Clark meets the new Boss

Before he was born to run. Before he danced in the dark, or wandered into the badlands, or had an inkling of the glory days that still lay ahead of him, Bruce Springsteen performed a memorable concert in Atwood Hall.

The date was October 6, 1974, when Clark welcomed the little-known New Jersey rocker and his E Street Band to the Atwood stage.

“Onstage, silhouetted dramatically by green light, the slight man (Springsteen) became a magician, deftly manipulating his band, his body and us, his audience,” Ruth Rachel Polsky ’76 wrote in her review of the show in The Scarlet. “When he jerked his hips to the left and to the right, a double-barreled drumroll and flashes of purple and red light occurred simultaneously, radiating to us in a wave of total sensuality. When his voice dropped to a husky, caressing whisper, we held our collective breath and rose with him to the crescendo on Clarence Clemons’ ethereal sax.”

In a story in The Worcester Telegram & Gazette commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Clark concert, several alumni who had attended that night recalled emerging with a profound appreciation for Springsteen’s star power.

“Springsteen showed up, and he started singing and I would say, within two seconds, pretty much the whole audience went crazy,” Leon Erlanger ’75 said. “It was like the Beatles or something.”

”The slight man became a magician.”

Harriet Baskas ’77, in a 2014 interview with Clark magazine, recalled approaching Springsteen and his band as they relaxed outside Goddard Library prior to the show and asking if she could record the concert for radio station WCUW.

“They said, ‘No, we’d rather you not.’ And I said, ‘Nobody knows who you are. We’ll put you on the radio and make you famous,’” she remembered. “At that point the station was running at about 80 watts—less than a light bulb—and I was going to make them famous! Many years later, Clarence Clemons was at a public radio conference that I attended. I went up to him and said, ‘I feel really badly— it was so presumptuous of me.’ And without missing a beat, he said, ‘Something’s been bothering The Boss all this time, and that’s probably what it is.’”