My Hometown

Bruce Springsteen (1949–)

That worst depression of my life that I mentioned in the notes for “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, it was finally wiped out by my first exposure to a live Bruce Springsteen show in 1974. He was in the middle of a triple bill, with Ann Murray headlining and Brewer And Shipley bringing up the rear. Antonia and I had been hearing about him for a couple years by that time. We bought his second album, The Wild, The Innocent, And The E Street Shuffle when it came out in late fall of 1973, along with his first album, Greetings From Asbury Park. But we were not expecting a show that would blow us so totally away. Although rock ‘n’ roll, which by then was simply “Rock”, had been getting better and better since 1962, it seemed by the early ‘70s to be getting a little worse. However, around 1970, I became aware that it was no longer possible to get my hands on all the music that was worth exploring: there was simply too much of it to be affordable. My old belief that somehow or other music was going to save the whole world? That was dead as a doornail by the early ‘70s. But when we saw Springsteen I thought, at least music can still save me. I had begun to think that maybe it couldn’t.