BRUUUUUCE Part III
On September 20, 2009 I took my 13 year old son to see his first Rock Concert. I set the bar pretty high by making his first concert Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I am confident he will never see another concert this great, but that is “The Price You Pay” for having a way cool mom. For my son, his first Rock Concert will be the best ever. Nothing will ever compare to it again no matter how long he lives. That is one thing I am sure of. It will be my 27 or 28th Bruce Concert, but I am afraid I lost count and was not smart enough to hold on to all the ticket stubs. But Bruce was not my first Rock Concert.
I was 14 years old when I went to my first concert. I went to see Jethro Tull. It was good. I was a little put off by the smell of marijuana whiffing through the stadium but I got use to it by the end of the night. Eventually, it would become the aroma of my youth along with L’Air Du Temps, and Anais Anais. The only two songs I knew going into the concert were Skating Away and Aqualung.
I was 17 when I first saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I immediately became addicted. It was the River Tour and my friend Melinda had to drive because I still did not have a license. I almost did not get tickets. In my naiveté I thought I was simply going to show up and buy tickets when they went on sale. HAHAHAH. They sold out in 15 minutes and I was shocked and angry. I had no idea I was part of a fanatical cult. It turned out Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had the most neurotically devoted fans known to man kind. I had joined the cult and not even known it. By time I drank the lemonade it was too late. I had been spending hundreds of hours listening to his albums over and over again in the sanctuary of my brother’s bedroom while my big brother went to work after school. I would come home from my routine high school day and gently slide Born to Run down that tiny silver stick on the turn table. I laid back with Princess Leah Head Phones as big black sound barriers covering my ears so I could actually be Mary dancing on that “porch as the radio plays, Roy Orbison singing for the lonely” But in reality I am a dorky looking Jewish Girl who knows Jews do NOT name their daughters Mary. They name them the Jewish version of Mary, Marla. And I could not even manage to get close in the name category or to that front porch. Our neighborhood was filled with apartment buildings and bungalows. Yet, I still yearn for a house with a big front porch. I listened over and over again to that album but also collected his previous work knowing it had to be as wonderful, and I was right.
Perhaps I could be Rosalita, I did manage to get a Spanish name, a name I always resented for making me stick out, just like the crooked teeth, the stringy hair, the big stomach. But inside those headphones, I could go from being Mary to “She’s the One” to Wendy to Rosalita to Sandy on the Fourth of July all in one hour of total bliss before my brother got home from work. Actually, Rosalita was the first song I ever heard by Bruce Springsteen. I was laying out on a green and white plastic lounge chair in the parking lot behind our building. The dark blue lot drew the sun’s heat like a laser beam and I always thought I would get a better tan there than if I positioned the chair on the small plot of grass masquerading as a backyard between the building and the parking lot. Next to me, I had a boom box, bottle of baby oil mixed with iodine, and a pack of Benson and Hedges Menthol with a lighter neatly tucked between the cellophane and the package holding the cigarettes. I would channel surf and day dream and leave that parking lot in the alley to accept my many academy awards, or hang out with Starsky and Hutch or John Travolta. The radio channel was tuned to WXRT, a classic rock station when this song came on and suddenly I was wide awake and feeling a source of energy surge through me. I waited and waited and waited for the song to end praying the DJ would be announcing who was singing this awesome rocking thrilling music. This song seemed longer than the average rock song. My patience paid off. That was Bruce Springsteen and Rosalita.
After becoming sufficiently dark, I went into our apartment and started looking through my brother’s albums. I did not own any albums because I did not own a stereo. My brother who is five years older and started working was able to save and buy all sorts of cool things. I was old enough to work, but for some reason I did not feel the need. He was always more industrious than I was and still is. There were so many albums, Simon and Garfunkle, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and many more I cannot recall, but luckily in the thick pile I found a white album with a scruffy looking guy leaning on a big black dude with a Saxaphone in his hand. I opened it and saw the words. I held the album open while I listened to it playing through the headphones. I read each word as he sang. I was amazed at the stories and words and the pictures they were able to create out of thin air. The music was exhilarating and energizing in a way I had never heard before. When I was done listening to the album I got on my bike and tried to burn off some of excess energy. What “was this new thing I found”? Why did I feel so addicted? I had no idea at the time that I was just one of millions who were becoming part of this “cult”.
Not long after that first exposure, I heard Bruce Springsteen was going to be at the Uptown Theatre. The tickets sold out quicker than you could sing even just one of his songs. I was devastated. Then it was Rosh Shoshana and it was the ONLY time my mother’s brother Birney, the rich one in the family, came to our house for dinner. Somehow I started talking about being upset at not being able to go see Bruce Springsteen and my Uncle Birney got to be a hero, which I am sure he loved. He said in his authoritative voice “where is he playing? I have a good friend at the Country Club, his son owns Jam Productions. Do you know who that is?” I didn’t even know what Jam Productions was! I just wanted concert tickets. “How many tickets do you need” my uncle asked. I needed two, one for me and one for whoever I could find to drive me. The next day my Uncle Birney called me and told me I had two tickets to see Bruce Springsteen. It was going to be a good New Year (remember we are on the Jewish calendar here). Melinda was a little nervous about driving her car into this crazy neighborhood but when we got to the Uptown Theatre there was the longest line of people I had ever seen wrapped around the block. Melinda and I went to the end and waited and got increasingly excited. We were sitting on the main floor. I even had an aisle seat. By the end of the show when he was singing Rosalita the entire main floor had left their seats and stood in front of the stage. I was within inches of my new Idol and he was pouring sweat, and singing his heart out. The concert ended on such a high note, I felt like I was on the top of a mountain.
But what surprised me even more than the energy and the 3 encores was something else. Rosalita lit up the theatre, but that was not the highlight for me. The highlight was when he sang the title song off the River Album. I felt I had discovered the poet of the century. His words were what locked me in what would become for me a life long passion for all things Springsteen. I loved the music and I could feel the music, but I don’t understand how to make music. I am challenged in that way. I am baffled by how music is created.
I was horribly depressed when I learned I did not have any musical talent. As a young child I loved singing for my father. I would entertain the family with my own version of 6 year old Kareoke. I sang and danced to records spinning on a little beige plastic record player my father put on our dining room table. “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “Downtown”, “Que Sera Sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, Que Sera Sera….” My father had a magnificent singing voice. He sang me to sleep each night with Polish Lullabys (at the time, I thought he was making them up) and “How Much is that Doggy in the Window”. I loved his deep voice. On the High Holidays in the Synagogue he would chant along with the Cantor and although I did not understand Hebrew, I would hold on to the strings of his Talis and I felt the melodies running through my finger tips and into my young soul.
When I first started Sunday School, I learned the Synagogue had a choir where the children would sing with a pianist and a Director, who was actually the Rabbi’s wife. But when I tried out, the Director told me I should just “mouth” the words because I couldn’t sing but I could still be part of the choir. I remember feeling ashamed and wondering why anyone would want to stand there just mouthing the words. Then the same thing happened to me in grammar school. We were practicing for an assembly and I remember the teacher walking back and forth tilting her ear down toward each sitting child. Finally, she gazed at me and pointed. “It’s you. I knew someone was off key. Maybe you should just mouth the words.” Again, there was that word “mouth”. Eventually I got the reputation for being a “big” mouth, a “smart” mouth and a “loud” mouth but that was because I took up being funny when I realized I was never going to sing like Petula Clark. Originally I was shy around everyone but my family. The shyness slowly disappeared after my dad died when I was in fourth grade. I did not feel like singing after he passed away, and no one was interested in listening to me sing and dance anymore anyway. With my one fan gone, I looked for other ways to express myself and picked up my number two pencil and a tiny spiral notebook.
I missed my father’s voice. The older I get the more the memories fade, my father holding the back of my bicycle seat and running along side me as I struggled to balance, watching my father paint pictures of mountains in the make shift art studio/basement or his steady hands running masking tape along the walls of our building’s hallways to paint perfectly straight lines along the stairwells, seeing him smile at me while I danced and sang “I Want To Hold Your Hand” as I reached out to grab his paint speckled fingers, listening to him singing in Polish as I drifted off to sleep. But his voice, his accent, his singing all died with him. It was the one thing I could not reproduce in my day dreams or in the dreams that came when I slept. I stopped singing for him and he stopped singing forever. I thought I would never sing again, until I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert.
You see, at a Bruce concert EVERYONE sings! No one notices if I am off key (I still don’t really know or understand what that means) or if I screw up the lyrics cause no one is listening to me. They are all singing with Bruce. I felt alive again as I shouted “Hey you’re alright and that’s alright with me. I even thought Hey, I’m alright and that’s alright with Bruce!!!
So, I will be a writer I thought. I once dreamt of becoming a singer, but that was a foolish dream…now I had other things to contemplate and it was all because of one line from “the River” that haunted me after that first Bruce Springsteen concert….
“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse? “
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