The first people pitch up at nine o’clock in the morning outside a small blue bungalow in Long Branch, New Jersey, hoping to see Bruce Springsteen. A car noses down the street and turns around, and for a moment they think it might be him.

“I think not,” says Marcus Jackson, 30, who has come with his mother, Lisa.

Springsteen himself has suggested that he will come. In this little bungalow near the beach, half a century ago, he wrote Born to Run, the album that saved and made his career. “On its anniversaries, I get in a car and play it from start to finish,” he told Peter Ames Carlin, the author of Tonight in Jungleland, a new book about the making of the album.

Springsteen said he drives along the Jersey Shore and when he gets to this little bungalow “I sit by the curb and let Jungleland play, all the way through, while I sit outside the little house I wrote it in.”

Jungleland is the last track on the album and it is nearly ten minutes long. If a rock star pulls up outside this little bungalow for ten minutes, it ought to be possible to spot him. So Lisa and Marcus Jackson have come, on the 50th anniversary of the album’s release.

It’s an album about escape, about getting out of town. “I grew up in New Orleans,” says Lisa, who now lives in California and works for Apple. It spoke to her “even though our highway wasn’t Highway 9”, she says. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there … It’s that feeling that you are born to be more than this.”

There’s a plane tree growing out of the pavement that shades the house, and a pile of trash beside it, awaiting pick-up. As Lisa and her son stand beside the rubbish heap looking for the Boss, a young woman emerges from the bungalow to pick up empty bottles from the grass.

The house in Long Branch, New Jersey is a mecca for Springsteen fans

JOHN TAGGART FOR THE TIMES

Jackie Hernandez, 23, has lived here for five years with her husband, a builder. She asks if the Jacksons would like to take a picture on the porch. As they are doing this a car pulls up across the road and we all turn to see if it is Springsteen. It is four women from Rhode Island in Springsteen T-shirts, all pointing excitedly at the bungalow.

“The first year I lived here, people kept looking at the house,” says Hernandez. She thought there must be something wrong with the roof. Her husband’s boss explained that an artist once lived in the house. She imagined a painter. Then a man who had come all the way from London appeared at her door.

“He told me everything,” she says. It explained why all these people kept showing up on her porch. Once, a bus pulled up outside. “It was 25 people,” she says. “They all ended up fitting on the porch.”

People sing on her porch. “It’s beautiful, the way they sing,” says Hernandez, who has a four-year-old son. “I don’t mind. I have been meaning to hear his songs but I keep forgetting.”

She could not quite understand the grip of Springsteen on these people. Then one night she and her husband were watching an Adam Sandler comedy. “My husband and I are big fans of Grown Ups,” she says. In Grown Ups 2, there’s a fancy-dress party scene where someone is dressed up as Springsteen. “We didn’t even realise how big he was,” she says. This convinced them.

The Rhode Island delegation are members of a Springsteen fan club, the Spring-Nuts, who came to the Jersey Shore for the annual “Spring-Nuts Serenade” at the Stone Pony, where Springsteen played as a young musician. This was a day before the anniversary. “There were 600 Spring-Nuts,” says Deb DiMeo, 67, whose day job involves leasing shopping centres.

Levon Helm and Bruce Springsteen perform at the Stone Pony in 1987

DEBRA L ROTHENBERG/GETTY IMAGES

She is quite confident that Springsteen will come to the bungalow. “He is in town,” she says. “He has been spotted on the beach.” But she must go. They have to get back on the road. “Tell him: ‘The girls from Rhode Island love you,’” says DiMeo.

Now comes a semi-retired court reporter from Illinois named Patty Thompson, 61, with Lovey Mazar, 62, who grew up in Long Branch and is showing her around. “We met in Las Vegas, at a concert,” says Thompson.

Mazar starts talking about what it was like in 1975. “It was rough and tough,” she says. She never met Springsteen but her older brother claimed to have beaten him up. “He said: ‘Ah, I see him all the time. I slapped the shit out of him,’” says Mazar.

“We will see him today,” she says. “He may be in a black, beat-up BMW. He may be in a convertible.”

A cyclist from Manhattan pedalling down the Jersey Shore stops, hoping to see Bruce; then Colleen Swenson, 58, from Massachusetts, with her sister and four friends. She has met Springsteen several times. Once, she got a photograph with him and sent it out as a Christmas card.

Colleen Swenson with the Boss

COLLEEN SWENSON

“I thought she was divorcing her husband,” says her friend Carla Stafford, 57, an emergency room nurse. Springsteen “is [Swenson’s] free pass,” she adds. Meaning she could drop everything for him.

“Well, her trousers,” says Stafford. “Definitely her trousers.”

Her friend is a fan of Springsteen and “I am a fan of Colleen Swenson,” Stafford says. “I would not be doing this if she weren’t doing this also. It became a fun hobby. Some people like scrapbooking, we follow Bruce, as much as possible, and fit him into our lives.”

Hernandez comes out and takes a photograph of the ladies on her porch. There is still no sign of Bruce. “My daughter is getting married on Friday,” says Swenson. So they must leave. “I didn’t tell anyone [in my family] I was doing this.” She feared they might try to stop her.

As the day progresses, veteran Bruce spotters arrive. There’s a man from Wales named Ian Gravell, who was in a car accident and learnt to walk again while listening to the Springsteen track Dancing in the Dark. He wrote a book about it called Loose Gravel.

There’s Mary Milewski, 50, from Connecticut, whose arm Springsteen autographed in 2018. She kept the arm above her head that night, clear of the sheets. The following morning she went to a tattoo parlour. “Every day I look at it and it reminds me of how amazing he is to me, in my life,” she says.

Signature tattoos were among the tributes on show

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The Jersey Shore rock’n’roll tour guide Jean Mikle pulls up at the wheel of an old Volkswagen. Kate Archer, 56, a solicitor from Birmingham, England, gets out with her son Joseph Wright, 20, a fellow Springsteen fan. Archer’s two younger sons, who are not Springsteen fans, remain in the car.

Kate Archer and Joe Wright from Birmingham

JOHN TAGGART FOR THE TIMES

Wright with Springsteen in London

Archer met Bruce in London, in 2009. He was playing at Hyde Park so she checked into Claridges. “He always stays there,” she said. Sure enough, she caught him coming into the hotel and got a picture of Bruce and her son. As Mikle talks about the bungalow, the landlords Ryan DeCarolis, 44, and Jerry Ferrara, 66, arrive with a plastic plaque in gold and black: a copy of the Born to Run album cover. This they glue to the front wall of the bungalow.

A plaque is placed on the side of the house

JOHN TAGGART FOR THE TIMES

DeCarolis says we should all look out for a silver Porsche. Springsteen has one, apparently. Every so often after that a silvery-blue Porsche cruises past, but it is not Springsteen. It is a chap who lives up the street, asking if we have seen him yet.

Then there are two men in a red Plymouth Barracuda, signed by various musicians and celebrities, and there’s a semi-retired instructor from a stunt driving school who was a bartender at the Stone Pony in the late 1980s.

“People ask me if I have met Bruce,” he says. “I used to tell him to leave.”

Springsteen would show up and play and the place would fill and no one would leave until he left, so he had to get the Boss out of there.

No one knows when to leave now. Some say he has already come. By 6pm the crowd has thinned, to a few stubborn stragglers. We are not like the tramps in Born to Run. We are more like the tramps in Waiting for Godot.

Then, in the golden light of this glorious summer’s evening, a man in a green chequered shirt steps out of the car. He has grey hair, he is tall, he strides purposefully towards the bungalow.

Heads turn, pulses quiver. He looks rather like Bruce.

But it turns out to be Joe Rapolla, chairman of the music and theatre department at Monmouth University. He is flattered to be mistaken for the Boss; he has a photograph of himself with the big man, as it happens, backstage at a concert. But he has come to announce the release of a new album, by his students, inspired by Born to Run. It is a piece of news, though it does not quite match the idea of Springsteen himself stepping from his car and staring wistfully at the little place where it all began.

When I leave, around eight, a few holdouts remain under the plane tree in the fading light, still hoping he will come.