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near the Karagheusian Rug Mill on the corner of Jackson and Center Streets, and showed her the wickedly thin black-and-gold electric guitar gleaming in the window. Built in Japan, Kent guitars didn’t register on the professional musician’s list of must-haves. But it had the shimmering look, the jagged edges, and the electrified volume this young rocker craved. So he knew it was expensive, but if it were possible, somehow, it was the only thing he could ever imagine wanting again.
    Adele took another look at the $60 price tag, and a few days later made another visit to the Household Finance Company for one of the short-term loans she turned to when she needed help squeezing through a tight spot or making the holidays as merry as possible. If Doug had any objections, the family’s main breadwinner wasn’t listening to him. Sowhen Christmas morning dawned in 1964, the precious instrument was waiting right where Bruce knew it would be, just beneath the lights decorating the lower boughs of the Springsteens’ Christmas tree.
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    His room equipped with the Kent and a small amplifier, the fifteen-year-old felt wired. When he got home from school, he ran upstairs to his room, shut the door tight, strapped the guitar over his shoulder, snapped the amp’s power switch, hit a chord, and boom : instant glory. “It was just, door closed, and you’re in there, doing your jam,” he says. “I had a pretty decent ear, so that helped. And then I developed quick, so that helped too, once I got just a little bit of the mechanics in.” Working through the chords, then the simple guitar solo from the Beatles’ arrangement of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout.” Mastering the twelve-bar basics of rock ’n’ roll, then working into the pop realm, with its larger palette of chords and melodic possibilities. Sometimes he played to the mirror, watching his hands on the guitar’s neck and reveling in the instrument’s potential to serve both as a shield against his shyness and a bridge to carry him to the center of everything. As he told Newsweek writer Maureen Orth in 1975: “The first day I can remember lookin’ in the mirror and standin’ what I was seein’ was the day I had a guitar in my hand.”
    Other kids were so entranced by the rock band image—the blithe rebelliousness magnified by the power of a group identity—they bypassed the music altogether in order to move straight to hipness, giving themselves a cool name and creating a logo to set them apart from everyone else. “It was magic in those days,” Bruce says. “There was no greater cachet. It was so good, people lied about it. I knew guys that had band jackets printed up with no band.” One guy Bruce didn’t know yet, a classmate at Freehold Regional High School named George Theiss, spent part of his freshman year as a member of the Five Diamonds, a pretend band linked by the matching green rain slickers they decorated with sporty black diamonds they hand-painted on their backs. As Theiss says, “One guy knew something about a guitar, but no one played.” Theiss bought himself a guitar, and with the help of his pal Vinnie Roslin’s older brother, learned how to play chords in an open E tuning. Theiss, a handsome kid with just the right facial structure to seem both menacing and mysterious atthe same time, also had a strong voice and a kind of indefinable presence. Soon he abandoned the Five Diamonds to form the Sierras, an actual instrument-wielding band that featured Vinnie Roslin on bass and a guy named Mike DeLuise, who came with a Gretsch guitar just like the one George Harrison played. When another friend, Bart Haynes, showed up with a drum set, they could count to four and make something that, in certain moments, sounded like real rock ’n’ roll.
    Still, the Sierras’ momentum ebbed. Theiss and Haynes teamed up with another guitarist named Paul Popkin, settled on a new name—the Castiles, named in tribute to Castile shampoo,