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In the summer of 1969, 19-year-old Bruce Springsteen packed his belongings from the longtime family home in Freehold, New Jersey, and threw them into a friend's truck.

His father, mother and younger sister had fled to the greener pastures of the West Coast a month earlier, and few hair-raising incidents with his bandmates and new housemates Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez and Danny Federici had prompted the landlord to kick out the remaining residents of what was later remembered as a “dumpy, two-story, two-family house, next door to the gas station.”

For Springsteen, it was just as well: It was time to say goodbye to this unhappy home, where his volatile father sat in the dark, inhaling cigarettes and beer, as well as this God-forsaken town, which had no plac

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