NEWARK, N.J. (Reuters) - Rock icon Bruce Springsteen has used cars and the open road as metaphors for both the American dream and the American nightmare throughout his career.

Now, more than 30 years after he asked fans to come along for a ride "about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88," the Newark Museum on Thursday opened "Springsteen: Troubadour of the Highway" -- the first major exhibition devoted to the New Jersey native.

The program records the artist's musical and visual use of cars and the highway as metaphors of American life.

The exhibit features music, lyrics, photography, videos, vinyl albums and other memorabilia. It also shows more than 70 works by renowned photographers Annie Leibowitz and Lynn Goldsmith as well as Springsteen's sister, Pamela.

Vivid imagery of jumping into a car and screaming into the night, usually with your "baby" in the seat next to you, resound through Springsteen's work. Highways aren't crowded -- they're "jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive."

Yet the road can also be poignant, as when a sorrowful lover promises he'll "drive all night again, just to buy you some shoes."

Springsteen's use of cars and the highway can be both gut wrenchingly bitter and hopelessly optimistic, as the characters in his songs run toward the promise of something better from the ruins of a life gone bad.

Project Director Becky Schutt agreed it was unusual to hold an exhibition built around a living rock star. "But we are looking at him as an artist and chronicling him for the past 30 years," she said.

Schutt said many of Springsteen's songs were about the declining fortunes in post-industrial small-town America and his use of cars in his songs reflected American aspirations.

"He traveled the highways of America, and he sings about the highway both physically and metaphorically," she said.

Museum director Mary Sue Sweeney Price said the exhibition reached out to a different audience.

"This exhibition had to come to New Jersey, which has more Springsteen fans per square mile than any place in the world," she said. She said New Jersey is one of the most densely populated, but diverse places in the United States, "which produces a creative tension that is beautifully expressed in the Springsteen lyrics."

Museum visitor and New Jersey resident Antoinette Rinaldi said she was a big Springsteen fan, praising his ability to keep in touch with himself and his home state.

"I think his lyrics are the Shakespeare of our times," she said. "He speaks from the heart."

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