Before he was ‘The Boss,’ a skinny rocker from New Jersey who slept on DJ’s sofas in Philadelphia

This story originally appeared in The Daily News on March 8, 1988.

His life was changed by rock and roll. And for sure, Bruce Springsteen has changed the lives of all the people he’s touched with his earnest, theatrically charged and socially redemptive rock and roll. Just read some of the essays on “How Bruce Changed My Life.” There are millions more where those came from.

Per capita, no town has more Springsteen fantatics than Philly, where the Boss is appearing tonight and tomorrow at the Spectrum. “This was the first city to really take to my music,” Springsteen has said. “I’ve got a lot of great memories, made a lot of friends here.”

» READ MORE: Bruce Springsteen fans in Philly complain of long wait times amid massive demand

Two years before “Born To Run” put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and more than a decade before “Born in the U.S.A.” made him a national political figure, Springsteen and his E Street Band were happening here, doing bread-and-butter gigs at every little college and nightclub in the area, to keep his vision pure, spirits high and belly full.

Things really took off for the Boss locally in the spring of 1974, with the release of his second album, “The Wild, The Innocent and E Street Shuffle.” While it was ignored practically everywhere else, the album sold a phenomenal 50,000 copies in the Delaware Valley - sparked by his legendary Main Point coffeehouse shows in Bryn Mawr and much more by the massive amounts of air play heaped on the artist by the DJs at WMMR-FM.

In those days, FM rock radio personalities were able to please their own programming whims. And the crew at WMMR, made up mostly of reformed folk- music fanatics, loved the raspy, artful folk flair in Springsteen’s early work. (In other towns, his sound - and that of other eccentric ‘MMR faves like Tom Waits, Jon Anderson of Yes, Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, Steely Dan and Al Stewart - was dismissed as being odd and/or un- listenable.)

Most of us have loved Springsteen from afar, from “breathing the fire he was born in.” But a few have gotten close enough to establish rapport and catch the flame in our hands.

Photographer Phil Ceccola took enough great pictures of Bruce Springsteen’s early Main Point and Tower gigs to fill several books. Some of those early, sparkling images also fueled Ceccola’s rock button business, Button Master.

Center city attorney Stewart Niemtzow gained access to the Springsteen backstage scene because his father, Dr. Frank Niemtzow, had the good fortune to deliver the Boss and to be Bruce’s childhood pediatrician. The elder Niemtzow recalls young Bruce as rail-thin and anemic, suffering more than his fair share of illness.

I got to meet the Boss briefly a trio of times. The first was the night of Jan. 3, 1973, when he made his first area appearance at the Main Point and stole the show from the headliner. (Where are you now, Travis Shook and Club Wow?)

The most satisfying time, I got to console him backstage at the Spectrum on June 6, 1973, when - as an opening act to Chicago - Springsteen and the E Street Band had been booed off the stage by the narrow-minded fans of the headliner act! (I wonder if any of those clowns would dare admit their mistake today?)

My only other brief encounter came after a show at C.W. Post on Long Island in December 1975, the blustery night Bruce recorded his memorable concert version of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.”

But those incidents pale next to the close encounters disc jockey Ed Sciaky has had with Bruce, at almost 300 gigs from here to California.

“People laugh at the ‘Dead Heads’ for being blissed out, but Bruce fans are just as blissed out,” says Sciaky, now on WYSP-FM, who’s spent many a vacation chasing Springsteen tours, observing as songs developed from one night to the next. His “Shockmobile” (a beat-up Rambler) and voracious backstage eating habits even became part of the Springsteen lore - worked into comic, spacey raps delivered by the Boss onstage.

I will never forgive Ed - then my across-the-hall apartment neighbor - for not inviting me over to hang out when Bruce Springsteen was his house guest. Springsteen talked late into the night about his musical and dramatic vision (then free of political content), and slept the day away on the Sciaky couch.

(As a consolation prize, Ed would later invite me over to watch Martin

Mull vainly put the make on Bonnie Raitt - a fun night but hardly the same thing as a close encounter of the Bruce kind!)

“It was an incredible weekend,” Sciaky recalls of that Springsteen visit in December 1974. “Bruce just came up to the radio station one Friday night. He was into self-promotion then. The band was sleeping in their van on a parking lot at 12th and Vine streets, on their way from one gig to another. The next day (recording producer) Tony Visconti called me up and said David Bowie wanted to meet Bruce. Bowie was here at Sigma Sound recording the ‘Young Americans’ album.

“I reached Bruce at home, and he came down on the bus to meet Bowie, and to hear the recording Bowie had made of ‘Saint in the City.’ But Bowie wouldn’t play it for Bruce, he said it wasn’t finished! It was a strange night. Bowie was doing more cocaine than I’d seen in my entire life, every fifteen minutes, and Bruce, who did no drugs, was kind of freaked out by the weird, bisexual/cocaine star trip. Bowie offered him a hotel room and Bruce said ‘No thanks, I’ll stay with Eddie.’

“The next night, I took Bruce to see Bowie perform at the Spectrum, then took him to catch the second show of Billy Joel and Janis Ian at the Academy of Music. Bruce was recognized in the lobby, which surprised and pleased him. Barry Manilow was in the audience, and afterwards I got Billy, Bruce and Barry together at the Eagle II restaurant. You can read about it in Barry’s new book.”

Later, “host with the most” Sciaky would introduce Bruce to his future booking agent, Frank Barsalona of Premier Talent - the company that put Bruce on the big arena and stadium circuit, for better and worse. And Sciaky encouraged Manfred Mann to record Bruce’s “Blinded by the Light” - actually the first million seller composed by Springsteen.

Sciaky’s walls are lined with Springsteen gold albums, but the real reward, he says, has always been in the music, especially in those live concert revelations.

“We used to say if you haven’t seen him live then you don’t know what he’s about,” says Sciaky. “It was so unique, hard to define, a whole package. His voice could drive you to tears on ‘For You,’ but it was also the way he moves, the cinematic drama of songs like ‘Jungleland’ and ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘Incident on 57th Street,” the look in his face. That’s what I’ve missed the most in his move to bigger halls - not being able to see his facial expression.”

Sciaky also has missed the personal contact. He and Springsteen haven’t spoken since 1985; the rock god has handlers who keep mere mortals at bay.

With his “Born in the U.S.A” and “Nebraska” albums, Springsteen became a more mature and down-to-earth artist, writing more understandable, focused songs that tell specific stories, Sciaky points out. That adult theme certainly continues in the “Tunnel of Love” album and concert tour, although Sciaky also senses a welcome return of metaphor in the artist’s work.

“Bruce is not writing so literally, every song. There’s more opportunity for interpretation,” he said.

And that’s the way we like it.