From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Every year, the New Yorker throws a big festival that lasts the whole weekend. And in 2016, I had the pleasure of sitting down for an hour on stage with one of the great musicians of our time, one of the great human beings, really, somebody I've admired since I'm a kid.

And I'm hardly the only one. This event sold out, I kid you not, in six seconds.

I first set eyes on Bruce Springsteen in June of 1973. I was 14, a North Jersey boy, and I told my

parents some outrageous lie about what I was doing, and I took a bus

across the river all by myself to New York City. I had a $4 ticket to see a band called Chicago,

which was a huge band at the time, and they had a big hit called 25 or 6 to 4. I have no

idea what that means. And I climbed to the highest seat in Madison Square

Garden, the blue seats, and outtrundled the opening act, a skinny guitar slinger and songwriter from

down the shore. And this guy was outrageous. He was like the white James Brown. He was singing,

dancing, stabbing at his guitar, leading the band with a

crazy urgency, bursting all the while through the indifference of a huge arena crowd that had not

come to see him. They had come to see Chicago. And in every sense, he was brilliant. And soon

things exploded. One reviewer wrote about him, and this is John Lando, who became his manager,

I saw Rock and Roll's Future. And that was the consensus view of Springsteen in rock and roll circles.

He was the future, and he was on the cover of time and Newsweek in the same week. And now 40 years

later, plus 20 Grammys, an Academy Award, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, all behind him,

Bruce Springsteen is starring on Broadway in a performance called Springsteen on Broadway.

And in the show, he performs solo and tells stories from his autobiography, Born to Run.

The book, which came out in 2016, is as vivid as his songs with that same pedal-to-the-floor

quality and just as honest and intimate about the struggles in his own life.

Hello.

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