Every collection begins with someone who recognized that history was worth saving.
That might mean an artist who kept a handwritten lyric or a stage costume; a family that carefully preserved a treasured heirloom; or a passionate collector who spent decades assembling an extraordinary collection that tells a much larger story.
Visitors to the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music are invited to experience one such collection in the Mongeluzzi Family Gallery.
Over many years, Philadelphia-based attorney Robert Mongeluzzi assembled an exceptional collection of photography documenting Bruce Springsteen’s career. These images capture defining moments onstage and behind the scenes.
Photography like this has always played a vital role in preserving music history. Long after the final encore, photographs remain. They capture not only the artists themselves, but also the energy, emotion, and cultural moments that made each performance memorable.
Springsteen Center Founding Executive Director Bob Santelli shows Bruce the Mongeluzzi Family Gallery for the first time, June 2026.
We’re deeply grateful that Bob chose to share this remarkable collection with the Center. His generosity ensures these images are no longer simply part of a private collection, but are now available for students, scholars, music fans, and future generations to experience and appreciate.
Recently, I had the opportunity to ask Bob about his passion for collecting, how his collection came together, and why he believes sharing music history matters. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and how your love of music and then collecting began.
Sure. I think my love of music started with my father. My father was a tremendous Sinatra fan.
Sundays with Sinatra, with Sid Mark, was always on in my house, from when I was a small kid. So, I was always interested in music, because my father—my father lived to 100. We were at his bedside, and when he died, “Fly Me to the Moon” was playing. He actually took his last breath when Sinatra sang “fly me to the moon,” and the next line is “let me play among the stars,” which I don’t think could be a more perfect way to go out; a more apt lyric to describe where he was going. So, my eulogy of him was based on Sinatra songs and I had our IT people there to play music, while I was given the eulogy. So, music has always been important to me.
I, like tens of millions of other people, watched The Ed Sullivan Show when the Beatles came on. I remember how excited my sister was—I was 7 or 8 at the time. And so that excitement, my love of music, came from my dad, and Sinatra.
I remember my first album was a gift. I think it was a Christmas gift, it was Cream’s Disraeli Gears, which I played on my little rudimentary turntable—at the time, there were no attached speakers. There was like a little tinny speaker. I remember listening to music, with those little portable transistor radios, that, you know, no longer exist now, but you could go to the beach back then, and pretty much every person on the beach was listening to [the radio]. So, I think that really created my love of music collecting.
I became a huge Bruce Springsteen fan. I was very much into rock music as I went through high school. My freshman year at Penn, I was in the quadrangle, which is the main freshman residence, and I’m going to say the second or third day there, I had [the radio on] and the first Bruce song I heard was “Incident on 57th Street.” And I became instantly hooked. That was fall of my freshman year in college. So that was late 1974.
Then my father, for my 19th birthday, got me two tickets to see Bruce, at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. I got front row tickets, and the show was on the night of my 19th birthday. So, you know, when people ask, “what was your first Bruce show?” It’s pretty easy for me to remember it because it was the night of my 19th birthday, February 23rd, 1975.
Interestingly, the first song he played at that show was “Incident on 57th Street,” still the best Bruce song I have ever heard live. It was gorgeous. It was—just Bruce’s voice, Roy’s piano, and Suki’s violin. And, once I saw that show, I was absolutely hooked.
Interestingly, one of the, maybe the other greatest show of my life was Led Zeppelin at the Spectrum, which happened to be two weeks earlier. So, my two best shows were within a two-week span in 1975. So that’s 51 years ago. So, I haven’t been able to replicate a couple two weeks like that ever since.
Anyway, I became an obsessive Bruce fan. I had seen on the internet a company by the name of Snap Galleries out of London had a Born to Run cover shot up for sale, and Eric Meola has only done 25 of those that have ever been sold in the large size. So that was one. And then it became like an addiction. And I continued to buy Springsteen high-end collectible photographs for the last 30 years now. I have pretty much everything out there that is available. Some of the album covers are covered by copyright and aren’t available, but I have pretty much every Bruce photo that matters in my collection.
That’s how it started, and I’ve branched out to some other key rock and roll things. I have the only large format Abbey Road in reverse that exists. Ian Macmillan took seven photos that day, including, obviously, the iconic cover image. I’ve got the cover of The Clash’s London Calling; I’ve got the famous Johnny Cash flipping the bird photo. The famous Hendrix guitar on fire at Monterey photo. So it goes beyond Bruce, but the vast bulk of it is Springsteen.
Are there particular photographers whose work you especially admire?
There are. For Bruce, I think the three that I admire and have collected the most are Eric Meola, Frank Stefanko, and Danny Clinch. Those three, I think, sort of stand above. I’m a fan of Annie Leibovitz, and I have two of hers, which include that famous jumping in front of the flag photo. I have never seen that available on the commercial market other than the one I happen to get at a charity auction on the internet. I’ve never seen it for sale any place else, I think that that’s pretty rare.
Of the Meola pieces—Bruce out in the Utah desert, I think those have the best story to them. If you go to the gallery, there are a number of images of Bruce driving a vintage convertible car in the Utah desert with a storm developing behind them. I’ve spoken to Eric about that. They went out to the Utah desert. This was maybe a month or two after Elvis died. They rented this car, they’re driving through the desert, and this thunderstorm comes up and shortly after he takes these photographs of Bruce driving the car with the storm in the background. They come back from the trip and about six months later, Eric gets a cassette tape from Bruce saying, “you know, this is a song from my album that’s going to come out.” The album, of course, was Darkness. And he hears the first line of “The Promised Land.”
On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert
And then he gets to the fourth stanza.
Well, there’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor
I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm
Gonna be a twister that’ll blow anything down
That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground
And that storm was the inspiration for the song “The Promised Land.” So, looking at those images and understanding that story makes them really meaningful. And so those are probably my favorites.
Many collectors spend years building collections for themselves. You made the decision to share yours with the public. And we are, of course, so grateful for that. Why was that important to you?
It was important to me because, you know, these images, these great images, have been in the law office—I’ve got a law firm in Philadelphia, and we have the entire 51st and 52nd floor of One Liberty, which is the major skyscraper in Philadelphia. And it literally covered the walls of the entire 52nd floor. There are about 75 images. Only 25 have made their way to the center at this point, although the Center owns them.
And I’ve given a number of tours for people who have expressed interest in Springsteen, and they’ve just been mesmerized and happy. And it also made me feel really good that I was able to share these with Springsteen fans. And so, when I heard about the Center, and started to become involved with it, I felt that it just wasn’t fair for me to keep these to myself, and to the very few people—I’ve probably given less than 100 tours of our law offices over the years, and that’ll happen in a morning at the Springsteen Center. So, I wanted this to be available to the people who really have a passion for Bruce Springsteen like I do. I wanted to make it available to them. And, you know, I’ve got a vacation place at the Jersey Shore, so it’s not that far for me to pop up there and see the children that I gave away.
Well, we are almost out of time, and I think that is a perfect place to end. Are there any last words you’d like to share?
Just that, you know, I’m a trial lawyer, and very much believe that what I do is very similar to a rock performance. I tell lawyers—I teach lawyers—and I tell them that if you want to be a better trial lawyer, go to Netflix and watch Springsteen on Broadway. Because everything we do, which has to do with storytelling and theme and pacing and connection with the audience, is what Bruce does. And so, he certainly has inspired me to be a better trial lawyer. I always use a line from a Springsteen song, and in all of my closings. The jury doesn’t know what it is. But one of my partners, who’s a huge Bruce fan, will have a little smile when he hears it, because he gets it. So, I guess I’m playing to an audience of one there, but it’s fun for me. So, Bruce’s given me a lot of joy. And I’m glad that that joy is something that people experience at the center, both in the Mongeluzzi Gallery and in the many other fabulous places there. And thank you for all your efforts in making that happen, and continuing to spread the word.
Well, that was the perfect closing argument. Thank you so much for your time today, and thank you for sharing your collection with us.
Melissa Kozlowski
Director of Curatorial Affairs
Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music
Monmouth University
July 29, 2026