Il Capo in Firenze

My friend has been to more Bruce Springsteen concerts this year than I have been in my whole life.  I'm a fan mind you, been to a dozen concerts, but I've never been to the Stone Pony, I've never driven more than a couple hours to see him, and I can't remember the first time I heard Rosalita.

I asked him what he loves about the shows, why he still goes and he said it's no longer just about the concert "it's about who I'm with."

Springsteen has been around long enough to be generational.  People can trace their life along the tours they've seen. Everything from the bootleg their older brother introduced them to, the first time they brought their wife, assuming they didn't meet at a concert, to the time they dragged their kids to the insanity.

But for me it's still about the selection of those 30 or so songs he plays and where they take me.  Yes, I'll remember Florence and Stadio Artemio Franchi and the way the Italians sang words they didn't know, the way most Jews chant prayers on the high holidays.

And I'll remember the rain and the sprint to the car, and the aborted McDonalds' run, and the three pizzas Joe found for us at midnight and how we ate them as they closed the hotel bar and the sauce spilled out of the slices, which I ate Tony Manero-style, onto my new Wrecking Ball t-shirt just above the Born to Run album cover.

It isn't because it was Italy, or even Florence a place where I have only good memories.  Or that we went with friends on the spur of the moment on a weekend when we had a million other obligations, but in the end it was because of Bruce.  When I am at a Bruce Springsteen concert I am an 8th grader at Birney Middle School the week The River album came out.  I am a freshman in the Markley Dorm at Michigan listening to Born in the USA.  I am at the Sammy house singing Jungleland at midnight with 20 sweaty guys and girls who I'd give anything to have a night out with again.  I am a senior in college trying to convince my poetry teacher that No Surrender is poetry.  I am newly married and shopping for our first house when Ghost of Tom Joad came on the radio.  I am on the train coming home from New York listening to the Seeger Sessions.  I am driving home from Deep Creek with three sleeping kids in the back seat listening to E Street Radio when Bruce explains the origins of the song Freehold.

A Bruce concert doesn't take me someplace new, it brings me back to all the places I've loved.

"Well, we busted out of class,

Had to get away from those fools

We learned more from a 3-minute record, baby

Than we ever learned in school."