\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div><\/div> \t\t\t\t\tFounding executive director of the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music Bob Santelli speaks with Springsteen in 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDanny Clinch*<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tSantelli was a music journalist who met Springsteen in 1968 and started writing about him in 1974, eventually co-writing E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg\u2019s book. He left journalism when Rolling Stone<\/em> founder Jann Wenner asked five writers to work on the launch of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He\u2019s launched rock museums ever since: the Experience Music Project and the Grammy Hall of Fame. In the past decade, new music museums have focused on a single artist: the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, Texas; both the Woody Guthrie Center and the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Louis Armstrong Museum in Queens, New York; the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville; the upcoming Beatles museum in London. So, in 2016, Santelli proposed the same to Springsteen.<\/p>\n \n\tSpringsteen thought a tribute to himself didn\u2019t jibe with his humble, working-man persona, so he said he\u2019d donate his 48,000-item archive if Santelli instead created a center for the entire history of American music, which is what Santelli had tried to do for 20 years, pushing for a giant museum in Washington, D.C., to tell the story of America\u2019s greatest cultural export (no offense to fast food). Springsteen says that as time and his relevancy fades, he hopes his story shrinks to a little glass cabinet.<\/p>\n \n\tSpringsteen did agree to be part of the center\u2019s two opening concerts. \u201cBruce, once again, said to me, \u2018I\u2019ll be a part of it, but I don\u2019t want to be the star. When you promote it, I\u2019m under \u201cS,\u201d as in Springsteen,\u2019\u201d Santelli recounts. \u201cThen I told him the second show was post-World War II [music], and I said to him, \u2018You\u2019re opening the show, because you should do Elvis.\u2019 He says, \u2018I don\u2019t open shows.\u2019\u201d He opened it with \u201cJailhouse Rock.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n \n\tI walked up the path to the museum, designed to look like a boardwalk surrounded by dunes. The two-story building is made of somehow already-rusted steel to evoke the rug factory where Springsteen\u2019s dad worked. It felt like I was just four blocks from where Springsteen wrote Born to Run<\/em>, partly because I was. I had hope.<\/p>\n \n\tGuests begin by climbing into denim-upholstered seats in a 240-seat auditorium and watching a 25-minute movie in which Springsteen offers an American Music 101 class through the lens of a boomer. Afterward, Melissa Kozlowski gave me a tour of the first floor: two rooms that house a Springsteen-free rotating exhibit on American music. And my heart sank, the way it had at the Academy of Motion Pictures museum, where C-3PO and R2-D2 look like they\u2019re lost on the way to a Hard Rock Cafe.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tThe \u201cSpringsteen Through the Decades\u201d exhibit at the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music.<\/span><\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Monmouth University<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n \n\tSays Kozlowski: \u201cThis isn\u2019t supposed to be celebrity show-and-tell. It\u2019s meant to inspire people to think. It\u2019s not just a plaque that says, \u2018This is Madonna\u2019s bra and panties.\u2019 It tells you about the role of gender and the expectation of women in American society. We\u2019re trying to inspire deeper conversation than you\u2019d have over mozzarella sticks.\u201d Madonna\u2019s bra and panties, like much downstairs, had been loaned to the center by the Hard Rock Cafe. The sheet music for \u201cGod Bless America\u201d had been purchased on eBay. I started to want mozzarella sticks.<\/p>\n \n\tI met Santelli upstairs, in the larger floor that houses the Springsteen paraphernalia. There was a high school notebook in which he proposed band names (almost all had the word \u201cBuffalo\u201d). The teeny black leather jacket he wears on the cover of Born to Run<\/em>. The rickety TEAC\u00a0Tascam 144 Portastudio on which he self-recorded Nebraska<\/em>. The Telecaster he toured with for years. The jeans from the cover of Born in the U.S.A.,<\/em> which a Levi\u2019s employee who visited this week identified as 10 years old at the time he wore them in the photo shoot. The red hat in his back pocket, which was given to him by a friend, says REMBASS, the name of a military system designed at a New Jersey Army base for use in Vietnam.<\/p>\n \n\tSantelli, 74, his arms bulging out of his black T-shirt from years of surfing, understands my fears. \u201cWe\u2019re not a museum. We\u2019re an archive with exhibition space and a performance theater,\u201d he says. He also is aware of the limits of memorabilia. \u201cMillennials, they are less impressed that you got Bruce Springsteen\u2019s boots. You have to contextualize that into an overall story.\u201d He has borrowed items from Hard Rock while he develops that story himself, which will be boosted by Jann Wenner\u2019s archives, which he just received, as well as another collection he soon hopes to secure. But Santelli believes that the music museum of the future is interactive, so he\u2019s designing the exhibits that way. And while scrolling through a screen showing Springsteen\u2019s drafts of his meticulous lyric changes is fascinating (he had \u201cWell, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night\/They blew up his house, too\u201d from the get-go), there\u2019s also the danger that concert footage and interviews will feel no different than YouTube.<\/p>\n \n\tSpringsteen, who has polished his legacy like those lyrics by writing a memoir and telling his biography in a Broadway show, wasn\u2019t involved in the center, other than donating items \u2014 some of which he is reserving the right to take out from behind the glass and wear or play in concert. \u201cHe didn\u2019t have any input. None. I had no idea if I was on the right track or not,\u201d says Santelli, who panicked when Springsteen finally came to see the center a few weeks before it opened. \u201cAt some point, I should ask him, \u2018Why did you let me do this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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