Bruce Springsteen’s Early Muse, Diane Lozito

A year before Columbia Records president John Hammond approved a ten-album deal for Bruce Springsteen, Bruce was trying to win the approval of Diane Lozito’s parents and allow their 18-year-old daughter to live with the 21-year-old guitarist.  In an interview for a 2024 French documentary called Citizen Bruce, The American Pal, Diane recalled, “He lived on a street with Big Danny, and soon all three of us lived together. Bruce asked me to move into an apartment with him but he wanted the okay from my mother. So one night, he came to dinner at my house. Bruce charmed her to death. When we left the house, he said, ‘Oh, she loved me. She’s gonna say yes!’ The next day he dropped by and said, ‘Did she say we could move in?’ I said, ‘Well, no. My father was a musician, and you’re a musician.’ Bruce said, ‘If your father is a musician, he’ll agree.’ But my father said, ‘No. Musicians don’t earn enough money and are tramps.’”  Diane’s mother even advised her daughter to go back to her old boyfriend, Billy (Wild Billy) Cahill, who was a law student. Perhaps Diane’s parents would’ve agreed in 1971 what Keith Richards griped about Bruce in his 2010 Life biography: “If there was anything better around, he would be still working the bars of New Jersey.”  But Mr. and Mrs. Lozito’s put down spurred Bruce to put down in a notebook: “I know your mama, she don’t like me, ‘Cause I play in a rock and roll band.”  He later added:

“And I know your daddy, he don’t dig me, but he never did understand, But now you’re sad, your mama’s mad, And your papa says he knows that I don’t have any money.”

The Rosito’s not only inspired a showstopper of a song but also supplied Bruce with its title.  Diane stated: “One day, he found a letter addressed to my mother, Rita Lozito. A little after, he met my grandma, Rosa Rosito and that inspired the title.”

In the 1998 book Bruce Springsteen: Songs, Springsteen said of “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight): “It was my ‘getting out of town’ preview for Born To Run, with more humor. I wrote it as a kiss-off to everybody who counted you out, put you down, or decided you weren’t good enough. The lyrics also took a peek into the future. ‘Someday we’ll look back on this, and it will all seem funny.’ Not that it would be funny, but that it would all seem funny. Probably one of the most useful lines I’ve ever written.”

Despite her parents’ objections, Diane and Bruce wound up cohabiting.  It seems like each chapter in their love story became a stellar song. The start of their relationship was featured in “Spirit in the Night.”  Diane recalled: “Billy and his friends were major party boys. But Bruce didn’t drink or get high. One night at the beach, when Billy and the others were drinking, Bruce and I ducked around a rock and started kissing. Then I said, ‘It’s time to go’ because I was so scared of getting busted by Billy. That was a nice night. Light coming off the ocean, nothing like it. The next day, he showed me the line ‘She kissed me just right/Like only a lonely angel can.’ I’d later ask him, ‘Why isn’t my name in those songs?’ He’d tell me, ‘It’s boring having a whole album about the same girl. And nothing rhymes with Diane.”

But Diane found that if she stayed with Bruce, she’d never emotionally grow in his ever-growing fame.  Diane confessed to her time with the Boss: “I didn’t like this kind of life, always moving around on the streets, and I couldn’t be anyone. In front of the press, he was forced to say that he lived alone because he could sell more records. For several years, I had to pretend that I didn’t exist. I didn’t want to be in the shadow of this person and never have my own life. I wanted to be the best at my profession, and I couldn’t be.”

After three years of being a live-in couple and realizing life with Bruce was his way or the Route 9 highway, Diane decided to uncouple after he asked her to accompany him on the road.  Diane said, “He went to visit my mother to ask where I was, and that was the theme of his ‘Bobby Jean.’  He didn’t write to me anymore, but he was talking to me through his songs.”

But even though their three-year relationship died, little ditties about Bruce and Diane live on. Songs documenting their time together are mainstays on the radio and are still played by Bruce in concert.  Besides starring as “Rosalita” and “Bobby Jean,” Diane is strongly rumored to be “Sandy” in “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” the “angel from the Innerlake” in “Thundercrack,” “Crazy Janey” in “Spirit in the Night” and “Terry” in “Backstreets.”

While Bruce became an icon, his ex-muse became a commercial photographer and a location scout for natural landscapes for films. Since 1983, she has worked as a realtor based in Bend, Oregon.  And even though Bruce never dropped her name in his autobiography, Diane and her husband, David Jenkins, an art director, dropped into Bruce’s hotel room after one of his concerts.  After they shared a warm hug, Diane said, “I told Bruce, ‘That man behind me is my husband.’ Bruce went ‘Eeewww!'”

But now and then, she must wonder, “Just because I went out with Wild Billy was no reason for Bruce to nickname me Crazy Diane.  Maybe he did it so I would fit in with the folks he has in his lyrics, whose nicknames sound like they were hitmen. I’m surprised there wasn’t a Sopranos episode costarring his songs’ cast of characters like Little Gun, Killer Joe, Bad Scooter, Hazy Davy, Dynamite, Jack the Rabbit, Weak Knee Willie, Wild Billy, G-Man, and Magic Rat giving orders to Miami Steve—huh, Silvio Dante.”

-Mark Daponte

Photo: Getty Images