Springsteen’s American Music Center Opens with a Night of Unlikely Pairings

On Friday, the OceanFirst Bank Center in Monmouth, New Jersey, hosted the second night of “Music America: The Songs that Shaped Us,” a celebration of 250 years of American music tied to the opening of the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music. Where the first evening focused on early pioneers like Robert Johnson and Hank Williams, this one shifted toward figures who reshaped the second half of the century: Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Dion DiMucci, and Public Enemy.

Springsteen watched much of the bill from the audience, then emerged for a series of duets. He honored Presley with sharp runs through “Jailhouse Rock” and “Burnin’ Love,” and later joined Sheryl Crow for Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” It was Springsteen’s first time singing the Basement Tapes classic, and the moment gained a quiet resonance: the night before, Dylan had opened his own tour by dusting off an obscure Basement Tapes song for the first time in nearly 60 years.

The evening’s most jarring and fruitful transition came after Public Enemy’s set. “Man, you can’t come on after Public Enemy,” Springsteen joked before taking the stage with Gary Clark Jr. for Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Further Up The Road.” The remark wasn’t just a quip—it acknowledged the real tension and excitement of slotting hip-hop’s radical energy into a formal institution’s inaugural event. During the finale, Eddie Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand,” Flavor Flav roamed the stage, sang into Springsteen’s mic, and shouted out “the E Street Band,” though only Nils Lofgren and Steve Van Zandt were present. It felt less like a mistake than a deliberate collision of worlds, a fitting close for a night that treated American music not as a canon to be admired from a distance, but as a live, unruly argument worth having in public.