Cover me... twice! Columbia promotion vet Paul Rappaport on the (in)famous TIME/NEWSWEEK covers @50
- Paul Rappaport
- 2 minutes ago
- 7 min read
October 20, 2025
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: It was fifty years ago today that a different image of Bruce Springsteen, in the midst of his breakthrough Born to Run album and tour, appeared on each of the covers of both Time and Newsweek in the same week. The news-magazines, issues of which consistently got dated a week ahead of the date they first hit newsstands, were each dated October 27, 1975 for their respective Springsteen-cover-story issues.
In 1975, getting simultaneous Time and Newsweek cover-stories was akin to going viral, and in at least some circles (though not all, as you'll soon read below,) it was considered quite the public-relations coup of its period. To this day, how exactly that happened remains a matter of debate and at least a bit of conjecture. If you ask Springsteen's former manager Mike Appel, he'll tell you he was behind it all (of course.) But it seems much more likely that multiple forces were at play, cosmically syncing up along the way as simultaneously as those cover-stories would appear at the end of the whole process. For example, in his Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story biography, Dave Marsh wrote, "One way or another, Jay Cocks of Time [who'd end up writing Time's cover story] got wind of Newsweek’s plans and convinced his editors that they should not be scooped." What Marsh didn't note in print was that it very well might have been Marsh himself who informed and encouraged Cocks - with whom Marsh was friends and shared great enthusiasm for Springsteen's music - regarding Newsweek's plans. (Incidentally Cocks, who at the time was writing film reviews and other articles on the arts for Time, later would become an accomplished screenwriter. His most recently filmed screenplay was for the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.)
Meanwhile, photographer Barbara Pyle, in her 2015 book Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band 1975, wrote, "At what I thought was going to be a routine concert in Red Bank, New Jersey, I was suddenly surrounded by Newsweek editors who wanted to buy my pictures. I would never give those pictures to Newsweek because I was a Time 'stringer.' Monday morning, I went to see my editors and told them that Newsweek was doing a cover on Bruce. It was now or never. The Time illustrator used my photos. That's the true story of how Bruce got the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week." (The Time cover's illustration of Springsteen, which is based on elements from at least two of Pyle's '75 in-concert photos of Bruce, was created by artist Kim Whitesides. Whitesides' illustration is now among the holdings of The Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery. The Newsweek cover's photo of Springsteen also was taken in concert in '75 by the late photographer Bernard Gotfryd during one of the two October 11, 1975 concerts at what was then Monmouth Arts Center and is now part of The Count Basie Center for the Arts. Gotfryd's cover photo is included in the Bernard Gotfryd photograph collection housed at the Library of Congress.)
Enter Columbia Records' former Senior Vice-President of Rock Promotion Paul "Rap" Rappaport, author of the great new book Gliders Over Hollywood: Airships, Airplay and the Art of Rock Promotion, which includes many Springsteen-related gems in its contents, of course. Letters To You recently connected with Rappaport after his appearance at The Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music's Born to Run 50th Anniversary Symposium, during which Paul attempted to share onstage something he knew about how the simultaneous cover-stories came to be, which turned out to be a rarely - if ever - heard tale to add to the mix. Unfortunately, Paul never got to share his story onstage that day, but we're pleased and honored to give him the opportunity to do so here today. Take it away, "Rap!"
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First off, thank you for inviting me to be a part of Letters To You.
I, like all of you, am a huge Bruce Springsteen fan and have been ever since Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ crossed my desk at Columbia Records, in Los Angeles, January of 1973. I was then the local album-promotion manager for L.A. and surrounding areas. I was 25 years old and in my second year at the label, having been a former college rep at UCLA.
I’d like to take a moment to set the scene, so you can fully understand everything that went along with the appearance of the two covers appearing simultaneously. In those days, Columbia released a lot of albums, and not all came with a marketing plan. So Greetings... landed on my desk unceremoniously with a small stack of other albums. Although the cover was fascinating, my initial thought was, “A rocker with the name Bruce Springsteen??? Wow, that’s a stretch.” Haha. But when I put the album on, I realized that whoever this Springsteen guy was, he had some important things to say.
Shortly after, in February, I went to see Bruce’s L.A.-debut performance at the Troubadour. WOW!! I immediately sent an ecstatic teletypewriter message in the shape of Bruce’s Fender Esquire looking guitar to headquarters in New York. That opened some eyes. After seeing Bruce live, the label didn’t even have to pay me to talk up this new artist. I was off to the races, and the rest of the music industry couldn’t stop me from incessantly raving about Bruce Springsteen. Of course, this kind of reaction happened for Bruce at almost every show, but back then, without an Internet, only a few of us who caught a club gig here and there knew what was about to unfold.
I share all of this with you because it’s important context to understand all that went on regarding Bruce’s simultaneous covers on Time and Newsweek. For those of you who weren’t around at that time or too young to be aware of the circumstances, you might think this was a great coup, a wonderful one-two punch that would solidify The Boss’s greatness and catapult him into stardom’s stratosphere. But just the opposite happened. Because Bruce’s early supporters, like myself, couldn’t stop talking about him, many radio programmers and industry media were feeling “overhyped.” Certainly no one could live up to the kind of euphoric charismatic performances that we were continually shouting about, trying to get everyone on board. Most of the West Coast radio programmers I worked with were just plain tired of hearing about Bruce Springsteen.
When Time and Newsweek hit the newsstands on the exact same day, the uninitiated were convinced this was just one more Columbia Records’ marketing scheme to super-hype Bruce into instant stardom. That kind of uber-coverage backfired. In my world, it was not uncommon to hear, “That’s it, I’ve had it. Don’t ever talk to me about Bruce Springsteen again.”
I’m sure to the public at large, two covers at once woke up a lot of folks to Bruce. But those two covers made our jobs within the biz harder. We got through it, with a series of live radio broadcasts, and taking radio programmers, press, retail, and general tastemakers to see Bruce one at a time. But helping Bruce launch his career took waaaaaaay longer than any of us thought it would.
Near as I can tell, no one actually planned it that way. It is my belief that the planets aligned to create a happy accident (except for the having-to-work-harder part.)
I have now heard three stories about how these simultaneous covers came to be. I have no reason to doubt any of them, but I know something that no one else knows. And, yeah, I thought I’d get to spill the beans during our panel last month, but the conversation got steered away from me.
During our panel, Mike Appel spoke about trying to convince both magazines to give Bruce a cover. Knowing Mike, I’m sure he pushed them hard. After our panel, I went back to the green room and met photographer Barbara Pyle, who commented that she knew the head of Time and warned him that he could be scooped by Newsweek. I don’t doubt her veracity, either, but I also am convinced that what I’m about to share here had a big hand, as well, in what ultimately happened.
At the time, Columbia’s East Coast offices were really pushing for a Newsweek cover. I guess they felt it was the easier of the two to get. The head of East Coast publicity called the West Coast offices, looking for their main publicist, to tell him to work the Newsweek West Coast offices so they’d be on the same page, pushing for the same thing, doubling the pressure. But that fellow was out to lunch, so they left a message with a young assistant and good friend of mine, Phillippa, a very cool and hip music gal from England. “Flip,” as we used to call her, was newly married, and she and her husband were big fans and readers of Time. When the West Coast publicist came back from lunch, Phillippa completely spaced out that Newsweek was the play, because Time loomed so large in her head. When her boss finally returned from lunch, she told him that New York had called to tell him to push Time for a cover!
Flip confided this to me many years later, because at the time she didn’t want to get into trouble for giving her boss the wrong message, especially after all the ruckus two covers at once created. Before I went to the Born-to-Run-@-50 symposium at Monmouth University last month, I asked her if I could tell her story. Because so many years have now passed, she laughed and said, “Sure, why not?”
Mike was certainly pushing both mags, and he did so much for Bruce that I’d never try to dilute any of it. But I also believe that this behind-the-scenes “assist” happening at just the right time helped to push Time over the edge for that same week.
The planets aligned. Voi-freaking-la! Two covers, same day!
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Look for more from Paul Rappaport later this week, when he'll relate the tale of how in 1982 he got rock-radio to give NEBRASKA its due by "getting heavy" and staging a "holdup." Stay tuned...