The piano Bruce Springsteen used to write the album Born to Run is missing somewhere in the Jersey swamps – but could be worth a fortune if it’s ever found.

Little is known about the old piano, but anyone near Long Branch who has a worn-out old Aeolian piano in their basement would do well to look under the lid – legend has it that the entire E Street Band has it signed when they were finished He recorded “Born to Run” and then left the piano at Bruce’s old house.

“Whoever discovers this piano, opens it and sees the signatures will realize that they have stumbled upon the holy grail of the Springsteen world,” said Rob Kirkpatrick, an E Street superfan and author of “Magic in the Night: The Words and music by Bruce Springsteen.”

The instrument hasn’t been seen since the early 1990s, when Springsteen’s former landlady Marilyn Rocky had it dragged to the sidewalk after years of sitting in the modest Long Branch home she rented to the rocker when he worked on the legendary Instrument worked album.

“When I rented the house to Bruce in 1974, he moved in and had this little piano. When he moved out two years later, he left it there,” said Rocky, who called out the house number: “Seven and a half!” – as I watched Bruce play in small clubs back then.

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

Rocky, now 81, first met Springsteen when he was just 24 and running out of luck in the pursuit of fame. By then he had two albums under his belt, both of which were critically acclaimed – but they had sold miserably, and Columbia Records promised to drop him if the third wasn’t a hit.

He had been nearly homeless while touring for the past two years, but the boss was looking for a place to settle down and write another album when he walked into Rocky’s real estate office and asked for a rental for his rock. n’Roll Revier asked Asbury Park.

She had nothing there but offered him a shotgun shack she owned on the shore 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 was living alone outside of his home or not sleeping on the floor of Student Prince in Asbury or traveling to perform concerts.”

Springsteen was a replacement tenant, Rocky said. He reportedly tended the bushes along the porch and sometimes paid his rent months in advance, anticipating being insolvent for extended periods while he was away or at the studio unpaid.

And he spent his nights sitting at the Aeolian piano he had brought with him and propped against the wall in the living room, fumbling his way across the keyboard of an instrument he could barely 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.” Kirkpatrick it changed his sound.

“Bruce has always been a guitarist first and foremost,” Kirkpatrick said. “That’s not to say he couldn’t play the piano, but he had described himself as ‘the fastest guitar in Asbury Park.’

“It must affect your writing process if you don’t play your primary instrument,” Kirkpatrick said. “And with songs like ‘Backstreets,’ I think we see the fruits of Bruce not composing a song as a virtuoso on the piano, but as someone who consciously relies on emotion rather than technique when writing.”

These fruits became music history. “Born to Run” was a huge hit when it hit theaters in August 1975 and made Springsteen a star. In October of that year, he landed on the front pages of Time and Newsweek on the same day; in November he toured abroad for the first time; and to this day the album remains one of rock’n’roll’s defining achievements.

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

“Subsequent tenants just left it in the living room and used it for whatever they found it useful for,” said Rocky, who sold the house sometime between 1993 and 1994 and told her last tenant to throw all the furniture on the curb for garbage disposal.

“It wasn’t a good piece of furniture. It was old and run down. As I recall, you could still make out a melody on the keys, but it had actually been there for 20 years.”

Days later she was at the dentist and met Springsteen’s right-hand man and saxophonist Clarence Clemons – he was also having 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 saw it. We lifted the lid, signed it and left it there for you.’”

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

“He said, ‘Well, that’s a problem.’ And I said, “What’s the problem?” And he said, “Well, you told me to clean everything out, there was the old piano… I threw it away. And he said it was picked up two days ago.”

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

Rocky believes that the piano was probably picked up by the garbage collector and that it “melted into the ground” in a landfill somewhere. But that hasn’t stopped rock ‘n’ roll treasure hunters from searching for it over the years because of the possibility that it was rescued from the sidewalk or that it’s still living in a dump somewhere.

“One time I received a call from the president of the Piano Technicians Guild asking me if I could tell them the exact date the piano was thrown away and where the trash was taken,” she said, explaining that she If Bruce had the instrument professionally tuned, the club would probably have a record of it and could confirm its identity – if only it could be found.

But in the three decades since its disappearance, no one has been able to track it down – and auction appraiser Leila Dunbar estimates 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 on which “Bohemian Rhapsody” was composed sold for $2.1 million in 2023, while the piano , which John Lennon wrote “Imagine,” sold for $2.1 million in 2023 in 2000 and would be worth up to $10 million today.

Although he’s not an appraiser, Kirkpatrick, as a true superfan, believes a “serious collector” would pay “seven figures” if the piano were ever found in salvageable condition.

“Any history of 20th century rock and roll is incomplete without talking about Born to Run,” he said. “The instrument on which most of it was composed and which gave it its musical identity – the value of a piece like this is… it is priceless.”

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

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