The piano Bruce Springsteen used to compose “Born to Run'' is missing somewhere in a Jersey swamp, but it could be worth a fortune if recovered.
Little is known about this old piano, but anyone near Long Branch with a beat-up old Aeolian upright in their basement might want to check under the lid. Legend has it that the entire E Street band signed it when they finished playing. We recorded Born to Run and left the piano in Bruce's old house.
“Anyone who discovers that piano, opens it, and sees the signature will know they have stumbled upon the holy grail of the Springsteen world,” said the E Street aficionado, who also worked on Magic in the World. said Rob Kirkpatrick, author of “Knight: The Magic.'' Bruce Springsteen's words and music. ”
The instrument has sat for years since the early 1990s in a modest Long Branch home that Springsteen's former landlord, Marilyn Locke, rented to the rocker as Springsteen worked on his legendary songs. After that, it was carried out onto the sidewalk and has not been seen since. album.
“When I rented the house to Bruce in 1974, he moved in and had this little upright piano. When he moved out two years later, he left it there,” Rocky said. and yelled out the house number. “7.5!” – While watching Bruce play in one of the smaller clubs in his early days.
He told the audience that his “landlord” was in the crowd, she said.
Rocky, now 81, first met Springsteen when he was just 24 and unsuccessfully pursuing stardom. By that time he had produced two albums, both of which received critical acclaim, but the albums sold very poorly and when the third one was not a hit, Columbia Records dropped him. I had promised to do it.
He's been mostly homeless while on tour for the past two years, but the boss was looking for a place to dig in and write another album when he walked into Rocky's real estate office and asked to rent his rock 'n' roll turf. Ta. Asbury Park.
She didn't have anything there, but offered him a shotgun cabin she owned on the beach in Long Branch for $200 a month, she said.
“He was really young, a boy,” Rocky said. “And this was the first time he lived alone outside of his home and wasn’t sleeping on the floor at the Student Prince in Asbury or sleeping on the street to play a concert.”
According to Rocky, Springsteen was a stand-up tenant. He reportedly trimmed the bushes along his porch, and while on tour or in the studio without pay, he would sometimes pay rent months in advance in preparation for a long period of bankruptcy. .
And he spent the night sitting at the Aeolian piano he had brought with him, pressed against the wall of the front room, fumbling with the keys of an instrument he barely knew how to play.
Their previous two albums, “Greetings from Asbury Park'' and “The Wild, The Innocents and the E. Street Shuffle,'' were written on guitar, but Bruce Writing “To Run'' was the first time he sat down to the piano, and Kirkpatrick says it changed his sound.
“Bruce was always primarily a guitarist,” Kirkpatrick said. “It's not that he couldn't play the piano, but he called himself 'the fastest guitar in Asbury Park.'
“Not using a primary instrument definitely affects the writing process,” Kirkpatrick says. “And in a song like 'Backstreet,' you hear the fruits of Bruce's composition not as a piano virtuoso, but as someone who writes very carefully, focusing on emotion over technique. I think you can.”
The result is music history. “Born to Run” was a huge hit when released in August 1975, catapulting Springsteen to stardom. In October of the same year, he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines on the same day. By November he toured overseas for the first time. And to this day, this album remains one of rock'n'roll's defining achievements.
And it all started with the piano he left in Marilyn Lockie's living room. The piano remained out of tune for 20 years.
“Subsequent renters just left it in the living room and used it for whatever they thought would be useful,” Rocky said. Rocky said he sold the house in 1993-94 and told the last tenant to throw all the furniture on the curb. Pick up trash.
“It wasn't good furniture. It was old and run down. From what I remember, it had actually been sitting there for 20 years, although I could still find the songs on the keyboard.”
A few days later, when she went to the dentist, she met, among other things, Springsteen's right-hand man and saxophonist Clarence Clemons — he also had his teeth cleaned — and he asked her if she still had the old piano. I asked please.
“He said, 'Well, when we finished writing all the music for 'Born to Run,' one day a few of us were home and we saw it. I lifted the top, signed it, and left it there.”
Rocky fell to the floor and rushed to the phone to call the tenant and tell him not to leave until the piano was delivered, but it was too late.
“He said, “Well, that's the problem.'' And I said, “What's the problem?'' And he said, “Well, you ask me to put things away.'' He said, “The old piano was sitting there…I threw it away.'' And he said it had been picked up two days ago.''
“This is the last time anyone saw or heard of this.”
Rocky believes the piano was probably picked up by garbage collectors and “melted into the earth” at some dump site. But rock'n'roll treasure hunters continue to search for the stone, hoping it might have been rescued from a sidewalk or still living in a dump somewhere.
“Once, the president of the Piano Technicians Union called me and asked me to tell her the exact date the piano was thrown away and where the trash was going,” she says, adding that they told her I explained that I said that. If Bruce had the instrument professionally tuned, the association would likely have a record of it and be able to confirm its identity if found.
However, 30 years have passed since she went missing, and no one has been able to trace her. Auction expert Leila Dunbar believes it could be worth at least $300,000 if found in salvageable condition.
“And given the market, it could sell for a lot more,” she added, noting that Freddie Mercury's piano, the composer of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” sold for $2.1 million in 2023, and that John Lennon's “Imagine” piano sold for $2.1 million in 2023. ” was sold for $2.1 million in 2023. It dates from 2000 and is worth up to $10 million today.
Kirkpatrick, who is not an appraiser but a true superfan, believes that if the piano were found in salvageable condition, a “serious collector” would fetch a “seven figure” price.
“The history of 20th century rock and roll is incomplete without talking about Born to Run,” he said. “So the instrument on which the song was largely composed and which gave it its musical identity, the value of a song like that… is priceless.”
As for Rocky, she believes the time she spent with Bruce and the band was worth far more than the price of a piano.
“I didn’t lose anything even if I didn’t know I had it or that they signed it,” she said.
