Bruce Springsteen by Peter Cunningham

The early Main Point gigs were amazing.  A hundred people in a two hundred seat club, Bruce doing essentially the same energetic show he still does...

The early Main Point gigs were amazing.  A hundred people in a two hundred seat club, Bruce doing essentially the same energetic show he still does today, the best performer in the business then and now, giving, giving, and giving some more.  It was then that I really knew the 19-year-old kid I had met was something special.  I told people about it.  When he came back to the Main Point about a month later - as I recall, he had a hard time getting gigs - I put my reputation on the line and dragged an old friend out of bed, forced him to come out against the wishes of his weary body.  Ed Sciaky was, at the time, a leading disc jockey on WMMR in Philadelphia; he was amazed at the performance and Ed started playing Bruce on the radio, it was his first airplay.  I'm told that years later Ed talked for half an hour on why I was responsible for "breaking Bruce", it's an obscure kind of fame, but I'll take it.  More satisfying was the home run I hit a couple months later as the Crawdaddy softball team rolled over the boys from E-Street.  Shortly after the Main Point gigs, Bruce played his first headlining show in New York at Max's Kansas City.  There he was discovered by many of the people who later came to write about him with great affection and insight.  Bruce was no longer a secret, but it was to be two more years before the general public came to the realization. <<

AP