One morning last week, exhibit installers from the Constitution Center and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where the exhibit originated, were busy unpacking guitars, like the black Takamine acoustic used during the recording of the 1982 album Nebraska. Grammys were lying around in bubble wrap, and the faded red baseball cap Springsteen had stuffed in his rear pocket on the cover of Born in the U.S.A. was still in its box.
Meanwhile, back in the Book of Dreams section, Constitution Center chief executive officer David Eisner was checking out a display of Springsteen's spiral-bound notebooks, which included scribbled drafts of the lyrics to "The Rising" and "No Retreat, No Surrender."
"So much of his thematic territory is really about the American Dream and the distance between where the American Dream is and what our aspirations are," Eisner said in response to the question, what's a Bruce Springsteen exhibit doing at the Constitution Center? "And when you read the lyrics to songs like 'Born in the U.S.A.' and 'The River' you can really see that that sense of chronicling where we are in the evolution of the American Dream is just dead center for him."
James Henke, the chief curator of the Rock Hall of Fame who selected 160 or so pieces of memorabilia in the exhibit from a warehouse somewhere in New Jersey ("I can't say where") where the Boss keeps his stuff, agrees that if any rock songwriter belongs in the Constitution Center, which is the only institution this exhibit will travel to, Springsteen is the one.
