Bruce Springsteen

When both Time and Newsweek magazines splashed the face of a largely unknown singer/songwriter across their covers in the fall of 1975, the event was as much about fiercely competitive journalism as it was publicity hype and record-company hope.

Still, it was an unlikely scenario, even for pop music. Here was a twenty-six-year-old, scraggly-faced street poet from Asbury Park, New Jersey, who had not sold millions of albums or toured the world to great acclaim or impacted the music and its culture. Not yet, anyway. But there he was on the cover of not one but two of the most powerful magazines in the world, an honor usually bestowed only on presidents, prime ministers and popes.