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 Led Zeppelin was playing the Asbury Park Convention Hall that weekend, and they went to that instead.
Nine years ago, Santelli went to Jon Landau, Springsteen’s famed producer, with an idea for a museum and archives built around Springsteen’s life and corpus. Landau agreed and said, sure, go to the man himself. “I brought it to Bruce,” Santelli said. “And he listened, like he does, paying attention. And he finally said, ‘You know, Bob, I am honored, humbled that you would think this.’ But he says, ‘I’m just a chapter in the ongoing story of rock and roll. I’m a link of a long chain. And if you would make it bigger, the story bigger, and I’m a part of it, then I’d be interested.’ And that’s how basically we became the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music.”
With that blessing, Santelli went out and raised the $53 million needed for the project. He didn’t ask Springsteen for a dime because “I didn’t want him to think, or anyone to think, this was in any way a vanity project.”
Santelli and team enlisted architect Rick Cook of CookFox Architects of New York and Minneapolis in 2019. Cook first saw Springsteen live at Albany’s Palace Theater in 1977, but he wasn’t one of those Boss concertgoers screaming out every word of “Backstreets.” Music, Cook told me, “just wasn’t my thing.” He admitted to having been a little intimidated at first: “I thought, my goodness, how do you find a physical way to express the story of American music and Bruce’s place in it? We make things in space, and music is this magic act that happens in time.”
For someone who wasn’t immersed in the Springsteen legend, Cook certainly offered up a design that captured the man’s aesthetic well. The exterior of the long, low-slung two-story building consists of rows of what are called “weathering steel rainscreen panels”; they’re as rusted as the mills where some of Springsteen’s protagonists used to work. As Cook walked me through the place, he explained the care that was taken to reinforce the proletarian ethos: the “end-grain block flooring” in the 240-seat Powell Soundstage that “recalls the old factory floors, the nineteenth-century factory floors”; the seats themselves, clad in workingman’s denim.
It’s in the Powell theater where the visitor’s journey begins (a general admission ticket is $22), with a 25-minute film by Thom Zimny, the director who has worked with Springsteen on many projects over the years. It’s a bracing 25-minute tour d’horizon of American music, with some mind-blowing footage (a teenage Aretha Franklin belting one out in a church) and narration from Springsteen himself, who alternates between talking about some of the legendary figures we see in the film and his own relentless youthful hunger for success. “I wanted to hear all that screaming again,” he said of watching The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. “But I wanted it to be for me.”
The whole place is just a joyous visual (and very virtual) celebration of American music. There’s a wall of album covers of all sorts: Nat King Cole, Chet Atkins, the Bye Bye Birdie Soundtrack, The Beastie Boys, Connie Francis (“I had kids pick out album covers that they thought were cool,” Santelli told me).
The exhibition halls aren’t large, so the amount of ground covered is all the more impressive. The gallery surveying the history of American music is a mere 2,200 square feet, but it packs in sections devoted to 11 different music genres (American classics, pop, soul, jazz, Native American, etc.) and six themes (race, gender, technology, geography, and more). There are display cases housing some of the earliest electric guitars, from the 1920s and 30s. A suit of Frank Sinatra’s. Louis Armstrong’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpets. A Chuck Berry guitar. An Elvis Presley jacket. Odetta’s guitar from the 1963 March on Washington. A Michael Jackson glove. Lady Gaga’s space helmet.
The ground floor also holds a space for temporary exhibitions. When I visited, the installation was “Chimes of Freedom: Protest, Patriotism, and the Power of Song.” It briskly tells the story of American political songs from “Yankee Doodle Dandy” to Springsteen’s own “The Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote in the wake of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. There was a Woody Guthrie guitar, and a handwritten set of lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land.” My heart jumped for a moment because I thought I was going to see, in Guthrie’s own hand, the famous samizdat lyrics, the verses about the relief office and the “No Trespassing” sign—but lo and behold, they were a completely different set of lyrics.
You go upstairs, and it’s all about Bruce. Well, not all: The E Street Band is given its due here, as are Bruce’s pre-fame bands (The Castiles, Child, Steel Mill). It’s interesting to be reminded of what a racially diverse assemblage The E Street Band was in its early days. There was Clarence Clemons, obviously; but at different times the band included David Sancious, the brilliant keyboard player whose stamp is so clear on 1973’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; Vini Lopez, who played drums on that record; and Ernest “Boom” Carter, who laid down the drum track on “Born to Run” before leaving with Sancious to form a jazz fusion group. But it’s a testament to Springsteen’s unpretentious decency and Jersey guy-ness that they all remained friends over the years. The last time I saw him live, he even played a song he’d written as a tribute to George Theiss, The Castiles’s founder, who had been diagnosed with cancer at the time, and to whom Springsteen remained close until he died in 2025.
There’s a little “recording studio” where you can listen to Max Weinberg or Gary Tallent explain a drum or bass guitar part. There’s a partial recreation of Springsteen’s old home library in Rumson, where the autodidact college dropout devoured volumes like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
And there’s the archives room, which is Chapman’s domain. Springsteen wrote his lyrics in Walgreens spiral-bound notebooks, many of which he held onto. Visitors can’t handle those directly, but many have been scanned so that you can see the composer’s scribblings. Chapman estimates the center has 45,000 to 50,000 documents. “His mom had scrapbooks,” Chapman says. “So we were gifted his mom’s scrapbooks, about six of them, plus other newspapers and correspondence.” You can sit at computers and browse through them—lyrics, old posters—while listening to Steel Mill play live from 1970.
But the Mona Lisa of this Louvre, so to speak, is The Guitar. You know the one. The Fender Telecaster, natural finish with black pickguard, that was strapped across Springsteen’s back in the famous Born to Run cover shot by Eric Meola. It’s badly gashed in at least two places, and as you look at it, you can practically smell the flat beer spilled on it and the tobacco smoke blown in its direction over the years. I, and nearly every other visitor I observed the morning of my visit, lingered over it. “That’s probably worth about $12 million,” Santelli said. “That was the last thing we put in.”
Someday, the mandarins of the Smithsonian will decide that American music needs its proper home somewhere on the National Mall, assuming Donald Trump hasn’t gobbled up all the remaining space with monuments to himself. But until that day, we have this—this modest, but big-hearted and imaginative and meticulously curated, tribute to the America that has earned our love. Within these walls you might believe that our America will win, and that the old, weird America is the America that matters. You might believe, for an hour or two, in the promised land.
