Goodbye to Suki Lahav, it would have inspired Springsteen’s She’s the One

The Israeli violinist, writer, actress and composer has passed away at the age of 74 Suki Lahavwho – among other things – was part of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band in the mid-Seventies. The news was confirmed yesterday, April 2, by her son Yonatan Lahav, who wrote on Facebook that his “beloved and beautiful mother” was “welcomed into infinity after a short and hard battle against the disease”. He added: “He wrote songs that touched people’s hearts.” And again: “She was a special woman, intelligent, with a pure heart and a lover of life. She was the best mother I could have wished for.”

The period of time that saw Suki Lahav, also known as Tzruya or Tsruya, among the ranks of the E Street Band was relatively short. Yet, in the period between October 1974 and March 1975 in which she collaborated with the New Jersey singer-songwriter’s group, the violinist contributed to the sessions for Springsteen’s second album, “The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle“, and for the next “Born to run” Among his most significant contributions are the violin introduction in “Jungleland” and the choirs in “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”.

Lahav first came into contact with Springsteen and the E Street Band when her husband Louis Lahav worked as a sound engineer on the debut album “Greetings From Asbury Park” in 1972. Then the musician began playing with the group on an experimental basis in 1974, when Springsteen was looking for replacements for Ernest “Boom” Carter and David Sancious.

With the E Street Band Suki Lahav rang in concerts at the end of 1974debuting at Avery Fisher Hall in New York on October 4, and joined them on stage for all the numbers requiring violin parts – including “Incident On 57th Street” and their version of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” – until his last concert, March 3 in Washington DC. Shortly thereafter Lahav returned to her native country, where she achieved success as a musician and songwriter, playing with the Kibbutz Orchestra and writing for other artists, including Yehudit Ravitz and Gidi Gov. His song “Shara Barkhovot” was the Israeli entry in the 1990 Eurovision Song Contest, performed by Rita. For his work in Israel, Lahav received the ACUM Lifetime Achievement Award and the Erik Einstein Prize.

According to what Mike Appel reported in the book “Down Thunder Road. The Making of Bruce Springsteen”, written together with Marc Eliot in 1992, taken from the Pink Cadillac website, “Bruce had fallen in love with her and it was mutual. So Suki had to drop everything and leave, to try to save her marriage”. Clinton Heylin also returned to the topic about ten years later in the 2013 volume “E Street Shuffle”, claiming that the violinist had inspired by the lyrics of the song “She’s the one”: “With her long hair falling / And her eyes that shine like a midnight sun”.