Original Bruce Springsteen Violinist Was 74

In Israel, Lahav’s time with Springsteen is more of a footnote to her later career there. Her i24News obituary describes her as “one of Israel’s most influential songwriters and poets” and “a central figure in Israeli music for decades.”

Lahav was a winner of the ACUM Lifetime Achievement Award and the Erik Einstein Prize. She wrote lyrics for such Israeli artists as Tamouz, Rita, Yehudit Ravitz, Rami Kleinstein and Yehuda Poliker. Lahav also wrote screenplays (“Kesher Dam”) and novels (“Andre’s Wooden Clogs,” “The Swamp Queen Does the Tango”).

Fans of Springsteen in his pre-superstardom days took a fascination in Lahav’s relatively brief time with him and the E Street Band. Author Clinton Heylin, in his book “E Street Shuffle,” contended that Lahav was the inspiration for the song “She’s the One,” although Springsteen has never confirmed it. Former Springsteen manager Mike Appel wrote in his memoir that when the duo played together on stage, there was “male and female heat, right up there, live in front of everyone,” and insisted that the singer had fallen for her. But in her own interviews, Lahav dismissed such rumors as “old wives’ tales.”

Her husband at the time, Louis Lahav, was Springsteen’s sound engineer at 914 Sound Studios in Blavelt, New York. After she left the band in early 1975, the couple moved to Israel, then divorced in 1977. Suki Lahav said in a later interview that they left the Springsteen camp in part because Springsteen was going through a split with Appel and “we were really Mike’s people.”

Little in the way of photos or film footage from her time with the band is online, although there are scraps of audio outtakes that have been a source of curiosity to fans, like an abandoned alternate ending to “Jungleland” that features a operatic-style solo vocal by Lahav.

In a 2007 profile in the Jerusalem Post, Lahav was described in her time with Springsteen’s band as being “a young girl in a flowing white dress from Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar in the Upper Galilee, barely out of the army, barely married.” “Yes, I went from kibbutz harvest music to rocking with Bruce,” she told the newspaper.

Later in life, Lahav gave up playing the violin, saying she never felt that she was an expert at it, and that it was impossible to revisit without keeping her chops up.

She expressed a preference for Springsteen’s earliest music over the bigger hits that he had after she was long out of his orbit. Asked by the Post if she still listened to the two Springsteen albums she appeared on, she answered, “Of course,” with, according to the reporter “real joy in her voice.” She added, “It’s not the main thing in my life, but it’s a part of me that will never fade.”