![]() ![]() and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle for a couple of years. Just two weeks before, Springsteen had been on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and he was touring on Born to Run, the breakthrough album that would make him a star.Īt my house, we had been wearing out copies of Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. 9, 1975, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played their first Florida show ever, at the Tampa Jai-Alai fronton. ![]() Springsteen in concert with the E Street Band for Suncoast rock fans in November 1975. He didn't play for four hours like in those rumored days of old, but he certainly managed an epic feel in a little under three. And who didn't see that coming? Point Blank, Light of Day, Bobby Jean, all rousing, all-American. And unless you have a bootleg of If I Was the Priest in your back pocket, go away. You're mixing up your references, she'd yawn. I wanted to walk on over to that barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge, hand her a warm beer, and say, "Wendy let me in, I wanna be your friend."īut I knew that the barefoot girl - born and raised in Piscataway, no doubt - would see right through me. Wandering the Meadowlands that late-summer evening, I felt like the lone human left in Invasion of the Body Snatchers I kept expecting Donald Sutherland to pop out of nowhere, point at me and unleash that horrific pod-person howl.Įxcept he wouldn't howl. I, on the other hand, came from Washington, D.C., a newbie, an out-of-state plate, a casual admirer in a Jungleland that accepted nothing less than zealous devotion. The purest of the pilgrims, birthed in the same rich soil as their preferred prophet. Springsteen, Garry Tallent and Van Zandt perform at the Asbury Park Convention Center in Asbury Park, N.J., on March 18, 1999. He got about 3 feet away from me and my friend, then climbed onto a chair and slid into the last verse, surrounded by bodies pressing close. And then they went into Rendezvous, and then, during the third song, Spirit in the Night, Springsteen jumped into the audience with his microphone and started wading through the rows. He and the band were going to play like there was no tomorrow. He obviously did not care if there were 5,000 people in the crowd or only 500. Somehow, though, he held the stage like no one I had ever seen. He was so scrawny, it looked like a solid bass line could have knocked him off his feet. I could not take my eyes off Springsteen. Then the lights went down, and the band came out, and I forgot everything else. The ice storm had kept almost everyone home. In my VW bug, we crawled past the fresh wrecks, holding our breath.Īt the convention center, we found no shortage of good seats. On the way we must have seen 20 cars slide into one another. An old friend dragged me down to the convention center for the show I only went to humor him. I was 19 and home for the weekend from Indiana University. A steady rain in the afternoon, then a freeze at dusk, and suddenly the streets of Indianapolis were draped in ice. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |