Bruce Springsteen recalled the first time he met and shot with Stefanko. “I’d gotten to know Patti Smith a little through our work together on ‘Because the Night’. When I visited her during one of her performances at The Bottom Line, she gave me the name of a South Jersey photographer and said, ‘You should let this guy take your picture.’

“One winter afternoon I drove south to Haddonfield, New Jersey, and met Frank Stefanko. Frank had photographed Patti at the beginning of her career. My recollection is he borrowed a camera for the day, called a teenage kid from next door to come hold up his one light and started shooting. I stood against some flowery wallpaper in Frank and his wife’s bedroom, looked straight at the camera, gave my best ‘troubled young man’ look and he did the rest. One of those photos ended up on the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town.

“Frank’s photos had a purity and a street poetry to them. They were lovely and true, but they weren’t slick. Frank looked for your true grit and he naturally intuited the conflicts I was coming to terms with. His pictures captured the people I was writing about in my songs and showed me the part of me that was still one of them. We had other cover options but they didn’t have the hungriness of Frank’s pictures.”