The last thing they did before posting on Facebook, she remembered, was look at each other and say: “God help us.”
“To All Our Family And Friends,” the letter began, and over the next 4,600 words, Howard and Julie Chazanoff explained to nearly 19,000 private-group members that they would soon shut down “Spring-Nuts,” the closest thing there was to an official fan club for Bruce Springsteen.
While Springsteen had always been political, his public rebukes of President Donald Trump had grown sharper and Spring-Nuts a more political forum. Spring-Nuts was central to the Chazanoffs’ story — they met at the Stone Pony shortly before founding the group in 2015 — but their passion project didn’t feel so fun anymore. They’d been accused of grifting, of censorship, of being bad fans. One day, under fire, Julie came home and found Howard, 58, catatonic on the floor. She thought he’d had a heart attack.
The day before the midterm elections, the Chazanoffs woke up and saw Springsteen had given a rare endorsement to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan.
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Howard didn’t understand. El-Sayed wasn’t from New Jersey. He wasn’t running for president. He already had a big lead, polls showed, and he wasn’t critical to the Democrats taking control of Congress because “it was going to be a landslide regardless.”
Six days later, the Chazanoffs finished Shabbat and got back on their phones in a suburb of New York City. Julie wanted to post just two paragraphs but settled for editing Howie’s final draft down to 143. They wrote that they respected Springsteen’s freedom of speech, that “loving an artist’s music should never come with conditions, and that “having a different opinion should never make someone feel unwelcome in a community.” But for them, the El-Sayed endorsement was too disturbing to ignore.
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Under Howard’s profile picture — an AI-generated image of him standing in front of an Israeli flag and holding a star-of-David guitar that said, “My Guitar Kills Antisemitism” — they wrote that El-Sayed had “strong relationships with people who have open disdain for America and Jews” and that he himself had made “antisemitic and anti-American” statements.
“This is not an Islamophobia thing,” Howard told me in an interview. “It’s just the fact that he was the one candidate that people had questions [about], and it was divisive.”
For years, the group had a “no-politics” policy. But the music was always about America — the open roads, the sputtering hometowns, the sacrifice and grief in the wake of 9/11, the things you cling to even when they disappoint you.
Springsteen had endorsed every democratic candidate for president since 2004. He had written scores of songs with overt political messages. But after he endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, the moderators posted, deleted and re-posted his video in what became a major controversy. Howard said he almost shut down the group back then, but the guitarist Steven Van Zandt and his wife talked him out of it.
The Spring-Nuts weathered the first year of Trump’s second term, and this spring, they got through the Land of Hopes and Dreams tour with some fans shouting ICE OUT NOW! and others holding their tongues. But now the Chazanoffs felt overwhelmed by exclusion and division.
In the letter, they wrote that they’d received messages from other members who felt the E Street tent that they had proudly considered home for decades was no longer welcoming all fans.
Therefore, they concluded, the best move was not to retire. Not to cede admin powers to one of their dozen moderators. Not to wait for the election storm to pass.
The best thing to do was to shut it down.
* * *
Within hours, Spring-Nuts was flooded with posts and the Chazanoffs’ letter had more than 1,100 comments.
I’ll wear my shirt proudly 💔
Shedding a tear for this group I’ve loved for so long.
Why do I feel like I’m … mourning the loss of a dear friend????
The profile pictures were full of wrinkles, smiles, selfies. Gray hair, no hair, AI. Cats and dogs, kids and lovers, friends and trademark Spring-Nuts T-shirts. They wrote from England and E Street; Germany and Grand Rapids; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; and Adelaide, Australia. Many addressed Howie and Julie by name. Sometimes, they called Julie by her nickname, “Jewlie.”
I have never been prouder of Howie and Julie.
They took their ball and went home.
Long ass post as always and it wouldn’t be right if it wasn’t.
Carol posted about an unforgettable night at Wrigley Field. Steve about a legendary show at Madison Square Garden. Mary listed all the people she’d met: “Dina at T-shirt pickup, Susan and Cindy in the lobby. I met Timmy and Toby from Canada!!” Many remembered the group’s “Serenade” parties, including Stacie, who called herself a “shy lurker” who wouldn’t have come out and made lifelong friends if it weren’t for the encouragement of Howie and Julie. Spring-Nuts was the only community, someone said, where you could come for a serious discussion about where in Springsteen’s pants he kept all those harmonicas.
* * *
I have lost too much in my life recently and this truly hurts.
As a history teacher for 30 years, I have often told my students that nothing has caused more deaths in the history of mankind than religion.
i guess it really is No Nut November.
* * *
Two nights earlier, in Niles, Illinois, Marya said she spotted a woman wearing a “Spring-Nuts” sweatshirt and followed her into the parking lot at Costco.
“I tapped her on the shoulder and acknowledged our shared love of Bruce,” she wrote. “She said, ‘When we meet each other randomly like this, we know we already understand one another.’”
Some bashed Howie and Julie for killing the group rather than handing it off. Others said they could do whatever they wanted with the square they had built.
They disagreed about whether El-Sayed’s opposition to Israel was antisemitism.
One person considered it poignant that Howie and Julie had made their post on the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
* * *
You’re playing into the anti semitic trope of “Jews controlling everything” by not releasing the trademarks and the group to someone else’s leadership.
Too many relationships including my own with my own family have been destroyed by the politics in this country and I am so sorry it is destroying this group.
He won’t be around forever and I don’t want to imagine a world where Bruce Springsteen doesn’t exist. But it will come to pass as all things do. What we’ll have left is each other w/ our memories and stories and support and the music.
“I’m so sorry” for not posting in a while, Katie wrote. But life was hard — her 83-year-old, paraplegic mother was in declining health, and after many surgeries, she’d learned that her own right leg had to be amputated.
“I miss you, my friends,” she wrote. “I did not post this on my FB wall because my family does not want anyone knowing what’s going on with us, but I wanted my SpringNut family to know.”
* * *
The night after the Chazanoffs’ post, a powerhouse charity and a group of comedians hosted the 20th annual “Stand Up for Heroes” fundraiser in New York City. The benefit for military veterans and their families was headlined by star entertainers, including Jon Stewart, Alex Warren and Hasan Minhaj. And, of course, Springsteen, who has attended nearly every one.
Spring-Nuts buzzed about the event for days, and in the run-up to the show, they directed each other to the best deals.
“Anyone else meeting around 7pm when the doors open?” a woman wrote that morning. “I’m having dinner with my son, so that’s the earliest I can meet. Yet another thing I will miss about this site!”
If Springsteen was aware of what had happened, he didn’t address it. He had spent all spring preaching against America’s most craven impulses and reached the culmination of the tour at Nationals Park on May 27. That night, sitting on the stage, he said:
“The hardest part of all of this for me has been feeling that terrible distance between you and your neighbors, you and your fellow citizens. … it hurts, and it can darken your soul. We have a president who says he wishes nothing but ill upon those which he disagrees with. But that’s not the country I want to live in.
“… America was born out of disagreement. It’s an argument. An ongoing, blessed, sacred argument. An argument about what course the country should take to form that more perfect union. We can argue about these things and still recognize our common humanity, our dignity, and yes, our unity.”
Howard had thought a lot about that message.
“These Bruce fans, they take the messages that fit their narrative; they don’t take the whole message,” he said the day after the post. “Bruce explained exactly how I felt, where he said: ‘The thing I hate more than anything is the division of our citizens, the division of our friends, the division of our families.’
“He said, ‘I don’t want to live like that,’ and that’s exactly how I feel. I don’t want to live like that. But on a smaller version, me and Julie don’t want to run a group like that.”
In New York, Springsteen started with “Hello Sunshine,” a song about competing desires for isolation and connection. Then “I’ll Work for Your Love,” an ode to devotion and sacrifice. And then “Moonlight Motel,” a ballad about a narrator visiting a dilapidated, abandoned motel where a romance once bloomed.
He ended with “Dancing in the Dark,” and at one point, he stepped back from the microphone so that the audience’s voices could lift his own.
“A poignant moment of togetherness,” a Billboard reporter wrote, “especially for those in the crowd who’d undoubtedly danced their way through unimaginable darkness to get there.”
The next morning, Spring-Nuts did not discuss the event. No new posts were allowed.
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