My 1st return visit to the Springsteen Center: a few errata spottings, and good news for Team Waves!
- Shawn Poole
- 6 minutes ago
- 4 min read
June 29, 2026
Last Friday afternoon, I made my first return visit to The Bruce Springsteen Center For American Music. It was under very different circumstances than the very first time I got to visit the Center, which of course was for Letters To You's special advance tour. This time around, like any other regular visitor, I simply bought my own ticket a few days ahead of time, and - just for kicks and curiosity - added on the free-with-limited-and-timeslotted-availability "Enhance Your Experience" option, which allows you to sit at a desktop computer in the Center's designated archival space for a timed session and explore/enjoy about fifteen or so staff-selected and digitized items from the Springsteen Archives, including recorded music! (Highly recommended, of course, and I understand that the selections for visitors get changed on a regular, rotating basis.)
I made this particular visit because I needed to take some additional photos at the Center to supplement some upcoming Letters To You articles/features that we're planning to post next month, one of which I am SUPER-extra-excited about, and consider it to be one of the greatest all-time honors in my tenure as founder/editor/publisher of this site. (More on that later, of course. Stay tuned...) So since I already had plans to be at another event in Northern NJ that night, visiting the Center for just a few hours as a regular ticket-buying visitor on that Friday afternoon was the easiest way to accomplish my "mission."
Anyway, as I guess I should've expected, while accomplishing my planned "tasks" I ended up noticing a few other things that I missed during my first visit. The most notable one, of course, was this:
Quite a vindicating little moment indeed, if you're a member of "Team Waves," which I proudly am and long have been, in the "great" (or is that grating?) debate over whether the line in "Thunder Road" should be "Mary's dress sways" or "Mary's dress waves."
Look, here's the thing... Bruce Springsteen is the creator of "Thunder Road," and if he believes now that he wants the line to be sung as "Mary's dress sways," that's totally his prerogative, of course. But the whole idea that it's always been "sways" and not "waves" is now empirically dead in the New Jersey water, thanks to the handwritten lyrics in these displayed original notebook pages circa 1974-75, courtesy of Bruce Springsteen himself.
In the summer of 2021, longtime Springsteen manager and friend Jon Landau decided to "settle" the "sways"/"waves" debate with the following public statement, in the form of a published email message to The New Yorker's David Remnick: "The word is 'sways.' That’s the way he wrote it in his original notebooks, that’s the way he sang it on Born to Run, in 1975, that’s the way he has always sung it at thousands of shows, and that’s the way he sings it right now on Broadway. Any typos in official Bruce material will be corrected. And, by the way, 'dresses' do not know how to 'wave.'"
Well, with all due respect, Mr. Landau, so much for "that's the way he wrote it in his original notebooks." And as for "that’s the way he has always sung it," it was rather serendipitous that my randomly staff-selected and digitized items from my scheduled Springsteen Archives visit included professionally recorded and mixed audio of Bruce's July 9, 1981 "Thunder Road" performance, which opened his concert with the E Street Band that night, live in the swamps of New Jersey. That recording just happens to feature the most clearly audible singing of the word "waves" I've ever heard. Since the recording also is available via nugs.net, you can just click here and then click on the "Thunder Road" clip to hear - and judge - for yourself.
Oh, and since we're now just a few days away from this year's big Independence Day holiday, let me also note, by the way, that "dresses" are made of fabric, just as flags are. Therefore, "dresses" do indeed know how to "wave," just like flags do, as heard in these oft-sung lyrics from another rather well-known piece of American music: "O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?" Best wishes for a Happy 4th of July 2026, Mr. Landau!
Finally, while we're in a corrective mode, I must respectfully inform the Springsteen Center itself of two relatively minor display-case errors that should be fixed ASAP. (Hey, I totally get just how busy you all have been and remain, these things happen, etc., but...) The first appears in the display of the 1975 Born to Run vinyl master test-pressing pictured below. "The Heist" is incorrectly described as "a song... which ultimately didn't make the album," but "The Heist" actually was just an alternate title for "Meeting Across The River," which of course made the cut for Born to Run, although it ultimately flipped positions with "She's The One" on Side Two.
And yes, especially as its editor/publisher, of course it was very cool and exciting to see the name of this website already on display in a Springsteen Center exhibit case. Extra-impressive, I might add, since the site will be only three years old this summer. Nevertheless, I much prefer a scenario in which we might someday achieve that honor on our own, and not just as a misspelled version of the title of Bruce Springsteen's 2020 album with the E Street Band:
Thanks anyway for that temporary thrill, Springsteen Center, along with all of those other and much longer-lasting thrills from my latest visit. I'll be seein' ya!