GRIEVANCES AGAINST WNEW-FM AS A BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN FAN

While I was writing about the 8-15-75 Bottom Line show, I kept going off on extended tangents about how much WNEW did not like Bruce Springsteen and it was detracting from the writing about the actual performance, so I thought I would move it all over here.

WNEW-FM, at the time, a venerable station in the New York City area – I listened to them up in Stamford, CT – did not like Bruce Springsteen from day one. They would not play the first two albums, and they also talked about it on air. I was a very precocious music fan from a very early age but this is not the kind of thing I would have been aware of had it not been very obvious! And in the days where you were limited by what you could pull in on terrestrial radio, you were kind of stuck until 1978, when WPIX went “new wave” and gave NEW some competition. But at that point NEW was busy acting like they had always been huge Springsteen supporters.

Back in the big cities, however, the rumours and stories continue to circulate. In New York, the black and white poster for the SRO Bottom Line shows is changing hands for a tidy sum of money. WNEW, the city's pseudo-hip FM station is still eating humble pie. They initially disliked Springsteen's publicity and all those analogies with Bob Dylan. They wouldn't play his records. Then, they discovered he had a big following. They had to beg, plead and crawl to get permission to broadcast the Bottom Line Show live.

Robin Katz, Street Life, 1 November 1975

As I got older and more vocal about what music I did and didn’t like, I carried that grudge like it was personally aimed at me. I also completely attribute WNEW’s loud snub of Bruce to the fact that being a Bruce Springsteen fan made you very unpopular in the mid-70s. I was definitely a weird kid, but being a weird kid that had BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND written in my approximation of the Born to Run font on all of my school notebooks did not help. There were probably other reasons that Bruce was not popular with my peers but this essay is not about that. (Let’s just say that the hazing was particularly bad after the No Nukes movie came out and the central topic was Bruce and Clarence. You are smart people, you can figure it out.)

Marc Dolan, in his great book Bruce Springsteen & the Promise of Rock and Roll, points out that WNEW morning show DJ Dave Herman had refused to play anything from Greetings for over two years, and basically went on the air the morning after he saw one of the Bottom Line shows and apologized. Herman would later feature a “Bruce Juice” segment on his show where he played a Springsteen song every morning, and for years acted like NEW had always supported Bruce when in fact it was serious revisionist history. WE DIDN’T FORGET, WNEW! 

This was the conversation that took place on-air before the 8/15/75 broadcast:

Richard Neer backstage at the Bottom Line with Dave Herman over WNEW FM in New York,  and of course we're here tonight for the third evening, the fifth performance of Bruce Springsteen. Dave, you were at opening night, do you have any impressions that you'd like to share with the audience?

Dave Herman: “Well, I think I mentioned on my show the next morning that over the last couple of years since Bruce Springsteen’s first album came out that I personally had not been all that turned on – not so much by Bruce personally, because he's fantastic – but before the records came out there was like so much pre-publicity on him that I had this kind of aversion to really getting into him. But when I saw him Wednesday night here at the Bottom Line, well, I think it was a rock and roll show unlike everything I've ever seen, at least  I've ever seen in five or six years. He has the extraordinary power of making rock and roll what it traditionally has been, and making it that again, which other people have been unable to do for a long time.

Richard Neer: Well, I think at the beginning comparing him to Dylan, it was another Dylan, a was a large mistake.

DH: That was part of the turn off. It was part of what turned me off personally and I think a lot of people. He's nothing like Bob Dylan.

RN: And although the comparison may be true for his effect on music, although at this point we have no way of knowing.

DH: Even his physical appearance, there's some truth to it.

RN: It is just is a statement that leaves somebody with a lot to live up to, and no matter how good you are, you really can't 

DH: His music is totally unique, he's Bruce Springsteen, he's no one else, he's not like anyone else, he is unique and he is new and fresh, and of course rock and roll is based on music that not only goes back to Dylan, but long before that. But he is totally unique and totally fresh, and something truly outstanding.

Victory is sweet.