Written by Tim Zatzariny Jr. - Excerpt from Selvedgeyard
“Frank Stefanko and Bruce Springsteen met in the cold winter of 1978 in the unlikeliest of places: a small town in South Jersey. They were young, hungry and had something to prove. Stefanko was a working man, sweating it out by day in a meat-packing plant in Pennsauken, NJ. But, his true passion was photography…
The Boss became mired in litigation with his former manager, which prevented him from recording new material.
With the lawsuits finally settled, Springsteen was ready to release the material he’d been writing as the litigation had dragged on. This was a make-or-break album for The Boss. But first, he needed an album cover.
That’s how Springsteen ended up in Haddonfield, and how Stefanko ended up shooting the covers for Springsteen’s next two albums, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River.
The collaboration between Springsteen and Stefanko probably wouldn’t have happened without the help of another Jersey-born rocker, Patti Smith. Smith and Stefanko had attended Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) together, but both left before graduating.
“The only honest work I’ve ever done in my entire life was at 14 or 15 when I was a lawn boy” I painted houses and tarred roofs in the summertime – that was to get the money to buy my first guitar.”
In the 1960s, playing with Steel Mill Bruce recalls: “We ended up playing this little club . . . and I’m in the bathroom, and this guy says ‘You guys are pretty good, where are you from?’ I said, ‘New Jersey.’ After a gig by his first band, the Castilles. “It was the best money I ever made . . . except for all the rest!”
“When I was very young, I would sleep until three in the afternoon, and not go to bed until three in the morning . . . because I could!”
So, when Smith ran into Springsteen at a party in New York around the time Greetings was released, she told him, “You’re going to be a big star someday. My friend Frank from New Jersey says so.”A few weeks later, Smith sent Stefanko an autographed copy of the album, signed by Springsteen, with the inscription, ‘To Frank, my biggest fan, Patti says.’
About four years after that, Smith and Springsteen were in the same recording studio in New York, when The Boss saw some pictures of Smith taken by Stefanko. He asked Smith if Stefanko would be interested in photographing him.
Then one night, his phone rang. “Hey Frank, let’s get together and do some photos,” the gravelly voice on the other end said.
On the day of the shoot, Springsteen pulled up to Stefanko’s home on Colonial Avenue in a beat-up Chevy pickup with stumps in the truck bed to provide weight for traction on the icy roads.
Stefanko had asked Springsteen to bring several changes of clothes for the shoot. The Boss arrived with a paper shopping bag crammed with jeans, T-shirts and plaid and denim shirts.
They set to work, shooting inside Stefanko’s house, and on the streets of Haddonfield. In one shot from the session, Springsteen leans against a barber pole in front of the late Frank Montemurro’s on Kings Highway.
In another, taken during a subsequent session, Springsteen sits on the hood of his 1960 Corvette, which was parked in front of Stefanko’s house. ‘He loved that car,’ Stefanko recalled.
‘Frank had a way of stripping away any celebrity refuse you may have picked up along the way and finding you in you … The pictures’ lack of grandeur, their directness, their toughness, were what I wanted for my music at that time,’ Springsteen writes in the introduction to Days of Hopes and Dreams. ‘He showed me the people I was writing about in my songs. He showed the part of me that was still one of them.’
Some of the thousands of photos Stefanko shot of The Boss from 1978 to 1982 are collected in the book Days of Hopes and Dreams: An Intimate Portrait of Bruce Springsteen. (The title is a play on Springsteen’s 2001 song, “Land of Hopes and Dreams.https://selvedgeyard.com/2017/09/23/jersey-boys-born-to-run-frank-stefankos-epic-springsteen-pic-corvette-winter/
