Forever Friends: The history of the Special Collection that paved the way for the Springsteen Center
- Bob Crane, Melanie Paggioli, & Shawn Poole
- 6 hours ago
- 18 min read
June 6, 2026
On January 10, 2017, 35,000 items from the personal collections of Bruce Springsteen fans were gifted to Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. In the years since, the University has built a 30,000-square foot archival center and museum upon this foundational donation. Now known as The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music, it officially opens to the public on June 13, and the building gets officially dedicated later this morning. Between 2001 and 2017, fans in 47 countries had contributed the original materials to a volunteer organizing committee of fans. By doing so, they created a collection that illustrates pivotal years of Springsteen’s career in extraordinary scope, magnitude, and authenticity. The following account tells the story of fans working together in trust, confidence, and generosity to pursue a dream unlike any other in the history of fan-to-fan activism. (It's also a major expansion of the brief history that was included with Letters To You's October 2023 report on the Springsteen Center's official announcement of its plans for a new building.) Here at last, and for posterity, is the full history of The Bruce Springsteen Special Collection and the organization that was formed to establish it, nurture it, protect it, and, when it finally was time, to donate all of it for the greater good... The Friends of The Bruce Springsteen Special Collection:
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As the man himself notes in his all-time biggest hit single, you can't start a fire without a spark. The particular spark that started the fire for the idea of a Bruce Springsteen special collection occurred in June of 2001, during lunch at a sidewalk café in the Woodley Park neighborhood of Washington D.C. At the table were Christopher Phillips, editor/publisher of Backstreets, the quintessential Springsteen fanzine/website, and longtime fan Bob Crane. At some point, one or the other mentioned that they were sitting little more than a mile from the site of the E Street Band’s first performances in D.C., a three-night stand at a tiny club named Childe Harold at 1610 20th Street, N.W. It was a casual observation, but it triggered a lament over how the original print reviews of those 1973 shows, along with other early reviews, had become scarce.
Would it be feasible, they wondered, for them to spearhead the collection and preservation of the essential publications from the period before Born To Run and the simultaneous covers on Newsweek and Time? It was an audacious concept, involving complexities neither had dealt with, but both agreed to make inquiries, exploring the possibilities.
Asked to realistically assess the idea of a Springsteen archives, a select group of fans not only praised the concept but promised early donations of valuable materials. Their enthusiasm in turn led to a series of critical developments:
Maret McCoy, a fan working at a D.C. public opinion polling firm, volunteered to manage communications with potential donors.
The leaders of Save Tillie, the historic preservation campaign focused on Palace Amusements in Asbury Park, volunteered to help with day-to-day logistics. Among the first were New Jerseyites Carl Beams, June Lisk, Dan Toskaner, and Sandy Wells, along with Maggie Powell (in Germany), Midge Botten (in the UK), and Mark Uzzo (New York.) All signed on to help establish a collection that would be publicly accessible in Asbury Park. Before long, they had officially registered as The Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection, a non-profit organization.
Anne Noss, a career research librarian, offered to create and maintain a website that would be the public focal point for the collection.
Asbury Park City Councilmember Kate Mellina secured a verbal loan agreement under which the Asbury Park Public Library agreed to find storage space for the collection that, while limited, would initially be sufficient for a start-up collection.
And then, momentum built rapidly. In mid-August, Phillips posted an announcement on the Backstreets website, describing the plan to create The Bruce Springsteen Special Collection. The goal, Phillips said, was to ensure that "all the truly indispensable works by the biographers, the critics, the scholars, journalists and fans" over the course of Bruce’s career are preserved and made available for public examination. In the truest sense of fan-to-fan cooperation, Phillips said the collection would be built on fan donations.
By late September, on the weekend of Springsteen’s 52nd birthday, the first 850 items had been donated to the Friends from 24 countries in 15 languages. By genre, the publications included 756 magazines, 85 books and complete runs of a dozen fanzines, including Backstreets with the extremely rare four-page first issue on newsprint, issued to coincide with Springsteen's October 24, 1980 concert in Seattle.
Overall, the donated materials documented a decisively mixed bag of opinions regarding Bruce’s early career. To reviewer Robert Christgau, Springsteen’s early songs were full of "absurdist energy and heart on sleeve pretentions" (Creem, April 1973.) People Magazine, in its premier issue, depicted the E Street Band as "raffish rockers from the slums of Asbury Park" (March 4, 1974.) British writer Jerry Gilbert was completely unmoved: "I just don’t believe he has very much to offer artistically" (Sounds, April 23, 1973.) In 1974, The New Times Magazine killed a profile by Paul Williams, focused on 1973-74 tour dates, citing uncertainty that anyone was interested in Bruce.
The publishing history of that era, however, was replete with glimpses of Bruce’s emerging potential. "You know the kid is good," Peter Knobler wrote in Crawdaddy, "when you wake up and you’re singing his songs -- and you’ve only heard them once" (March 1973.) Reviewing Springsteen’s first album, Dave Marsh informed readers of Creem that "Springsteen is like Bo Diddley, like Elvis, like Jerry Lee" (March 1973.) In Circus, William Pratt described "Bruce Springsteen territory" as a place where "Bruce’s guitar howls, (and) Clarence’s sax wails" (January 1974.)
In an early note to volunteers, Phillips described these pro and con publications as "an important part of a large historical record that could be lost if scattered throughout the basements of Springsteen fans around the world. Some of the pieces are old and brittle. To some extent what we have here is the equivalent of a Springsteen rare-books room. One thing very important to us is making sure that the Collection is accessible."
On September 30, 2001, in an editorial entitled "A library treasure," The Asbury Park Press praised the Collection for simultaneously highlighting Springsteen’s "time on the world musical stage" while creating "another attraction in the city’s renaissance."
Official dedication of the Collection drew an overflow crowd to the Library for a celebratory party on December 8, 2001. Phillips, along with city and library officials, spoke during a brief ceremony, but the most famous words of the day came that evening during a three-and-a-half-hour holiday concert at Convention Hall. Thanking everyone who turned out at the library earlier in the day, Springsteen added, "The Collection has almost 1,000 books and magazines on myself and the band – more stuff than every place except my mother’s basement."
From 1,000 documents on the day of the dedication, the Collection doubled in size in two years, with the 2,000th donation – issue No. 9 of Point Blank, one of Great Britain’s earlier Springsteen fanzines – arriving in November of 2003. It was the donation of Point Blank editor and publisher Dan French of Westcliff-on-the-Sea, Essex.
"Asbury Park gave me one of the greatest musical experiences of my life," French said in a letter accompanying the donation, "an unscheduled performance by Springsteen on October 3, 1982 at the Stone Pony. That night will always hold a special place in my heart, so it's a privilege to be able to give even a small something back."
Point Blank No. 9 was part of a seventy-items donation by French which included fan magazines from Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Japan, Finland, and Sweden, along with other publications from Ireland, Canada, England, and the US. UK author Mike Saunders of Hove, Sussex, added a hard-to-find issue of Point Blank No. 8 to French’s donation, giving the Collection a full set of the fanzine’s ten issues.
As the Collection continued to grow, the Friends recognized that to continue collecting and preserving historic documents, they needed to expand their knowledge of archival techniques. They also needed more storage space, having rapidly filled the storage closet provided by the Library. Three outside authorities provided valuable help.
Jorge Arevalo, curator of the Woody Guthrie Archives, conducted a ninety-minute work session with the fan organization. The session covered archival practices, access policies, outreach, fundraising, and organization structure.
Archival consultant Carla Zimmerman from the New Jersey Historical Commission trained the fan organization in a wide range of archival techniques including climate control and other environmental factors as well as the selection of proper storage materials. Her tutorage led to a long-time relationship between the fans and the Historical Commission, including the awarding of three grants to the Friends -- for the purchase of archival materials, shelving, and microfilming of a thousand of the oldest and most fragile documents in the Collection.
And Gary Loveland, an official at a family-owned steel fabricating company in Jackson, New Jersey, solved the storage problem. Loveland and his team created a secure, environmentally appropriate storage space in the basement of the Library.
Collectively, the lessons learned from these outside authorities and the expansion of the Collection’s storage space had the effect of assuring donors that materials contributed to the Collection would be responsibly managed, which in turn dramatically spurred the growth of the Collection.
Soon thereafter, donation number 5,000 arrived, along with more than a hundred other items, all sent by Margrit Roepke of Hamburg, Germany. The official 5,000th donation was the April 13-19, 1985 issue of Japan’s TV & FM magazine with an ecstatic headline reading “Springsteen Has Come,” reflecting the frenzy in the Japanese media when Springsteen arrived for his first tour of the island nation. As Roepke explained in an accompanying letter, she had been collecting Springsteen rarities through trades with fans around the world since the 1980s.
"It was a pleasure that I could help the Collection," she said. "During my wildest Bruce years, we had great fun. Now that we all have personal lives, we unfortunately lose sight of each other. But what still is in our hearts is Bruce’s music."
The tour of Japan also produced a review that is, by far, the oddest in the entire collection. Here, in its one-sentence glory, is the review from the Japan Times:
"Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band rocked the hyperboloidal rafters off the Yoyogi Olympic Pool all Wednesday night long in the opening show of their first Japan tour to an absolutely hyped-to-the-hilt house rocking on their feet through two electromagnetic sets and two hell-rocking encores with the thousands shouting along the lyrics with the New Jersey band from the opening zazen-vaporing "Born in The USA" to a raw-rocking "Twist and Shout" finale in four-part audience harmony, as the Brucer (sic) boogied and stomped across the stage and up the piano, slinked in step with the rest of the octet, warned us of time's winged chariot while pointing out how Big Man Clarence Clemens has 'maintained his youthful beauty,' dedicated "My Home Town" (sic) to a madding Tokyo crowd in Japanese they went crackers over that one and seduced a woman from the frenetic multitudes to rock with him on stage only to carry her off after she fainted, crescendoing the bonzo Tokyoites from one climax of pure rock energy to the next and the next and the next, this preacher of rock 'n' roll spinning yarn and singing his hungry heart out about tough times, feeling good, cars and girls and cars and girls, this cool rockin' daddy from the USA."
As so many non-profit organizations do, to help fund its increasingly expensive endeavors, the Friends launched a membership drive. Paid members of The Friends of The Bruce Springsteen Special Collection not only helped to support the organization financially; they also got some cool members-only benefits in return, including a membership card, bumper sticker, a subscription to the members-only newsletter, a special annually-issued collectible Friends bookmark spotlighting a different notable Jersey Shore location each year, and a special membership discount on purchases of the Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection T-Shirt, featuring the Friends color logo on the front.
During 2006, fans packed the Library as The Friends held a series of presentations by authors of the most prominent books on Springsteen’s early career. Bob Santelli kicked off the series, flying in from the West Coast, where he worked at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, following years as a curator and the first Director of Education and Vice-President of Public Programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. He used a treasure trove of stories from his book Greetings from E Street: The Story of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band to depict Springsteen’s career as an event of unparalleled cultural significance in New Jersey, and to predict (correctly!) that Springsteen and the E Street Band had major musical pinnacles left to achieve.
Weeks later, the series continued with a joint appearance by author Dave Marsh, who told stories from his book Bruce Springsteen On Tour: 1968-2005; Eric Meola, photographer and author of Born To Run: The Unseen Photos; and Daniel Wolff, whose book 4th of July, Asbury Park is a leading history of the city from its earliest days onward. Wolff also wrote the introduction to Meola's Born To Run... book.
Donation 10,000 was a gem, a 26-page pamphlet entitled Great Lyricists, No. 2, published during mid-summer 2008 by The Guardian and Observer newspapers in the UK and donated by S-J Rice, an Australian living in Scotland. The pamphlet featured a forward by author and music critic Elizabeth Wurtzel, who told of receiving a six-string acoustic guitar for her twelfth birthday and quickly realizing that she’d never grow up to be a rock star like her idol, Bruce Springsteen. However, she wrote, she had a fallback plan. Inspired by "Blinded By The Light" from 1973 - and specifically the phrase "some hazard from Harvard" - she would get good grades and go to Harvard, knowing "I would be at a college that Springsteen was aware of. That’s how much I loved Bruce Springsteen."
By that point, donations were arriving at a rate of nearly a thousand a year. Having reached the 10,000th-donation plateau, Phillips send a thank you note to volunteers and donors, paying tribute to "all whose support have enabled us to build a lasting, meaningful collection devoted to the history of Bruce and members of his bands. To reach 10,000 documents in seven years is an amazing demonstration of support and commitment by Springsteen fans around the world, and we’re grateful to them all."
Public libraries everywhere struggle under fiscal shortages; the Asbury Park Library was no exception. For eight years, The Friends demonstrated their belief in the Library by taking as much of the Special Collection work off the Library staff as possible, managing donations and acquisitions and maintaining the Special Collection website. Even so, by 2009, the rapid growth of the Collection had the unintended consequence of putting new strains on the resources of the Library, affecting the relationship between the Friends and Library staff. Before long, the Friends began discussing a previously unthinkable possibility. To ensure the safe keeping and future growth of the Collection, it needed to be relocated to a larger, more accessible location.
The solution arrived in the inbox of the Friends on December 6, 2009, in the form of an email message from Eileen Chapman, who at the time was the Assistant Director for Performing Arts at Monmouth University. Chapman had read about the issues at the Library. “Would you be interested,” she wrote, “in housing the collection here at Monmouth University? Bob Santelli, who is an alum and former professor, and I have spoken often about creating a music archive collection here, and it would make perfect sense to kick it off with your collection.”
To the Friends, relocating to Monmouth University would mean giving up on the dream of establishing a permanent home for the Collection in Asbury Park, and all that would mean for Asbury Park’s tourism economy. Springsteen, however, had performance history at the University, dating to 1973, and the University is just down the road from the bungalow where he had written Born To Run, his breakthrough album. Furthermore, the combination of a potential partnership with Chapman, a longtime central figure in the Asbury Park music scene, and Santelli, who by then had left Seattle to help create the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, felt to the Friends like a lifeline. They agreed to talk.
The talks ultimately led to the complete relocation of the Collection to Monmouth University, which at that point was certainly no easy task. By 2011, when the Friends moved the Collection to the University in what was at first a loan-agreement, the Collection had grown to over 20,000 items from 48 countries in categories including books, magazines, tour books, song books, fanzines, newspaper articles, other printed materials, posters, ticket stubs, backstage passes, CDs, DVDs, videos, and vinyl recordings. The Collection included items from all over the world. The countries represented included Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the former German Democratic Republic, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, UK, Uruguay, USA, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Zimbabwe.
Their new home was an on-campus cottage formerly occupied by football coaches. The Friends signed a written agreement establishing a long-term loan of the Collection to the University and, with the help of another grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, set about purchasing enough shelving and archival materials to more than quadruple the storage capacity of the Collection.
In 2012, the Friends' organization began expanding its work to include special events in conjunction with Monmouth University. These events allowed for fundraising in order to purchase required supplies. At times, artifacts were also purchased, though most were donated.
Unfortunately, the first event was not without a bit of bad luck. A second, new book-signing with Eric Meola was scheduled for November 9, 2012. Meola's new book, Streets of Fire: Bruce Springsteen in Photographs and Lyrics 1977-1979, picked up where his earlier book Born to Run: The Unseen Photos left off, and interest in his scheduled appearance ran high.
Superstorm Sandy, however, had other ideas. Even though Sandy had passed by then, Monmouth County had been hit particularly hard by the storm. Emergency staging areas set up by first responders included the Monmouth University campus, requiring the cancellation of many campus activities and events, including the Meola event.
For the Friends, the hurricane-related cancellation of Meola's in-person appearance was a major disappointment, due in part to the fact that many fans pre-paid for a personally signed book. With the cooperation of HarperCollins Publishers, the Friends had taken a large number of preorders and, by the time Hurricane Sandy came ashore, were in possession of boxes of books, awaiting signing.
Carl Beams, an original member of the Friends’ Board of Directors, refused to accept the disappointment. As he had done on countless other occasions, Beams found a way to save the day. Learning that Meola and his wife were planning to visit friends in northern New Jersey, Beams arranged to meet them at a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway where, on a sunny day, Eric sat outdoors at a card table, signing books to the astonishment of onlooking travelers.
With the Collection safely relocated and continuing to grow at an extraordinary rate, the core founders of the Friends voted to infuse the organization with a new group of leaders capable of maximizing the future of the Collection at Monmouth University, as earlier leaders approached retirement. A careful process of interviewing and evaluating potential additions to the Friends led to a restructuring of the organization.
Due to the rapid growth of the Collection, and the need to expand the Friends' reach within the community, more Board members were added. Over the next few years, Jennifer Bardwell, Kevin Farrell, Denise Greene, Lisa Magliano, Jane Murphy, Shawn Poole, Sheryl Nevin, Roseann Whypp, and David Wilson were added to the original "small and mighty" group.
Other changes within the group happened, as well. Bob Crane retired and Melanie Paggioli (who began volunteering with the Friends in 2005 and joined the Board in 2006) was elected to fill his very large shoes. Chris Phillips remained as President of the Friends. Carl Beams continued as Treasurer and Mark Uzzo continued to serve as attorney to the 501(c) 3 corporation. When Anne Noss retired, Melanie Paggioli and Carl Beams continued the maintenance of the websites, and Jane Murphy took over the writing of the newsletter.
In order to reach more fans and provide a look into the Collection for fans around the world, David Wilson set up and managed a Friends Facebook page until the Collection was acquired by Monmouth. He posted a near-daily column with weekly highlights.
In 2013, the Friends returned to organizing more events in conjunction with Monmouth University. For Bruce Springsteen's birthday that year, a special screening of the documentary-film Springsteen & I was held in the University's Pollak Theatre. Before entering the theatre for the screening, all ticketholders for the screening could treat themselves to a slice of birthday cake, along with a chance to sign a huge birthday card for Bruce, which was sent directly to him to enjoy before becoming part of the personal archives he'd later donate to the University.
A year later, the Friends - collaborating again with Monmouth University - would co-organize not one but two major events centered around celebrating Bruce Springsteen's birthday, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of his becoming a professional musician. First up, on September 20, 2014, was the day-long Fifty Years of Makin' This Guitar Talk symposium. "Fans, authors, and scholars from all over the country met to celebrate the summer of '64 and Bruce's newfound guitar skills," Friends Executive Director Melanie Paggioli later said on E Street Radio, "Maybe you were even there. We also discussed and debated Bruce's body of work. The conversations were so lively; we could probably still all be talking." Check out this archived Monmouth University video filmed at the symposium:
Three days after the symposium, on Bruce Springsteen's 65th birthday, the Friends and Monmouth University co-presented An Evening with Thom Zimny in the University's Pollak Theatre. Zimny, who is of course Springsteen's longtime film/video collaborator (and director of the short The Ties That Bind film that will welcome visitors to The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music's new building,) presented a jaw-dropping selection of Springsteen film and video clips from the vault, spanning the years from 1972 through 2013, almost all of it never seen before or since by most of the sold-out audience's members. Backstreets Magazine/website's editor/publisher - and the Friends board's president - Chris Phillips joined Zimny onstage to discuss and present each clip.
Later that year, members of the Friends board also received a special-thanks shoutout for their contributions of research/memorabilia to the booklet and packaging of the Bruce Springsteen: The Album Collection, Vol. 1 1973-1984 box-set:
They also hosted a special two-hour Guest DJ session on E Street Radio in celebration of the box-set's release and Springsteen's fifty years in music:
Friends board members would go on to receive similar special-thanks research/memorabilia shoutouts in two more of Bruce Springsteen's major box-set releases: The Ties That Bind: The River Collection (2015,) and The Album Collection, Vol. 2 1987-1996 (2018.)
On November 17, 2015, Thom Zimny returned to Monmouth University's Pollak Theatre for the Friends/Monmouth University/Backstreets Magazine co-presentation of "A Celebration of Bruce Springsteen’s The River, The Ties That Bind Preview Screening." Another sold-out audience got to enjoy a big-screen "play it loud" preview of the The Ties That Bind box-set's eponymous documentary, plus an awesome extended big-screen preview of segments from the box-set's Tempe, 1980 concert film.
Just over a year later, in early 2017, after officially donating the Special Collection to Monmouth University and officially dissolving the Friends as a non-profit organization, several former Friends Board members - Carl Beams, Kevin Farrell, Melanie Paggioli, Chris Phillips, and Shawn Poole - became members of the initial Advisory Board for what was then known as The Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, continuing to help shepherd the newly formed organization as it transformed into what is now officially known as The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music. And when the Center's new building is officially dedicated today - Saturday, June 6, 2026 - several of the Friends' Board members also will be present as specially invited guests.
In 1986, Dave Marsh, while writing about the story intentionally told by Springsteen's summative-at-the-time (and still essential) Live 1975-1985 box-set, observed the following: "The album did not conform to rock and roll mythology; these descendants of Johnny B. Goode grew up, and the ending of their story was collected, not chaotic, open rather than closed, nurturing rather than wasteful." With the opening of the The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music's new home this month, the same, fortunately, can be said about the story behind The Bruce Springsteen Special Collection, and the people who made it all happen. Their efforts lived up to one of the best ideals of Springsteen's best music: preserving and extending our greatest collective histories and traditions.
Finally, we also are pleased to share here with our readers (and on our YouTube channel) this "lost" mini-documentary on the history behind how the Special Collection played a major role in birthing what is now known as The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music. It was filmed and produced a few years ago by Michael Sodano and Nancy Sabino of ArtsRule, LLC for a planned but never realized documentary mini-series on the unique collection of fan-based memorabilia that provided the Center's foundation. Nevertheless, despite being somewhat dated by the Springsteen Center's 2026 name-change, it still offers many additional historical insights, especially in regards to the Special Collection and the Friends, featuring exclusive filmed interviews with former Friends Executive Director Bob Crane and current Springsteen Center Director Eileen Chapman. Special thanks to Michael and Nancy for allowing us to share their excellent work here at Letters To You: