The Change Was Made Uptown (cont'd)...

Click HERE for part one.

I guess it was just impossible to get away from this Jersey cat in that year of our lord, 1984. The machine was in motion and that motherfucker was EVERYWHERE. Quickie cash-in magazines and books littered the shelves of supermarkets and bookstores. Every bad teen comedy had at least one doofus wearing a sleeveless denim vest and a red bandana and every bullshit TV show had some kind of Broooce reference. Hell, I can even remember that Growing Pains episode where that kid that grew up to be a complete whacko christian fucktard was gonna take the dad character to a live show. Technically 1985, but within that year Boss fever had become so entrenched in the nation that they went so far as to use the one-word title "Springsteen" for the second episode of this horrific sit-com. If you want to torture yourself, you can watch it HERE (or if you really want to torture yourself you can go YouTube some of Kirk Cameron's fairly insane and completely illogical fundamentalist christian spiels...). I mean Born In The USA was right up there with Thriller, Purple Rain, and the Los Angeles Summer Olympics on the oversaturation-turning-into-overfuckingkill scale. I guess it's no wonder that I somehow wound up with a copy.

I can't rightly recall how I came by it, however. I don't remember being the actual purchaser of this cassette with a close-up of a guy's Levi's-clad ass as the cover. Very Village People-esque, no? I'm a fat, on-the-cusp-of-pubescence kid that's just starting to realize his tallywhacker is for more than pissing. As lame as my tastes were, I'm pretty sure if it had been me making the rare purchase of a full-length recording, I would have gone with this:

Notice the big, naked cans? Much more enticing that this:



Notice the big (most likely hairy) man-ass?

I figure this was probably a purchase my mother made in an effort to steer me away from shit like Twisted Sister and Quiet Riot.  I would occassionally be gifted audio atrocities such as Billy Joel, Hall and Oates, and even Air Supply, as a way to try to hijack my tastes into a blander, more acceptable arena.  My tastes may have been (and still are) pretty unrefined, but I just couldn't hang with that shit.  I do remember plugging in the Springsteen tape and half-way listening to it.  We'd just gotten cable and I'd heard a few of these songs played to death on MTV.  Didn't love it, didn't hate it, didn't think much more about it than I did anything else in heavy video rotation (back then MTV actually played nothing but MUSIC videos - that's what the "M" stood for).  But by the time that tape rolled onto track five, the gloriously gloomy "Downbound Train," I was hooked.  Out of a twelve song album, seven of those songs were released as singles; "Downbound Train" was not one of them.  Go figure.  I guess it's too much of a fucking downer.  In hindsight, it's a wonder that it made the album at all. 

This song still grabs me by the short hairs.  It has a beautiful sadness to it that puts it square in the realm of Leon Russell's "Me and Baby Jane" and Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."  Heavy company by anybody's standards.  It was with this song that I became I fanatic.

Thanks to the popularity of BITUSA, the K-mart tape bins were also stocked with the Springsteen back catalog.  It was here that I gave up singles and started saving money for the long players.  Being too young to get any kind of paying work, I started saving the daily dollar my parents gave me for lunch and a snack at school.  As a fat kid, the benefits of this were two-fold:  I could squeeze out at least one Springsteen cassette a week and I was also losing some excess calories along the way.  Thanks, Bruce.

I started at the beginning:  Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ.  What a fucking record.  Still love it (as evidenced below by my donning the swank t-shirt gifted to me by my groovy mother-in-law).  I quickly ran through the catalog in more or less the sequence of release.  The River escaped me for a long time due to the inhibitive cost of a "double" cassette.  Those double-length cassettes always immediately got clogged up and ripped apart in the goddamned tape player anyway. 

Like a true-old fart, I'll tell you that was a magical time in my life.  There was no internet to grant me the immediate gratification of my desires.  I had to read the back of the albums to figure out the chronology of album releases, the contents weren't spoiled and picked apart by a million dimwits posting their two cents in Amazon reviews, and each record was a gamble with my money.  And each album was like taking a journey into parts unknown; there wasn't much of a way to have heard most of this stuff before. I think in many ways it provided a much more intimate bond with the music.  Is that too pretentious, yet?  Probably.

Another thing I got out of that whole experience was the thrill of wondering what this stuff I listened to must be like live.  Of course MTV was gaining ground in tearing that wall down, but there was still this need to connect with someone whose music you were that into.  See the myth made flesh and all that shit.  I was too young to actually go see these shows, as if any of them would ever hit our backwater burg anyway. Didn't stop me from daydreaming about it, though.   I wouldn't feel that way again until almost ten years later when I was feverishly ordering small-run punk singles through the mail, receiving almost weekly packages from labels like Baloney Shrapnel, TPOS, and Jettison.  The big difference being was by that time I had both a job and some wheels.  Gas was a buck a gallon and I thought nothing of jumping in the car and putting several hundred miles on the odometer in order to check out my current obsessions. 

But alas, the stars never aligned for me and The Jersey Devil.  By the time I had the license and the wherewithal, I no longer had the inclination.  I had held the Springsteen flag aloft all through my high school days, but by the time I was outta school, I was more interested in punk rock noise...and Bruce was putting out E Street-less albums like Lucky Town  and Human Touch.  That "other band" tour woulda been the one I was most apt to see and I just wasn't very interested in seeing Bruce head up a band of studio musicians - I wanted to see the cats that made THOSE records.  At some point in time, I took my Springsteen collection to the local trade-in shop and got my thirty pieces of silver for selling out the guy I had once been such an ardent disciple of.  I suppose we're all bound to kill our idols at some point in time.  Probably a natural thing to do. Never mind how much enjoyment and comfort I had found in the words and music for years - after all, wasn't this guy one of them corporate-minstrel fat cats writing for a buck?  I had succeeded in turning myself into one of those myopic, jaded, joyless jackasses that validates themselves through their record collections.  My loss. 

Flash forward to 2001.  I'm walking through a local used CD shithole and what should catch my eye?  That Live/1975-85 box set.  Twelve bucks.  Impulse buy.  I grabbed it, took it to the register, threw in the first disc as soon as I got in the car.  I don't know what I was expecting.  Maybe some comfort food from days gone by.  I was floored.  Not only were the songs as good as I remembered - they were better.  Pushing thirty, I could see a lot of things I'd missed the first time around.  While the twelve-year old me had been hooked by the youthful pangs of "Growin' Up," the heading-towards-middle-age me could identify with the themes of desperation, hope, and love that have permeated so much of Springsteen's work.  Just like that, I was hooked again.  I immediately started repurchasing the back catalog along with copious amounts of bootlegs and anything else I could get my hands on.

Sometime in the midst of all this, Springsteen was said to be coming out with a new album.  His response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Towers - the very Towers he referenced in "Darlington County" way back in the BITUSA days.  Count me in.  I could only hope there would be an accompanying tour.  I'd had my head up my ass back when the E Street Band had done that fabled reunion tour, but now I might have my shot...

To Be Concluded...HERE