In the autumn of 1975 Bruce Springsteen was, by every outward measure, the most talked-about new rock star in America. His third album, Born to Run, had been released on 25 August 1975, and on 27 October 1975 he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week. The E Street Band were playing long, ecstatic concerts to growing crowds. The future, as the critic Jon Landau had famously put it the year before, seemed to belong to him.
And then, for almost a year, he made no record at all. Not because he had run out of songs, or because the band had broken up, or because the public had turned away. He made no record because he was not, in practice, allowed to make one on his own terms. A lawsuit with his manager, Mike Appel, and the court orders and legal advice that followed it, kept him out of the recording studio from the summer of 1976 until the end of May 1977. The year after Born to Run was therefore not a fallow year. It was a year spent on stage, on the road, and at a farmhouse in New Jersey, writing song after song that he could not yet record, while lawyers argued about who owned his work and who was entitled to decide how it should be made.
This article stays inside that year, and in the months immediately after it, when the songs written in enforced silence finally reached tape. It is not a general biography of Springsteen, and it is not a track-by-track appreciation of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the album that eventually emerged on 2 June 1978. The album matters here as the outcome of the lawsuit, not as a separate subject. The question at the centre is simpler and more human than any chart history: what happens to a singer when the moment of his greatest success is also the moment he loses control of his own career, and what does he do with the time he is forced to spend waiting?
A caution belongs at the start, because the legal story is told in secondary accounts that do not agree on every detail. The main dates — the filing in July 1976, the countersuit two days later, the settlement on 28 May 1977, and the return to the studio on 1 June 1977 — are consistently reported. The exact scope of the court order, the precise financial terms of the settlement, and the exact number of songs Springsteen wrote while he waited are reported differently in different sources. Where sources disagree, this article says so, rather than choosing the tidiest version.
The star Born to Run made
To understand why the lawsuit mattered so much, it helps to remember how unlikely Springsteen’s breakthrough had been, and how complete it suddenly seemed. He had grown up in Freehold, New Jersey, spent years playing in local bands on the Jersey Shore, and signed to Columbia Records in 1972. His first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, both released in 1973, won him critical admiration and a devoted live following without making him a star. The third album was, by his own later account and by the accounts of everyone around him, a make-or-break record. It took fourteen months to record.
Born to Run, when it arrived in August 1975, justified the effort. It was a big, romantic, cinematic record, full of cars, highways, and escape, produced with a density that deliberately recalled the wall-of-sound records of the early 1960s. Columbia promoted it heavily, and the promotion worked. The album climbed the charts, the title song became a radio staple, and the band’s live shows began to draw the larger audiences the record deserved. The simultaneous Time and Newsweek covers on 27 October 1975 were the visible symbol of that arrival. Time’s piece celebrated Springsteen as an artist. Newsweek’s was more sceptical, concentrating on the scale of Columbia’s promotional campaign and asking, in effect, whether the star was being manufactured. The difference between the two covers captured something Springsteen himself would soon feel acutely: the gap between being celebrated and being in control.
The band that carried that success was, by 1975, a settled unit: Roy Bittan on piano, Clarence Clemons on saxophone, Danny Federici on organ, Garry Tallent on bass, Steven Van Zandt on guitar, and Max Weinberg on drums, with Springsteen himself on guitar, harmonica, and vocals. They were not session musicians hired for a record. They were a touring band, road-tested, who knew how to play for three hours and how to hold a room. That fact would matter enormously in the year that followed, because when the studio was closed to them, the stage was not. The band could survive a lawsuit in a way that a solo singer with hired hands might not have, simply by doing what they already did best: playing, night after night, in front of people.
It is also worth remembering what Springsteen wanted next, because the lawsuit was not, in the first instance, about money in the simple sense. After Born to Run, Appel wanted to capitalise on the album’s success with a live album. Springsteen wanted to return to the studio, and he wanted to do so with Jon Landau, who had co-produced Born to Run, rather than with Appel as producer. That disagreement — live album versus new studio album, Appel versus Landau — was the creative spark of the legal fire. Springsteen, in later interviews and in the documentary The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story, put the point in terms of control rather than cash. As one account of the documentary reports his words, it was not a lawsuit about money, it was a lawsuit about control: who was going to be in control of his work and his working life. That distinction should be kept in mind throughout this story, because it explains both why Springsteen was willing to endure a year without recording and why the album that finally emerged sounds the way it does.
A contract signed in 1972
The roots of the dispute went back to the beginning of Springsteen’s professional career. In 1972 he had signed with Mike Appel’s company, Laurel Canyon Ltd., in agreements that covered management, production, and publishing. Appel, a songwriter who had previously co-written songs for the Partridge Family, had become Springsteen’s manager and, with Jim Cretecos, his early producer. At the time, as several histories of the period note, it was customary for a new artist seeking a record deal to give away a large share of publishing, and a young singer from New Jersey with no leverage had little reason, or little ability, to question the terms. Springsteen later described signing the contracts without reading them closely, a mistake he called, in one account, the biggest of his young career.
The standard summary of those terms, repeated in Ultimate Classic Rock and elsewhere, is that the Laurel Canyon arrangement paid Springsteen minimum royalties and gave him none of the publishing rights to his own songs. That summary should be treated as a secondary account’s shorthand, not as a quotation from a court judgement, and this article presents it as such. Contract interpretation is, by nature, contested, and both sides in a lawsuit will describe the same document differently. What can be said with confidence is that by the spring of 1976 Springsteen had come to believe the terms were unacceptable, and that one account describes an auditor’s report in the spring of 1976 calling Appel’s management unconscionable exploitation. That is a strong phrase, and it is attributed here to the account that reports it, not adopted as this article’s own verdict. The important point is that Springsteen decided he could not go on working under the old arrangement, and that Appel, having built his own career around Springsteen, was not willing to let the arrangement go without a fight.
The personal dimension made the fight harder. Appel had not been a distant corporation. He had been Springsteen’s manager since the debut, his co-producer on the breakthrough, and, for a time, a friend. The break between them was therefore not a clean business separation. It was a rupture in a working relationship that had carried Springsteen from obscurity to the covers of the national news magazines. That is why the lawsuit, when it came, felt to those around the band like something more than a contract dispute. It felt like a divorce, and Springsteen himself would later use exactly that word for it. In his autobiography Born to Run, as quoted in several accounts, he wrote that a settlement was reached, separation papers were drawn up, and one quiet night in a dimmed midtown office building, he and Appel finalised their divorce. The word is revealing. It suggests not a victory, but an ending.
July 1976: suit, countersuit, and the studio door
On 27 July 1976 Springsteen filed a lawsuit against Laurel Canyon Ltd., Appel’s company, seeking to break the management and publishing arrangement. The allegations, as reported by Ultimate Classic Rock and other accounts drawing on the court filings, included fraud, undue influence, and breach of trust. Two days later, on 29 July 1976, Appel countersued in the New York State Supreme Court, asking the court to prevent Springsteen from working with Jon Landau in the studio. The speed of the countersuit tells its own story. This was not a dispute that would be allowed to drift. Both sides moved at once, and both sides understood that the practical question — who would produce the next record, and under whose authority — was the question that mattered most.
What happened next is the part of the story where sources differ on scope, and the difference matters enough to state it plainly. Some accounts, including Ultimate Classic Rock and the Guardian’s account of the Darkness period, describe the result in broad terms: Appel obtained an injunction barring Springsteen from entering a recording studio, and Springsteen was therefore unable to record for almost a year. Other accounts describe the order more narrowly: the court barred Springsteen from recording with a producer not approved by Appel, or advised him not to return to the studio until the case was settled, and Springsteen himself chose not to record at all rather than record under Appel’s terms. A third version, reported from the documentary and from Springsteen’s own later telling, emphasises his own refusal: if he could not go into the studio and make the music he wanted to make, he would not make music in a studio at all.
These versions are not, for the purposes of this story, contradictory in their practical effect. Whether the bar was absolute, or limited to Landau, or a combination of a court order and Springsteen’s own principled refusal, the outcome was the same: no new Springsteen studio recording was made between the summer of 1976 and June 1977. The distinction is worth preserving, however, because it prevents a simple villain-and-victim telling. Springsteen was not a passive figure locked out of a room by a judge. He was a party to a lawsuit who made a deliberate choice — costly, risky, and, as it turned out, artistically productive — to wait rather than compromise on who controlled his next record. The plan for this article, prepared before drafting, gave a specific date for the injunction, 15 September 1976, and named the judge as Arnold Fein. The Guardian account names Judge Fein as granting the injunction, but the sources checked for this draft do not all confirm the 15 September date to the same standard, so this article does not assert that date as settled fact. It is enough, and more honest, to say that by the autumn of 1976 the legal position had hardened into a practical ban on the studio work Springsteen wanted to do.
The Lawsuit Tour: proving it nightly
If the studio was closed, the stage was open, and Springsteen and the E Street Band used it with a determination that gave the period its nickname. The tours of late 1976 and early 1977 are known, in fan and press shorthand, as the Lawsuit Tour, and in one account as the Lawsuit Drags On Tour. The nickname is a joke, but it is a joke with a serious point. The band were touring an album that was already a year old, with no new record to promote, no new single on the radio, and no prospect of one until the lawyers finished. They had to prove, night after night, that they were not a record-company creation, not a hype, not a one-album wonder.
They did so by playing longer, harder, and more variously than before. One milestone from that period, reported in a Born to Run anniversary account, was the band’s first headlining arena show at the Spectrum in Philadelphia on 25 October 1976, where sections of the venue were curtained off to make the large room feel smaller. That detail — curtains in an arena — reveals a band thinking carefully about scale: how to grow without losing the closeness of a club show. The set lists of the Lawsuit Tour mixed Born to Run material with older songs, with covers, and, increasingly, with new songs that audiences had never heard on record. A fan who saw Springsteen in the winter of 1976-77 might hear a song that would not appear on an album for another eighteen months, or that would never appear on an album at all in its original form. The concert became, in effect, the only place where the new work could be heard, and that gave the shows a particular intensity.
Springsteen himself later described that necessity in terms that have become famous among his fans. In the Guardian’s Toronto interview about the Darkness documentary, he is quoted as saying that people thought the band were gone, finished, that they thought Born to Run had been a record-company creation, and that the band had to reprove their viability on a nightly basis, by playing, and that it took many years. The sentence reframes the lawsuit year. It was not a year off. It was a year of nightly examinations, in which the only evidence the band could offer for their own existence was the next night’s performance. A recording career can be paused by a court. A live reputation cannot be paused in the same way, because it is remade, or lost, every night.
Holmdel: a farmhouse full of songs
When Springsteen was not on tour during the lawsuit year, he was at home in New Jersey, writing. The place most often named in accounts of this period is his farm home in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he worked on new material in a barn and at home, sometimes rehearsing with the band away from any commercial studio. The image of a farmhouse barn as a rehearsal room is a useful corrective to the image of a rock star in a Manhattan studio. The songs that would become Darkness were not, in the first instance, studio creations. They were songs worked out in a room with no clock running, no engineer waiting, and no record company expecting a finished master by the end of the week. That freedom, paradoxically bought by a lawsuit that had taken his studio freedom away, shaped the writing.
How many songs did he write? Here, again, the sources give a range rather than a number, and this article preserves the range. Wikipedia’s Darkness article, drawing on published histories, says he amassed between 40 and 70 songs on the road and at Holmdel. Other accounts say more than 50, or more than 80, or about 70 written with about 50 recorded in some form during the sessions. The differences probably reflect different ways of counting — finished songs versus fragments, songs written during the lawsuit versus songs written during the long sessions that followed — and this article does not try to reconcile them into a single figure. What matters is the order of magnitude: Springsteen entered the Darkness sessions with far more material than any single album could hold, and the problem of the sessions would not be finding songs, but choosing among them.
Some of the songs from that stockpile are now well known, even if they did not all make the final album. Among the material recorded or attempted at Atlantic Studios in the early sessions, as listed in the Darkness session histories, were Rendezvous, The Promise, Frankie, Don’t Look Back, Something in the Night, Because the Night, Racing in the Street, Fire, and Breakaway. Something in the Night, by one session account, had been written in 1976 and rehearsed in the barn at Holmdel. Don’t Look Back, by another, had been composed by early 1977, during the time Springsteen was barred from the studio, and had been played live regularly during the Lawsuit Tour. Fire was written in the summer of 1977 with Elvis Presley in mind. Because the Night would become, in other hands, one of the great songs of the period, though not on a Springsteen album. The Promise, the title song of the later box set, would be left off Darkness itself, in part, by one account, because Springsteen feared it was too transparently autobiographical.
28 May 1977: the settlement, and four days later
The lawsuit ended, as such cases usually do, not with a dramatic courtroom verdict but with a settlement reached out of court. On 28 May 1977 Springsteen and Appel settled, with Springsteen buying out his contract with Appel. The settlement allowed Springsteen to work with Landau as his manager and producer, and to return to the studio. Springsteen’s own later summary calls the outcome a divorce, finalised quietly in a dimmed midtown office building. The quietness of that image is deliberate. After ten months of public touring and private legal argument, the end came not on stage but in an office, at night, with papers.
The financial terms of the settlement are reported in two different ways, and both should be noted. One widely repeated account, drawing on Christopher Sanford’s 1999 book Springsteen Point Blank and on Ultimate Classic Rock, says Appel gave up most of his publishing rights in exchange for 800,000 dollars, and that his production share was reduced from six percent to two percent, with a share of royalties from Springsteen’s first three albums retained as part of the buyout. Another account, in American Songwriter, describes the settlement terms as undisclosed. This article does not choose between the detailed figure and the undisclosed description, because the sources checked do not allow a confident choice, and because the exact figure is less important to the story than the structure: Appel was bought out, Springsteen regained control of his publishing and his choice of producer, and both sides avoided a trial.
What is not in doubt is what happened next, and how quickly it happened. Springsteen entered Atlantic Studios in New York City with Landau and the E Street Band to record his next album on 1 June 1977, four days after the legal proceedings ended. Four days is a strikingly short interval. It suggests a man who had been waiting for almost a year and who had no intention of waiting any longer, and a band who had a stockpile of songs and a clear idea of what they wanted to do with them. On the first night, 1 June 1977, the band recorded at least ten songs, according to Brucebase’s session history, including Rendezvous, Because the Night, I Wanna Be with You, and, by biographer Dave Marsh’s account, the rocker Don’t Look Back. That is not the behaviour of a band celebrating. It is the behaviour of a band getting to work, methodically, on material they had already lived with for months on tour and at Holmdel.
Atlantic, the Record Plant, and the long cut
The Darkness sessions, which ran from June 1977 to March 1978 at Atlantic Studios and then at the Record Plant, both in New York City, were long by any standard, and they became longer because Springsteen was not satisfied easily. After about two months at Atlantic, the band moved to the Record Plant, where most of Born to Run had been recorded, in search of a better sound. The move was a practical decision — the Record Plant’s rooms suited the band’s live, full-band approach — but it also had a symbolic value. It was a return to the studio where the breakthrough had been completed, now under new management and on Springsteen’s own terms.
The making of Badlands itself, the album’s opening track, shows the same refusal to settle. The title came from a poster for Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, though Springsteen, by one session account, had not seen the film. The music was composed in late June 1977 and first played by the band on 27 June 1977 at Atlantic Studios. The opening riff, Springsteen later revealed, was a major-key twist on the minor-key introduction to the Animals’ 1965 hit, a borrowing he has acknowledged openly. Badlands was then rewritten in November 1977, with new lines added, and it went through several versions before Springsteen felt it deserved its title. In a later Rolling Stone interview, quoted in American Songwriter’s Badlands history, Springsteen said he kept writing and writing until he had a song he felt deserved that title. That sentence could stand as a summary of the whole Darkness process: a songwriter who had waited a year to record, now refusing to settle for a song that did not earn its place.
The same refusal shaped the album’s final shape. The sessions reportedly yielded between 50 and 70 songs, of which only 32 are known in detail, and only ten made the final album: Badlands, Adam Raised a Cain, Something in the Night, Candy’s Room, Racing in the Street, The Promised Land, Factory, Streets of Fire, Prove It All Night, and Darkness on the Edge of Town. There is no filler, no song included merely because it was available. Songs that in another context would have been hits were left off: Because the Night was given to Patti Smith, who made it her own; Fire was held for another singer; The Promise was held back, in part, as noted above, because it cut too close to the lawsuit itself. The discipline of leaving strong songs off an album is a discipline Springsteen learned, at least in part, during the lawsuit year, when he had learned to live with songs without recording them, and to judge them over time rather than in the excitement of a first take.
Springsteen’s later feelings about the finished record are also worth recording, because they prevent a simple triumph narrative. In a 1984 appearance on the British television show The Old Grey Whistle Test, as reported by American Songwriter, he said Darkness was a record he thought had some of his best songs of a certain type and a lot of good ideas, but that he had always felt it was a little dry, recording-wise, and that the band had underplayed and oversang a little. That self-criticism does not diminish the album. It shows, rather, that the man who fought for control of his work did not then pretend the result was perfect. Control, for Springsteen, meant the right to judge his own work harshly, not the right to declare it flawless.
June 1978: a darker record, and a tour to prove it again
Darkness on the Edge of Town was released on 2 June 1978, almost three years after Born to Run. It was, by the standards of a follow-up to a breakthrough, a restrained and even sombre record. Where Born to Run had been grand, orchestral, and romantic, Darkness was rawer and harder, with a stripped-back production that replaced the earlier wall of sound with a leaner, more direct band sound. Its characters, as the standard critical summary puts it, are ill-fortuned people who fight back against overwhelming odds. The album reached the top five of the Billboard album chart, by the accounts that report its chart performance, and sold three million copies in the United States, remaining on the chart for 167 weeks. Those figures are reported here from secondary summaries, not from a chart archive consulted for this draft. What is certain is that the album did not match Born to Run’s immediate commercial impact, and that Springsteen, by several accounts, did little to promote it in the conventional sense. The record had to find its audience, as the band had found theirs during the lawsuit year, by playing.
The Darkness Tour, which began on 23 May 1978 at Shea’s Buffalo Theatre in Buffalo, New York, ten days before the album’s release, was the band’s largest tour to that point, with shows lasting upwards of three hours. It was, in effect, a second Lawsuit Tour, but with a new record to prove. The band played the whole of Darkness, they played Born to Run material, they played covers and unreleased songs, and they played with the same nightly intensity that had carried them through 1976-77. The tour’s reputation has only grown since, and the 1978 shows are now regarded by many listeners as the peak of the E Street Band’s live powers. That reputation is, in part, a product of the lawsuit year. A band that has spent a year proving itself nightly does not forget how to do so when it finally has a new record.
The longer legacy of the lawsuit year is visible in the box set that followed decades later. In 2010 Springsteen released The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story, a documentary and a collection of 21 unreleased songs from the Darkness sessions, including the title song The Promise itself. The box set is, among other things, an archive of the lawsuit year’s stockpile: songs written in 1976-77, recorded in 1977-78, and held back for thirty years because they did not fit the ten-song album Springsteen had chosen. Listening to The Promise today, a listener can hear the scale of what was at stake in the lawsuit year — not just ten songs, but dozens, written by a man who could not record them, and then recorded by a band who had to choose among them.
Why the missing year still matters
It is easy, looking back, to treat the lawsuit year as a footnote between two famous albums, a legal delay that happened to produce a good record. That reading misses what the year actually did, and why it is worth a whole article rather than a paragraph in a biography. The lawsuit year changed Springsteen in two ways that are still audible in Darkness, and still relevant to how his career is understood.
First, it changed his relationship to his own songs. A songwriter who writes forty, fifty, or seventy songs and cannot record any of them learns to judge songs over time. He learns which songs survive a tour, which survive a winter, which survive being played to an audience that has never heard them on record. The Darkness sessions benefited from that slow judgement, because the songs that made the album had already survived months of live performance and private rehearsal. They were not fresh ideas committed to tape in excitement. They were tested ideas, chosen from a large field.
Second, it changed his relationship to his band. The E Street Band survived the lawsuit year because they toured together, and they toured together because they had no other way to stay together. That experience — of being a band first and a recording act second — shaped the Darkness sound, which is, above all, a band sound: full-band live takes, a rhythm section that plays together, a saxophone that enters like a voice rather than a decoration. The record does not sound like a singer with session musicians. It sounds like a band that has spent a year on stage together, and that is because it was.
If there is a single image to carry away from this story, it is not a courtroom, and not a studio. It is a stage, in a town the band had already played, on a night when there was no new record to sell, with a singer introducing a song the audience had never heard on a record, because he had written it in a farmhouse while waiting for lawyers to finish. The audience could not buy that song the next day. They could only hear it, remember it, and wait with him. That waiting — shared, nightly, for almost a year — is what made Darkness possible, and it is why a year in which Bruce Springsteen was not allowed to record is, paradoxically, one of the most productive years of his life.
Sources
- Wikipedia — “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (suit July 1976 for ownership of his work; prevented from recording for almost a year; toured the United States and Europe with the E Street Band; wrote on the road and at his farm home in Holmdel, New Jersey, reportedly 40 to 70 songs; settlement 28 May 1977, Springsteen bought out Appel’s contract, lump sum plus share of royalties from the first three albums; entered Atlantic Studios, New York, with Landau and the E Street Band on 1 June 1977, four days after proceedings ended; recorded June 1977 to March 1978 at Atlantic and Record Plant; released 2 June 1978).
- Ultimate Classic Rock — “How Bruce Springsteen Battled Back Against the ‘Darkness’” (contract paid minimum royalties and none of the publishing rights, as reported there; filed suit July 1976, Appel countersued and obtained an injunction; litigation settled out of court May 1977; free to record again with Jon Landau; moved to the Record Plant by September; album released 2 June 1978, top-five, triple-platinum account).
- Ultimate Classic Rock, via i95rocks / Cheat Sheet summaries of Sanford — “How Bruce Springsteen Settled a Lawsuit With His Original Manager” and related reports (filed 27 July 1976 against Laurel Canyon Ltd., allegations fraud, undue influence, breach of trust; Appel countersued 29 July 1976; settlement 28 May 1977 reported as Appel giving up most publishing rights for 800,000 dollars, production share reduced from six to two percent; note that another account describes terms as undisclosed — both versions are noted in the article).
- American Songwriter — “Remember When: A Lawsuit Kept Bruce Springsteen Out of the Studio After ‘Born to Run’” (July 1976 federal suit; Appel’s New York State Supreme Court countersuit seeking to prevent recording with Landau; settlement 28 May 1977 on undisclosed terms; back in the studio a few days later).
- The Guardian, via The Light in Darkness — “Bruce Springsteen: ‘People thought we were gone. Finished’” (filed 27 July 1976, countersuit two days later, Judge Arnold Fein granting the injunction, recording career on hold for 12 months; “People thought we were gone. Finished” and nightly reproving quotation).
- Brucebase Wiki — “Darkness on the Edge of Town: Studio Sessions” (first night 1 June 1977, at least ten songs including Rendezvous, Because the Night, Don’t Look Back; Badlands music composed late June, first played 27 June 1977 at Atlantic, title from the 1973 film poster, opening riff as a major-key twist on the Animals’ introduction; sessions June 1977 to March 1978).
- American Songwriter — “The Story Behind ‘Badlands’” (Appel wanted a live album, Springsteen wanted the studio with Landau; legal proceedings blocked recording for almost a year; settlement 28 May 1977, buyout, studio return 1 June at Atlantic; move to the Record Plant; Badlands rewritten November 1977; Rolling Stone interview quotation on writing until the song deserved its title).
- American Songwriter — “Remember When: Bruce Springsteen Appears on the Covers of Time and Newsweek in the Same Week” and Vivid Seats — “30 Facts About Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run” (Born to Run released 25 August 1975; simultaneous Time and Newsweek covers 27 October 1975; Lawsuit Tour nickname; first headlining arena show, Spectrum, Philadelphia, 25 October 1976).
- The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story (2010 documentary), as reported in secondary accounts (Springsteen’s control-versus-money account; settlement and divorce wording from his autobiography Born to Run, as quoted in Far Out Magazine and other reports; 2010 box set with 21 unreleased Darkness-session songs).
- YouTube embeds as shown on secondary pages — “Bruce Springsteen – Badlands (Official Lyric Video)” (embed ID o5IZuuzUa04, title as shown on The Odyssey Online and Musiclipse pages embedding it; channel not verified from the video page text fetch, so no official-channel claim is made in this draft).
Image credits: Urban street scene — photo by Lesli Whitecotton, Pexels free licence (thematic image only, not a photograph of Bruce Springsteen). Microphone on a dark stage — photo by Michael DO, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). Close-up of microphones in a studio — photo by Clement Lepetit, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). Illuminated control panel — photo by Daniel Ponomarev, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). River at dusk — photo by Ehsan Haque, Pexels free licence (thematic image only). All images are thematic illustrations; none is a photograph of Bruce Springsteen.