Route 35 Drive-In
New Jersey
Bruce Springsteen played a ninety-minute set in a New Jersey parking lot, then everyone watched a movie.
On July twenty-ninth, nineteen sixty-six, a band called The Castiles set up at a drive-in theater on Route 35 in Hazlet. Their singer was Bruce Springsteen. It was the drive-in's tenth birthday. The band started at seven in the evening and played for ninety minutes, until it got dark enough for the projectors. Then the cars settled in for a comedy called The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. The screen was a hundred and twenty feet wide. The projectors threw an image four hundred and twenty feet across the lot, and the speaker boxes that hung in car windows had heaters built into them for cold nights. The place had opened in June of nineteen fifty-six on a former watermelon farm, and the first film shown there was The Searchers, with John Wayne.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
For the 10th anniversary of the drive-in, they hosted Bruce Springsteen and his band, The Castiles, on July 29, 1966. The band open festivities at 7 p.m. and plays a 90-minute show until darkness and movie time.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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