The Springsteen Museum’s Modest, Big-Hearted Vision of America

The new center displays the Boss’s “Born to Run” Telecaster, hand-written lyrics, and more. But it also tells a much longer and bigger story about American music.

It’s odd, when you think about it, that there is no major, comprehensive museum devoted to American music. One can after all make a very strong case that music is the form of creative expression that has been America’s greatest gift to the world. American cinema, literature, and visual art are all of course formidable. But the music! Folk, blues, jazz, spirituals, country and western, Broadway, on up to hip-hop … utterly endless variety, ingenuity, passion.

And yet, there exists in the United States no single great temple to all this rumbustious genius. Genres have their halls of fame, as with country music. And speaking of Nashville, there does exist in that city a Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum, which expands its purview beyond country music and seemed to me outstanding on my visit there a few years ago. But still, it doesn’t claim to be exhaustive. And, obviously, there’s the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, but it is, of necessity, international in scope.

The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music is not that great temple, as executive director Bob Santelli will readily acknowledge. With exhibition space totaling roughly 8,600 square feet, it couldn’t possibly be. But what the center lacks in comprehension, it more than makes up for in—well, the word, as The Beatles put it, is love. The center, which opened its doors on June 13 on the campus of Monmouth University in the Boss’s lifelong Jersey stomping grounds—he wrote the lyrics to “Born to Run” at a coffee house that used to be just up the street—is a down-to-earth and heartfelt bear hug of every imaginable genre, and of the country that produced it; of the “old, weird America,” in Greil Marcus’s indelible phrase; the America where everything didn’t have a price and where ample room was made for the iconoclasts and misfits and insubordinates who wove us this glorious aural tapestry.

The museum is the product of Santelli’s deft execution, but it reflects Springsteen’s heart and vision. Santelli, along with architect Rick Cook and director Eileen Chapman, who spearheaded the job of collecting the Springsteen archives that are such an important part of the museum, showed me around the center on a late July Friday. Santelli was a longtime Rolling Stone rock critic until he turned toward museum curation in the 1990s, first in Cleveland, and then hither and yon. He has known Springsteen since they were teenagers. He first saw Bruce play in around 1968 (“He was so good, and so far ahead of everyone else”). When Woodstock came around, they both skipped it, because........

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