Tunnel of Love

More words for your enjoyment repurposed from Rate Your Music. This time, I reminisce about a couple of concerts I attended almost 20 years ago. Enjoy!

Bruce Springsteen
May 16 & 19, 1988, at Madison Square Garden.

These two shows are without a doubt the most radically different, from a purely experiential perspective, that I've ever attended. But first, a digression...

Even though I was raised in Jersey, I had somehow managed to completely miss out on the vast majority of Bruce's catalog up until the year 1984. Back then, it was impossible to be a school-age teen in the Garden State and not know who The Boss was--if your peers weren't listening to him, chances were good that he'd be featured in the local media at some point. I remember our local rag covering the opening of the Continental Airlines Arena, which was a pretty big deal at the time. Bruce, of course, was the first artist to perform there (he was supporting The River at the time).

My ignorance of all things Bruce ended one summer when I accompanied my family to a company picnic. It was a pretty large affair (or perhaps I'm remembering it as such) in a field in New Brunswick. All of the teens who attended were given their choice of a free cassette: Thriller, Born in the U.S.A. and some other Columbia artist. I hadn't yet (grudgingly) accepted MJ's musical genius, so I went with the Boss. It didn't take me long to get drawn in to the music, and I soon became a convert. Later, I would actually start paying attention to what Bruce was singing, and my interest in him as an artist would grow exponentially.

So, of course, I subsequently miss what is probably one of the most storied concert tours of the 80s (at least from a Jersey standpoint), when Bruce played stadiums for the next year (two years?). Born in the U.S.A. tour t-shirts were ubiquitous at my high school. For some reason, I didn't go. Maybe I wasn't a full-blown fan at that point, maybe I couldn't get tickets, maybe I just decided it wasn't something I needed to see. Obviously, this was a mistake that I would have to rectify at my earliest opportunity.

That opportunity didn't arrive until I was at college. Bruce was supporting his Tunnel of Love album, and was scheduled for a stand at Madison Square Garden. Now, this was a time before some of you whipper-snappers might remember, where if you wanted to buy a ticket you had to pick up a telephone or perhaps even present yourself at a physical location that specialized in the sale of tickets! None of this clickety-clickety-purchase nonsense! So there I was, the morning tickets went on sale, dialing and dialing and dialing (back in the Dark Ages, there was also no such thing as automatic redialing; if you wanted to retry the number, you pressed every single one of the digits again) and getting nothing but a busy tone. By the time I finally got through (if I even did) the entire run had sold out.

Well, I thought to myself, fuck that; there was no way that I wasn't getting a ticket. Luckily, there were alternate means of procuring them: I simply located a copy of the local phone book and found the number of a "ticket reseller." And procure I did, to the tune of around $100. To put that number into perspective, the face price of the ticket was $22.50, so I paid more than four times what the ticket was worth.

Now, you'll recall that this was in the dark ages before the Internet, so the only way you could tell where you'd be sitting was to look at a seating chart in the same phone books that you used to buy your illegally marked-up tickets (coincidence?) and approximate. Unless you were really familiar with the venue, you'd not be able to match your row number to your actual position.

I think you may be able to guess where this is headed: the seat was terrible. Literally at the very side of the stage and all the way up, positioned precisely so the majority of the speakers were facing elsewhere. Most of the show I got to see the side of Bruce's head as he addressed the audience in front of him. But for the most part, it didn't matter. I was thrilled to be there, even if I didn't have the level of familiarity with his work that I would in later years and wasn't able to readily identify what was being played.

I find out soon after that I was not the only Springsteen fan at my college. Turns out, the girlfriend of one of my buddies was an absolute Boss freak and when she found out when tickets when on sale she got on line, got a wristband and was one of the first ten people to get tickets. Good for her, right? No, good for me, 'cuz they had an extra ticket that they'd be willing to sell. My first question, thinking about how much I'd just blown on my other ticket, was "How much?" Ticket price, I was informed. And where were the seats? Eighth row.

I think you can guess what my answer was. Needless to say, it was one hell of a more enjoyable concert than my first experience. Musically, I believe it wasn't all too different than the one I'd seen a few days prior, but it sure as hell sounded better, and it was nice to be able to see the faces of the people performing the music. In fact, I'm relatively sure that Nils Lofgren pointed at me and asked (by way of pointing at his instrument and then at this ear) if his guitar was sufficiently audible.

I told him to turn it up.