It was the only album cover that Meola ever shot. I wonder if there is any part of him that is annoyed by the fact that the rest of his prolific career is overshadowed by an image he shot in just two hours on a summer morning in June 1975? “If I’m lucky enough to get an obituary, the Born to Run cover will be the obituary photograph,” he says, “and I’m totally at peace with it.”
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