BRUUUUUUUUUUCE!

The first time I heard about Bruce Springsteen, I was in high school and I was 15 years old. My best friend at the time, Christine, had a life size poster of him on her bedroom door, and she was my map into the world of "The Boss".

I, on the other hand, couldn’t really understand what the fuss was about. He was just a guy from New Jersey, with a raspy voice that, to my ears, strained to sing, and an obvious fan of red bandanas, though if the poster on Christine’s door was to be believed to not have been photoshopped, the lucky owner of a pretty nice butt! But I couldn’t really get into him. The Springsteen mystique eluded me.

Fast forward a few years later to my first conversation with DB, and my re-education of Bruce Springsteen began. DB knows every album, every song, and further to that, the lyrics to every song. And I don’t mean the lyrics that you and I can readily sing to, like “Born in the USA”, “Born to Run” or “Glory Days”. I’m talking about “Incident on 57th Street”, “She’s the One”, “Part Man, Part Monkey” – songs that are buried under the commercial machine that is mainstream radio and consumer marketing. He knows those songs.

I slowly began to understand why legions of fans were unable to stop themselves from screaming that now legendary word….”Bruuuuuuuuuuuce”. I’m now one of them. At my first Springsteen concert last year, I screamed myself hoarse along with them. And that raspy voice that I’d balked at as a teen? Well, that voice makes him “Bruce”….that voice makes him “THE BOSS”. I get it now.

So last night, we drove 45 minutes to San Jose, overpaid for parking, stood in a line that wrapped around the HP Pavilion, and spend 2 ½ hours dancing, singing, jumping, screaming, and idiotically grinning to each other, as Bruce, Stevie, Patti, Nils, Soozie, Gary, Charles, Roy, Max, and Clarence, showed us why, in Bruce’s own words, they are truly “the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, earth-quaking, nerve-breaking, history-making, legendary…..E…..STREET….BAND!”