On Cleveland & Bruce Springsteen in the mid-70s
Cleveland rocks.
Cleveland, Ohio was a rock and roll mecca in the 1970s and one of their favored sons was none other than Bruce Springsteen.
Let's begin with this artifact below, keeping in mind that Kid Leo at WMMS had been playing the single for almost a year at this point. The local Columbia Records rep brought Kid Leo a copy of the song in the summer of 1974, and he'd play it at the end of his show every Friday at 5:55 pm at the end of his show, declaring it the official start to the weekend. (If your local radio station did that too, they basically copied Kid Leo, sorry.)
He'd say, "It's time to punch out, wash up, come back and wrap it up," and and put on "Born to Run." Kid Leo did this every Friday until he retired from the station in 1988, and he's definitely snuck BTR on at the end of his Underground Garage show.
But printing the lyrics is a whole other level. This is on page 2 of this particular issue of Scene! This is valuable real estate! They didn't do this to fill space because an advertiser dropped out on page 36. PAGE TWO. You only do that if you know it's going to get people's attention. You only do that if you think there's enough people that are going to be influenced by picking up a copy of the paper while waiting for the bus or killing time and are going to see BORN TO RUN and know what that is and keep reading. It's honestly amazing.
The Scene also sponsored a contest where you could win a leather jacket "like Bruce Springsteen's." And, like, just the minimum amount of effort, because why work hard when you know that every Bruce fan within distribution radius is going to enter the contest. I particularly love that you can submit your entry by mail or by bringing it physically to the office, and that "all entries will be judged by Kid Leo & Columbia Records." I tried finding a photo of the winner in a later issue and was sadly unsuccessful.
I didn't go into the archive to look at the classified ads, but the search function lit up on those pages so I took a look and man, these are solid gold. There was always at least one Springsteen-related classified in any mid-70's issue of Scene: tickets, photographs, and as you can see below, looking for tapes.
Caryn Rose
