There are many times in my life when I feel sorry for myself for having been born too late. Mainly it has to do with music and missing the 60s. But recently the disappointment has been more general since it feels like, at least here in the USA, we're living through a nasty era of crisis, stagnation, and national decline. A lot of the things we all took for granted up until 9/11 won't be so easily available to us any longer, if they're available to us at all. But in the end, fretting about when you were born is a waste of time, and at least I got to experience a nice little chunk of the pre-9/11 world. One thing that makes me feel very lucky is that I got to see Bruce Springsteen on several occasions when I was a kid, the first time in 1981 at Madison Square Garden, exactly one week after my bar mitzvah. Childhood memories are always more vivid and have a tendency to become larger than life as you reflect back from the standpoint of a world-weary adult, but that Springsteen concert, in support of The River, stands in my mind now as the greatest show I ever saw, and I think that's saying a lot... 
With all the thinking I've done about Dion over the past week or so, it was inevitable that I'd make my way to the Springsteen records in my collection. There's a direct line connecting Dion and Phil Spector to Springsteen. That same line, incidentally, also connects to the Ramones, Blondie, the New York Dolls... That's a story for another day... Springsteen's connection to the early 60s is quite interesting and weirdly contradictory. He hit the scene right around the time when a feeling began to emerge that rock had become overly serious and self-important. The 60s dream had crumbled, America was on the verge of losing its first war, the president was shown to be a two-bit crook. It’s not surprising given this context that nostalgia for a simpler time would grip the masses. American Graffiti, Happy Days, Sha Na Na, the renewal of interest in the early Beach Boys... So Springsteen comes along and he’s also a throwback to the days when rock ‘n roll was fun and innocent. He's a revivalist. And yet, he can't be so easily reduced to nostalgia for the time before the 60s got all hairy and serious because his music both harkens back to the halcyon days of Dion and Spector and also has people talking about him as the new Bob Dylan. Perhaps we can see him as a revivalist who takes the art of pop seriously. A serious revivalist. Something like that. But however you choose to view Springsteen, there's no denying that the dude's always been a very complicated cat. He seemed so god-like when I was a kid. There was a kind of religious devotion to him, a messianic aura that I got swept up into. I can recall counting down the days to the concert, feeling like it would never come, and then it finally came and it was so much more than what I could have imagined. How often does that happen? I think part of it had to do with growing up in New York. I know
Springsteen's a Jersey guy but, let's be real, Jersey is just a New York satellite, and there’s always been something very Nu Yawk about the Boss. It’s his 1970s New Yorkness that somehow always seems to pick me up when I’m feeling sad and blue… Springsteen was in heavy, heavy, heavy rotation on WNEW-FM, ‘where rock lives.’ (Interesting that even back in the 70s there was already this serious anxiety about rock ‘n roll burning out or fading away). I used to call the station all the time and ask Scott Muni, Pat St. John, Vin Scelsa, Meg Griffin, Richard Neer, and even the late Allison ‘Nightbird’ Steele, to play songs like Badlands, Rosalita, Backstreets, and, of course, this one, which might be my favorite...
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