ABSTRACT
On a chilly Thursday evening in early April 1974, Bruce Springsteen was in the midst of a three-night benefit at Charley’s, a small bar near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The club could not have held more than three hundred people, and it had rarely been so packed. Outside, lines stretched around the corner, despite the weather. Springsteen had been playing in Boston a good deal recently, and word-of-mouth was making him a local cult hero there, as it was all over the Eastern Seaboard.
