The untold story of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ jacket

Here’s a rock and roll story that’s never been told.

It’s a New York City summer day in 1975 and Bruce Springsteen is trying on an old leather motorcycle jacket his manager Mike Appel wore as a teen and just dug out of the attic.

“Fit him like a glove,” Appel recalled. “He said, ‘This is it.’”

Bruce then headed downtown with saxophonist Clarence Clemens, and with the battered coat on his back and his Telecaster in hand he posed for one of the most iconic album covers in rock history — the cover of “Born to Run.”

Springsteen — 25 at the time — went on to wear that black jacket with silver star studs on the duds throughout the album’s tour, and it was the sight of him wearing it that exploded into homes across the country as “Born to Run” became his first major hit.

But by the time Bruce returned to the stage for the “Darkness on the Edge of Town” tour in 1978 his signature coat was gone. And while he wore many like it over the years, the actual “Born to Run” jacket was never seen again — until it reappeared one day in 2010 on the wall of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

The Rock Hall never disclosed who loaned it — fanning a mystery that’s simmered among Springsteen fans for decades about where the coat had gone. A mystery that only Bruce and two others on Earth could answer: the jacket’s original owner, Appel, and the girl he says Bruce gave it to.

The Kid from Queens

Nearly 20 years before “Born to Run,” in 1958, Appel was a kid from Queens with rock and roll dreams when his mom asked what he wanted for his 16th birthday. The answer was obvious for Appel, who’d been playing in bands for over a year — he wanted the kind of black leather jacket worn by rebel icons like Marlon Brando and James Dean, and rockers like Elvis Presley and Gene Vincent.

“I was wanting to be a little bit of a rock ‘n’ roll bad boy,” Appel said. “That jacket became something to have — you were part of that world too. It was your way of showing that.

“And you thought you might attract women with it,” he added. “It had all the right reasons for me to want it.”

So Appel’s mother brought him down to a local Robert Hall clothier near the Queens-Nassau line, and he grabbed a leather jacket with red lining from the rack and pulled it on.

Though the “Born to Run” jacket is often presumed to be made by Schott NYC — the ubiquitous biker brand worn by rockers like the Ramones — it was most likely a generic steerhide model from the same manufacturer that produced leathers for the department store Montgomery Ward, which vintage jacket expert Jonathan Evenchen said an NYC-area Robert Hall would stock.

Appel wore the coat until his father convinced him to go to college, then he “stuffed it somewhere” and forgot about it.

After graduation he found work as a songwriter and producer for record labels, and in 1972 he was introduced to an overlooked 22-year-old rocker from, Freehold, New Jersey — Bruce Springsteen.

From Freehold to Famous

Appel immediately recognized Springsteen’s talent and got him an audition with Columbia Records, and after landing a contract with the label they started recording and touring. But the first two records famously flopped, so Bruce and the band poured everything they had into making his next — “Born to Run” — a hit.

For 14 months they worked — about six months were spent on the title track alone — until by June 1975 the album was almost done, and it was time to photograph the cover. That’s when Bruce — a clothing obsessive — asked Appel about the old motorcycle jacket he’d mentioned wearing as a teen.

“He puts it on, he takes one look, and said ‘I’m doing this, I’m going off for my photos.’ And that was it,” Appel said. “I mean, can you imagine how quick that that decision was made?”

“It symbolized the same things it did for me. It was rebellion. Life is not always happy. It can be dark, too,” he added. “And our fathers would never be caught dead in one of those jackets, so we wanted one.

“Then on top of that he picked up a little Elvis button at one of the souvenir shops on his way to the photo session. And he put that on the jacket for the shoot, so that little thing is on the jacket.”

Bruce kept wearing the jacket after the photoshoot and on through the “Born to Run” tour, effectively transferring his characters from songs like “Jungleland,” “Night,” and “Backstreets” onto the stage. He even wore it as he began to argue with Appel over their management contract, and the dispute deteriorated into a vicious legal battle by summer 1976.

Then, that October, Bruce left NYC’s Palladium Theater with the coat on his back one night, signed a few autographs, and climbed into a car and waved goodbye. He was never seen in the jacket again. Bruce and Appel had little contact until they reconciled about a decade later. When they reunited in the late 1980s, Appel asked what ever happened to his old coat.

“I asked him, dumb-out one day, I said ‘What about that black leather jacket?’” Appel said. “He says ‘I gave it to a girl. But you know, you would have done the same thing.’”

Bruce dated several women around the time he was last seen in the coat. One was a ballerina named Karen Darvin, who was known to wear the coat offstage during the “Born to Run” tour. Then there was Lynn Goldsmith, a legendary rock photographer who Bruce infamously ejected from Madison Square Garden after a bad break up in 1979. And there was Joyce Hyser, an actress he dated into the early 1980s.

But there was a fourth girlfriend — a blonde from Jersey — who Bruce dated in the thick of his lawsuit with Appel. Her name was Joy Hannan, and she remembers everything clearly.

She’s the One

“It’s not a secret that I had the jacket,” Hannan told The Post. “I used to wear it when we were dating.”

Bruce and Joy met sometime in 1976 at the Stone Pony, a now famous Asbury Park bar where he’d frequently hop on stage to jam with whatever band was playing. The Pony had just opened in 1974, and in the thick of his lawsuit troubles and rising stardom Bruce made it a refuge where he could remain “just a guy in a band,” as Hannan and others on the shore always knew him.

Hannan was in her early 20s and had just graduated college when she was hanging at the Pony one day and caught Bruce’s eye.

“He asked me to dance, then he gave me his phone number and asked me to call him,” said Hannan, and they began dating while Bruce’s lawsuit with Appel kept him locked out of the recording studio.

“It was fun. We had fun wherever we went,” she said. “He wasn’t able to make music. He had this white truck he called ‘The Supertruck.’ We just had fun.”

And Bruce was constantly putting the “Born to Run” jacket on her shoulders — until one day he told her to keep it, she said.

“He liked me to wear it when we were out,” Joy said. “He gave it to me because he said I looked better in it than he did.”

By spring 1977 Bruce and Appel had settled their lawsuit, and the E Street Band went back to the studio to record “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Bruce’s attentions turned back to music and he was spending most of his time between the studio and a Manhattan hotel, and he and Joy drifted apart until they finally broke up.

But he never asked for the coat back, and though she left the spotlight of rock and roll stardom she kept her little leather bit of it safe in a cotton garment bag in her closet.

Joy got married, had kids, and moved eight times from New Jersey, across the south, then back to Jersey — and kept the coat with her all the while. It was in bad shape when Bruce gave it to her — his longtime friend and “official #1 fan” Obie Dziedzic even once had to replace its ragged red lining — so Joy rarely wore it, and while she didn’t try to hide it, most of her friends and neighbors over the years had no idea she had it.

“I was living my life. I just had it in my closet,” she said — adding that her husband never complained about her superstar ex-boyfriend’s coat hanging around, because he got the “perks” of going to concerts.

Joy and Bruce remained friendly after they broke up, and whenever she dropped by a show he would take her backstage with her family to hang with the band like old times. At one concert along the way she even wore the jacket so Bruce could see she still had it.

It was Joy who first loaned the coat to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, and in the years that followed it went from her Jersey home to various exhibits and back until one day she made up her mind that it belonged with Bruce.

“I decided it was time for it to go someplace better than my closet,” she said.

So in June 2022 — just shy of “Born to Run’s” 50th anniversary — Joy drove down the road to Bruce’s Colts Neck home and passed the jacket back to him in person. They took a photo holding it together, and the coat now hangs again in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Despite the coat being worth a fortune — Stephen M.H. Braitman of MusicAppraisals.com told The Post he wouldn’t be surprised to see it draw over $1 million if it ever went to auction — in all the years Joy had it she never seriously considered selling it.

“My husband tried to talk me into selling it years ago when we were trying to buy a house. But I just said, ‘Nope.’”

And Appel — whose mother would have paid around $30 for the coat when she gave it to him — also never considered that the jacket belonged to anyone but Bruce.

“He earned that one. I never did a four hour show in my life. Except when I was doing the sound and lights for him,” Appel said.

“What, are you kidding?”