The following article appears in the April '98 edition of "Live Magazine" which is published by TicketMaster. Titled "Meet the New Boss" the article was penned by Elliott Murphy and includes a full page picture of Springsteen onstage in August '76 at the Monmouth Arts Center as well as a backstage photo of Murphy and Springsteen from the same time frame.

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"One of the best in the long line of singer-songwriters who've been saddled with the unfortunate tag "The New Dylan," Elliott Murphy has been making literate, provocative music since 1973. Reviewing Aquashow, his debut album, Rolling Stone wrote, "Elliott Murphy and his work will be with us as long as we have rock and roll" Although he's never been a best-seller, he's made 17 more albums since then, including the recent Selling the Gold, which features a duet with old friend (and onetime competitor of sorts) Bruce Springsteen. Murphy, who has also written a novel entitled Cold and Electric, now lives in Paris. He expects to release a new album, tentatively titled Small Room, this spring.

MEET THE NEW BOSS - In 1976, a colleague encounters a young Bruce Springsteen, a rocker born to run-apart from the pack.

    In 1972, legendary rock critic Paul Nelson landed a prized A&R job at Mercury Records, where he could actually put his (or rather, his company's) money where his mouth was and sign bands and artists to recording contracts. His credentials were impeccable: He'd gone to college with Dylan, founded the legendary folkzine Little Sandy Review and written stunning poetic prose in the form of album reviews for Rolling Stone. I, on the other hand, as green as the front lawns of the Long Island suburbia where I came from, was trying to get anybody in the music business to listen to my demo tapes.

Miraculously, Paul did listen and even said he liked what he heard, and so I began to regularly haunt his office. One day over lunch, he handed me a recent first album with a postcard-like cover that proclaimed Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and told me to listen carefully to the fellow with the scruffy beard grinning from the back cover. So even though I was put off by the beard (at the time being a dandy from the Between the Buttons school of dressing), I took Paul's solemn advice seriously and was soon transfixed by the album's rousing energy and hipster lyrics and by the reassuring feeling that there lived a kindred spirit somewhere out there in the wilds off New Jersey.

For a short time, Bruce Springsteen and I shared the same road to glory:  In January 1974, my debut album, Aquashow, and Bruce's second, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, received extremely favorable reviews in the same issue of Rolling Stone. My own review (by Paul Nelson himself) came under the headline "He's the Best Dylan Since 1968," and understandably my record company went wild. Bruce had received similar raves, many with the same well intentioned comparison, and we were both being aggressively promoted as "critic's darlings." for the next few years, through no fault of our own, we ran neck and neck in a race to capture the so-called "New Dylan" trophy, surely the bobby prize of the music business if ever there was one.

In August 1976, Bruce and the E Street Band played a series of shows at the Monmouth Arts Center in Red Bank, New Jersey. I don't remember which show I attended, but I believe it must have been during the last half of the six-music business of the kind usually reserved for Rolling Stones tours or new Bob Dylan albums. In fact, the anticipation and excitement were similar to the effect of Bruce's weeklong stint of shows at the Bottom Line in New York in 1975, with one crucial difference: Out there in Red Bank, he was no longer the crusading knight coming to convert the infidels; he was drawing all the movers and shakers right into his own turf, deep in the heart of Jersey.

I remember the stage lights being incredibly theatrical, like nothing I'd ever seen at a concert before: West Side Story with a rock 'n' roll attitude. Streams of pin lights rained down as Bruce moaned his sorrowful ballads, and then suddenly the stage was awash in jubilant moving color for his transcendent rockers. The E Street band had jelled into one of the tightest bands around with even their individual monikers moving into mythic territory. Little Steven, Mighty Max, the Big Man. This was nohot band of studio cats backing a gifted singer-songwriter - it was a goodgodalmighty rock 'n' roll review, complete with a horn section and a front man who was not afraid to move or sweat.

Bruce Springsteen was riveting that night, performing longer and stronger than anyone I'd ever seen before. By the end of the night, all the jaded music-biz pooh-bahs were up on their feet dancing. I believe Bruce had taken a long leap of faith to get to that triumphant moment in the Monmouth Arts Center, and now he was pulling us all with him over to the promised land. No longer sporting his beard, he looked as fresh and vulnerable as James Dean, dressed in an electric-blue '50s blazer and dancing as loose as Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock. Bruce performed cinematic originals like "Thunder Road" with Brando-like intensity, playing the lead role in every song-story he wrote. Even when he covered classics like the Animals' "It's My Life," it was as if the songs were written for nobody but that Jersey boy, on that stage, that night.

The interplay between Bruce and Clarence Clemons was what American race relations always should have been: They laughed, cheered, hugged and kissed each other. Can I saw it was Huckleberry Finn and his cohort, Jim, all over again and still be politically correct? Although now Jim was free as a bird, blowing sax like King Curtis, lifting his boy Huck higher and higher till he was prancing on the piano top. That night the Mississippi River was reborn as the Garden State Parkway, and we all crowded onto the raft as if our very lives depended on it.

I recall the scene in the dressing room after the show: Bruce surrounded by music-biz honchos, seeming as if he'd rather be anywhere else but there. We were finally introduced, and neither of us could think of anything momentous to say to each other. Finally, I asked if he wanted a beer – one of his own dressing-room beers - and after serious reflection, he replied, "Yeah, I'll take a taste." I thought that was pretty cool. Still do.

Something happened that night both to Bruce and to me. He had raised the stakes against his promise kept on yet another higher level. Although I recently had been signed to Columbia Records, Bruce's own label, I knew any race between us was thorough. What I should have realized - and finally did many years later - was this: If Bruce had not achieved the level of fame he finally did, I think it would have killed him, whereas if I had, it surely would have killed me. That night I rode back to New York in a long sleek limousine, but it was the losing car."

Elliott Murphy, Paris 1998