Inside the legend of Bruce Springsteen’s lost ‘Born to Run’ piano – ‘holy grail’ that could be worth a fortune

The piano Bruce Springsteen used to write “Born to Run” is missing somewhere in the swamps of Jersey — but could be worth a fortune if ever recovered.

Little is known about the old piano, but anyone in the vicinity of Long Branch with a beat-up old Aeolian upright in their basement would do well to check under the lid — according to legend, the entire E Street band signed it when they finished recording Born to Run, then left the piano behind in Bruce’s old house.

“Whoever discovers that piano, and opens it up and sees the signatures, will find that they’ve happened upon the holy grail in Springsteen world,” said Rob Kirkpatrick, an E Street superfan and the author of “Magic in the Night: The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen.”

The instrument hasn’t been seen since the early 1990s, when Springsteen’s one-time landlord Marilyn Rocky had it hauled onto the sidewalk after years of it sitting in the modest Long Branch home she rented out to the rocker as he was working on the legendary album.

“When I rented the house to Bruce in 1974, he moved in and he had this little upright piano. When he moved out two years later, he left it there,” said Rocky, who would shout out the house’s number – “Seven-and-a-half!” – while watching Bruce play small clubs back in the early days.

When he heard her, he would tell the audience his “Landlordess” was in the crowd, she said.

Rocky, now 81, first met Springsteen when he was just 24-years old and down on his luck as he chased stardom. By then he had two albums under his belt, both of which had been met with critical acclaim — but they’d sold abysmally, and Columbia Records was promising to drop him if the third wasn’t a hit.

He’d been all but homeless while touring for the past two years, but the Boss was looking for a place to dig in and write another album when he walked into Rocky’s real estate office and asked for a rental on his rock and roll turf in Asbury Park.

She had nothing there, but offered him a shotgun-shack she owned up the coast in Long Branch for $200 a month, she said.

“He was just so young, he was a boy,” Rocky said. “And this was the first time ever that he lived on his own outside of his house, or wasn’t sleeping on the floor of the Student Prince in Asbury, or on the road doing concerts.”

Springsteen was a stand-up tenant, Rocky said. He reportedly tended the row of bushes along the porch, and would sometimes pay his rent months in advance in anticipation of long stretches of insolvency while he was on road touring, or in the studio without pay.

And he spent his nights seated at the Aeolian piano he’d brought along and pushed against a wall in the front room, feeling his way across the keyboard of an instrument he barely knew how to play.

The previous two albums — “Greetings from Asbury Park” and “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle” — had been written on guitar, but Bruce turned to the piano for the first time while writing “Born to Run,” and it transformed his sound, according to Kirkpatrick.

“Bruce has always primarily been a guitar player,” Kirkpatrick said. “Which is not to say he couldn’t play piano, but he’d described himself as ‘the fastest guitar in Asbury Park.’

“It must affect your writing process to not be on your primary instrument,” Kirkpatrick said. “And on songs like ‘Backstreets,’ I think we hear the fruits of Bruce composing a song not as a virtuoso on piano, but as someone who is writing very deliberately for emotion rather than technique.”

Those fruits became music history. “Born to Run” was a smash hit when it was released in August 1975, and launched Springsteen to stardom. That October he landed on the cover of Time and Newsweek on the same day; by November he was touring overseas for the first time; and to this day the album remains one of the defining achievements of rock and roll.

And it all started on the piano he left behind in Marilyn Rocky’s living room, where it sat steadily going out of tune for two decades.

“Subsequent renters just left it in the living room, used it for whatever they found it useful for,” said Rocky, who sold the house sometime between ’93 and ’94 and told her last tenant to toss all the furniture to the curb for trash pickup.

“It was not a good piece of furniture. It was old and beat up. Although, from what I recall, you could still pick out a tune on the keys, but it had really been sitting there for 20 years.”

Days later she was at the dentist, and of all people ran into Springsteen’s right-hand man and saxophone player Clarence Clemons — he was also getting his teeth cleaned — and he asked if she still had the old piano.

“He said, ‘Well, you know, when we finished writing all the music for ‘Born to Run,’ some of us were in the house one day and we saw it. We lifted up the top and we signed it and left it there for you.’”

Floored, Rocky rushed to a phone and called up her tenant to tell them not to leave until she had the piano — but it was too late.

“He said, ‘Well, that’s problem.’ And I said, ‘Problem being what?’ And he said, Well, you told me to clean things out, that old piano’s been sitting there… I threw it out’ And he said it was picked up two days ago.’”

“That’s the last anybody has ever seen or heard of it.”

Rocky thinks the piano was likely picked up by the garbage collectors and that it’s “melted into the soil” in a dump somewhere. But that hasn’t stopped rock and roll treasure-hunters from hunting for it over the years on the possibility that it ended up saved from the sidewalk, or that it still lives in a dump somewhere.

“I once got a call from the president of the Piano Technicians Guild, who asked me if I could give them the exact date that the piano was thrown out and where the garbage would have been taken,” she said, explaining they told her if Bruce had the instrument professionally tuned then the association would likely have a record of it and they’d be able to confirm its identity – if it could just be found.

But in the three decades since it went missing nobody has been able to track it down — and auction appraiser Leila Dunbar thinks it would be worth at least $300,000 if it ever turned up in salvageable condition

“And given the market, it could sell for more,” she added, explaining that Freddie Mercury’s piano used to write “Bohemian Rhapsody” sold for $2.1 million in 2023, while the piano John Lennon wrote “Imagine” with sold for $2.1 million in 2000 and would be worth up to $10 million today.

Though not an appraiser, as a bona fide superfan Kirkpatrick thinks a “serious collector” would put down “seven figures” if the piano was ever found in salvageable condition.

“Any history of rock and roll in the 20th century is incomplete without talking about Born to Run,” he said. “So the instrument on which most of it was composed and which gave it it’s musical identity —the value of such a piece is… it’s invaluable.”

As for Rocky, she thinks her time with Bruce and the band was worth far more than whatever price the piano could ever have fetched her.

“If I didn’t know I had it or that they signed it, I certainly didn’t lose anything!” she said.