It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive

Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Gillette Stadium, 8/18/12 

Huck and Jim

"Clarence doesn’t leave the E Street Band when he dies. He leaves when we die."


 -- From Bruce Springsteen's eulogy for Clarence Clemons

Songs for the Matthew Comp: The Obligatory Bruce Tracks

Back when I haunted the Cedar like an alcoholic poltergeist (which would be a Jägergeist, right?), I’d make up a birthday mix every year and have them throw it on the CD player while I slowly but pleasantly obliterated every single brain cell I had accumulated in the prior twelve months. The past few years I’ve done that without any musical accompaniment to speak of, but this year will be different. Or the same. Depending on how you look at it. (And don’t expect me to look at it and see less than double a week from now, okay?)

But while gathering up a bunch of songs that mean the year to me, I’ve also been digging up songs that mean me, period: songs that my ghost will dance to when I’m gone, if you will. Or if not dance to, then at least whistle along with. That’s going to be a little more of an ongoing project, something I will be working on as I approach the conclusion of my sixth decade and the beginning of my seventh.

Believe it or not, there’s actually an obvious first choice. It’s a piece of Erich Wolfgang Korngold music, no more than two minutes in length, from the score of Captain Blood. What makes it the first choice is that it is the one piece of music I find myself whistling when I’m not thinking. You’ve probably all heard me whistle it at some point and wondered, “What the hell is that he’s trying to whistle? Does it have a tune? Or is he just making it up?” What makes it the second post is that the damn Captain Blood CD is in storage somewhere, along with the damn Captain Blood DVD, so the world is going to have to wait until I get corporate funding for the archaeological expedition that is digging through my stuff in storage before it sees the light of day.

This post is about the second and third songs, the two pieces of music I sing to myself more often than anything else. (Yes, even more than Marshall Crenshaw’s “Cynical Girl.” I know, I know -- hard to believe, huh?) The songs are "Point Blank", which I heard for the first time on September 25, 1978, during the Darkness Tour; and "Racing In The Street." Of the two of them, "Point Blank" is the killer. Hearing it for the first time was like getting, well, shot right through the heart. It still gives me chills. And as for "Racing in the Street?" Here’s how memory plays tricks on you. The River tour show I saw in Boston was on December 16, 1980. I know this because three of the clearest memories I have of this night are (a) seeing the band wearing black armbands because John Lennon had been shot the week before, (b) worrying, really worrying that some nut with a gun -- well, we didn’t want to put it into words, but the worry was there -- and (c) Bruce throwing himself into the crowd during "Spirit In The Night," which literally picked up all those worries and threw them away. And of the two Boston shows he did in December 1980, he only did Spirit in the Night on the 16th, not the 15th, according to this database. But that conflicts with one of my other clear memories of the night: the fact that they did "Racing In The Street" followed by "The River," one right after the other. Which they did on the 15th, but not the 16th. Proving that memory, like so many human activities, always aspires to the condition of art.

(My other big memories of that 1980 show? Hearing "Point Blank" again. And the very end of 'Wreck On The Highway," where Bruce just stands on stage looking at a spotlight as the song plays out, like a bystander staring down at a wrecked car with a hard, unreadable look on his face.)

Luckily, there’s a real world relic of that fake memory of mine, from a show the band did earlier on the same tour in Tempe, Arizona. As well as a great version of "Point Blank," one in which the piano introduction alone breaks your heart. So let these be the first cuts on the Matthew Comp.

Racing to the River

Point Blank

Play them and think of me.

Down, down, down, down . . .

The great thing about working in the basement?

If I want to jump out of a window, I have to use a trampoline.

The Badlands Story

“No -- one more, one more!” cries Donna, and Tom says, “Yeah, we got time for one more, your train doesn’t leave till ten, right? We’ll get you there by ten. One more song.” And he puts on Badlands, and the three of us spend the next four minutes and one second dancing with each other and screaming the words to the chorus like sinners crying for redemption at a camp meeting.

It’s October 1981 and I am heading down to Washington DC to see (and be part of) an evening of one-act plays I’ve written entitled A Night To Dismember. I’ve checked my luggage at South Station, booked a berth on the sleeper train, and have spent the night partying with my friend Tom Muscarella and his roommate Donna Paradise in their Norwood Ave apartment in Newton. Did we drink like fishes? Oh yeah. Did we go out to dinner? Can’t remember. Did we listen to anything else but Springsteen? Tom might remember but I can’t. All I remember is looking at my watch at about 9:45 and saying, “I think we should get going,” and Donna saying “No –- one more! One more!” And you don’t argue with Donna when she gets into Party Girl Mode. (I’m trying to remember what party it was where I made a dance tape and Donna kept saying after each song ended “Don’t let us down, Matty -- don’t let us down now.” And I was like, oh crap, please don’t let me disappoint this woman and play something she doesn’t want to dance to. Was it your 40th, Tom?)

So now it’s 9:49:01, and Tom says “Okay, let’s go,” and we run downstairs and pile into the Green Shark. Donna calls shotgun and I sit in the back, and I am immediately thrown from one side of the seat to the other as Tom roars around the corner and motors towards the Mass Pike entrance, and it’s 9:51 now and I’m getting a little nervous because Newton is about 15 minutes from South Station via the Mass Pike even when there’s no traffic at all, but Tom is on the case, Tom is gonna get me there on time, Tom is about to defy the laws of physics by breaking every traffic law on the books in eight minutes and thirty seconds.

The radio is cranked to 10 and Donna is singing along to whatever is playing on WBCN and Tom is checking off a mental list of road rules to break. Speed limit? Fuck that –- he drives like he’s doing a time trial for the Indy 500. Traffic signals? It is to laugh –- when the light’s yellow, he speeds up to cross the intersection; when it’s red, he looks both ways before stepping on the gas. I am laughing that wonderful, life-affirming “We’re all gonna die!” laugh that you only get to experience maybe once or twice in your life and live as Tom weaves in and out of traffic on the Pike and zooms towards Boston. Does he even slow down as he hits the toll booths? Hell no –- he just drives right through them, and he’s going so fast that the “Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!” sound you hear when you don’t throw a quarter into the toll takes five seconds to catch up with us, which means that our ground speed is only about ten miles per hour away from breaking the sound barrier.

There’s a stoplight at the end of the Pike where it spills into the lower end of the Combat Zone; Tom runs right through it like it’s tissue paper. I don’t think his foot has touched the brake pedal once in the last eight minutes. Does he head down a one-way street in the opposite direction? If he doesn’t, it’s not for lack of trying. But what he does do is drive the car right up onto the curb in front of the entrance to South Station, and when I say “up on the curb,” I mean he was so close to the door that, if it opened out instead of in, I wouldn’t have been able to squeeze through. “Thanks!” I cry as I dive out of the car and sprint for the door. “Have a great time!” he and Donna yell as I run into the station. I check the board as I head for the luggage check area. My train has NOW BOARDING next to its name and number. I give my ticket to the guy at the check station, grab my suitcase from him, and run to the door of the last car, the sleeper car. Literally five seconds after I put my foot on the top step, the train pulls out and starts heading south.

And the punch line? After breaking every driving rule in the book to get me to my train, Tom obeys every single one of those rules as he drives back to Newton. He slows for yellow lights, he makes sure he’s 5 MPH under the speed limit at all times, he comes to a full stop at STOP signs. And he is one block from his apartment –- one block! –- when a cop pulls him over and gives him a ticket for driving with his headlights off.

Weekend Update: Springsteen Special

8/2/08, 3:15 AM. After seeing Tandy’s sets at the Rodeo Bar, I pick up my luggage and get on the Night Owl in Penn Station. I get about 4 hours total of train sleep in three separate batches: 90 minutes till New Haven, 90 minutes till the guy snoring in the seat ahead of me wakes up everyone in the car, and 60 minutes between Providence and Boston.

12 noon. After training to Greenbush where my sister Monica picks me up, I’m on the beach watching the tide come up to the sea wall. This year the beach has totally disappeared; high tide lasts for something like six hours.

2:30. After a pass-out nap, Mon and I head to my cousin Joe’s place in Marlboro. Joe and his wife Holly are coming to show with us; the four of us are sitting on the floor in section B2.

4PM. Tailgating at Gillette Stadium with Joe, Holly, their neighbor Ken, and three of Ken’s friends whose names I have caddishly forgotten. We spend half the time eating and the other half propping up the crippled tent we’ve erected in the parking lot. The center supporting struts are all broken, and the ribs are all bent or cracked. It sits there on the tarmac like a dog with three broken legs, and about once every ten minutes, one of the struts pops loose and swings down like a pendulum, narrowly missing a different person each time.

5:30. Three cops on bicycles roll up to the four kids getting ready to grill hot dogs and drink Buds three cars away from us and ask to see ID’s. The guy who owns the car hands his over; evidently he’s 21, but the two girls are 15/16 and the other guy looks like he’s 12, so the cops take all the beer away. And I mean all of it, which means the kid may not be as old as his ID says he is, because when you’re 21 you know enough to (a) always hide a six somewhere just in case and (b) have a couple of empty Pepsi cans for the underagers, who can fill them up in the back seat when no one’s looking.

6:30. Because I’m a neurotic old fart who hates to be late, I make everyone start packing up so we can be in the stadium for the ticketed 7:30 start time.

6:50. While walking out of the parking lot, we pass the tent where the police are tailgating with their wives and girlfriends (yes, all the police are all male). I notice the three cops who took the Buds from the kids near us, and wonder if those beers are what everybody is drinking right now. Silly question; of course they are. This is Massachusetts, after all –- the place where the juvenile delinquent who used to kick your ass in high school grows up to be the State Trooper who gives you a speeding ticket on Route 3.

7:10. When I talk to my friend Bill on Sunday about the concert, he asks what the ticket situation was like. “We saw no one looking for tickets,” I reply. Unlike New York, where you can take a bus to the Meadowlands and hang around to see if anyone has a ticket to sell, Foxboro is one long-ass car drive from civilization as we know it. A bitch to get to, and a bitch with attitude to get out of, Foxboro is the venue equivalent of a dentist’s office – you never go there unless you have to, and you sure as hell don’t go there and hang out in the waiting room hoping for an appointment to open up.

7:15. Having said that? The stadium owners are turning the place into a little city, with a cinema, boutiques, restaurants, and a projected hotel. They know it’s at the ass end of nowhere, so they’re going to make sure that ass is wearing nothing but the finest Victoria’s Secret panties.

7:20. I get patted down at the front gate. There’s a “No Camera” provision printed on the ticket; the guy searching me taps my binoculars and my wallet and asks what they are, but when he taps my camera case he says nothing. Score! (Little I do know; see below.)

7:30. At the souvenir stands, the event T-shirt is only available in XX size, which is big enough to be a nightgown for Shaquille O’Neal.

7:45. The stadium is empty. Where is everyone? Traffic jam? (Quite possible.) Threat of rain keeping everyone away? (Also possible.) General e-mail to everyone but us that the show is really starting at 8:30? (Better than even bet.) But looking at the sky? Oh yeah--people are totally afraid it's going to rain.


8:20. As I’m one person away from getting a T-shirt, and bemoaning the fact that I’m not 11 feet tall, and therefore cannot wear the XX event T, I hear what sounds like fireworks. Is the show starting with a video? Now that would be unique in the annals of E Street. But it’s not fireworks. It’s thunder, and lightning, and in less than a minute, the skies that have been threatening since 5 PM open up over Gillette Stadium and dump an ocean of golfball-sized raindrops on our heads, like God just defrosted His refrigerator and decided to dump the melted ice onto Foxboro. Ninety seconds later I’m in my poncho; ninety-five seconds later every exposed piece of clothing on my body has become leisure wear for Aquaman. Including my running shoes, which will still smell like ass on Monday morning before I go to work. I tell Joseph “They are so opening up with Who’ll Stop The Rain tonight,” and the words are barely out of my mouth before the floor Nazis are shooing us off the metal flooring on the field and into the stands so that, when lightning strikes, we all won’t fry like an extra in The Green Room. Ten minutes later we’re allowed back to our seats. Fifteen minutes later, it’s like someone dumped a plastic bag of people into the stands—the place is jam-packed.

8:45. Roadies come out and take the tarp off Max’s drum set. Everybody cheers and leaps to their feet. We do the same thing when they take the tarp off the keyboards and then the piano.

9:00. The HDTV screen turns on. It won’t be long now. Sure enough, two minutes later, the lights go down and carnival music starts playing. Then the band hits the stage and jumps right into Summertime Blues, followed by 10th Avenue Freezeout. It’s a great opening, and my inner party-boy is kvelling, but my inner photographer is pissed and cranky. Because we’re on the floor, every time there’s a light change to illuminate the crowd, it shines right in my face and screws up my camera settings. It takes me about three songs to kick my inner Weegee to the curb and enjoy myself.


9:45. First part: Summertime Blues, 10th Ave Freezeout, Radio Nowhere, Lonesome Day, Promised Land, Spirit in the Night, Tunnel of Love. (The Springsteen website says he did Light of Day after this, but don’t believe them; he didn’t.) After Tunnel of Love, Bruce walks up to the lip of the stage and takes request signs from the fans in the mosh pit. “Here’s one that’ll stump the band,” he said, holding up a sign that reads “Little Latin Lupe Lu.” Then he turns it over. “It’d stump me too except for this,” he says, and there on the back of the sign are the complete lyrics to the song and KEY OF F in big letters at the top. He does this, Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street, and Hungry Heart. After which he does Who’ll Stop The Rain. “You called it,” says my cousin.


11:00. Next section: Youngstown, Murder Incorporated, She’s The One, Living In The Future, Mary’s Place, The Rising, Last To Die, Long Walk Home, and Badlands. Little Steven takes a verse and chorus at the end of Long Walk Home and hearing his voice is like bumping into a long-lost friend. Oh man, I sure hope he gets a band together and tours on his own now that Sopranos is over. And as for Badlands, I can never hear that song without thinking of the Norwood Ave night when Tom and Donna and I danced and screamed to it before T&D drove me to South Station literally thirty seconds before my sleeper train left for DC. (A story for later.)


11:15. Bruce takes the next batch of requests for the encore: “the seldom-requested and even more seldom-performed” I’m Going Down and Jungleland. Then the stadium lights come up full and I get the only decent pix of the night when the band does Born To Run, Glory Days, Dancing In The Dark, American Land, and the final “I’m going to leave you with a New Jersey fairy tale,” Rosalita. After which Bruce yells out “Good night Boston -- or wherever the fuck we are!” He’s like me –- no matter where I am in Massachusetts, it’s always Boston.

12:20 AM. We head back to the parking lot, and instead of getting into a non-moving line of cars trying to get onto the highway while their engines idle for 90 minutes, we go green with the whole thing and fire up the grille for steak tips, hot dogs, and marinated turkey. But it’s cold (relatively speaking) – it’s 65 and I am totally not dressed for anything under 80. So I’m shivering. Plus I’m having those hallucinogenic fadeaway moments you get when you’re overtired. I guess four hours of train sleep is no longer enough to keep me awake for more than 18 hours. Thankfully, the chilly air plays Omar Sharif to my Lawrence of Arabia ass, whacking me awake every couple of minutes with the cautionary words “You were drifting.”

(Not me, but it sure could have been.)

1:30 AM. Parking lot traffic finally begins to move. We pack up and head back to Joe and Holly’s, where Monica and I bid them good night and drive back to the beach. More drifting from Matthew, during which I have a number of visions, fever dreams, and brilliant insights into the nature of the universe, none of which I can remember when I jerk back to wakefulness. We get back to the cottage around 3:15. Less than two minutes later I’m fast sleep.

POSTSCRIPT: SUNDAY. I wake up five hours later (as I usually do whenever I drink), and hit the beach about 9:15. It’s cloudy and overcast; there’s a couple with a golden retriever near where I usually sit, but nobody else for miles. Every time I get up to go into the water, the dog follows me there and back the way Security follows a suspected shoplifter. I read a couple of chapters of Colin Wilson’s Mysteries, ponder the nature of my various selves (participant, observer, photographer, writer, self-sabotager, resentful child, out-of-sight out-of-mind asshole, brilliant but unrecognized genius, eternal 19-year-old) and doze a little. The sun comes out about fifteen minutes before I leave to get lunch and check train times for the return to New York. Which is when God laughs and says “What train times, boy?” They’re all sold out, except for a first-class seat on the 3:10 Acela ($250) and a coach seat on the Night Owl ($89) which gets me into NYC at 2 AM. Or I can take the bus. The pluses: the bus leaves every half hour and it’s cheap. The minuses: it’s the fucking bus, which means cramped seats, a shitty movie, and people talking on their cellphones the entire ride. I book a ticket on the Night Owl, and wonder if it’s the gas crisis or the Springsteen concert that has everybody in the world heading back to New York today. Because I have always believed that art trumps real life, I vote for Springsteen.

Bru-u-u-u-u-u-u-uce!!

Details to follow . . .

Once upon a time in Boston Garden

It was before I moved to New York, so it had to have been either '80 or '81. (If it was '80, then it was December '80, a week after John Lennon was shot, and everybody onstage would have been wearing black armbands.) My friend Tom had an extra ticket to see Springsteen and we were on the Garden floor about two thirds of the way back, and Danny Federici starts playing the introduction to "Thunder Road" and it sounds like. . . is that really? . . . no . . . yes, yes, son of a bitch, he's playing Ennio Morricone, he's playing "Jill's Theme" from Once Upon A Time In The West! What a great fucking intro to "Thunder Road!" I'm picturing the carriage rolling onscreen that's taking Claudia Cardinale to Sweetwater, and the camera pulling back to reveal Monument Valley in all its glory, and it's the most perfect Sam Shepard moment ever because suddenly there's a vista to "Thunder Road" that I'd never seen before, and now I'm never going to be able to hear that song without picturing it taking place on a dirt road shack with John Ford buttes and mesas in the background, and I'm jumping up and down inside and I look around to see if anybody else is looking around and grinning like me, looking around the way you do when you recognize something and you want to share it with somebody else. And nobody was. Not even Tom, who was staring at the stage, enraptured. Nobody else seemed to recognize it at all. Or at least have my reaction to it. So 28 years on now, part of me thinks I imagined it. But real or imagined, of all the vivid concert memories I have, that one is the clearest.

Rest in peace, Danny.

He Vas My Badlands Boyfriend

You know what makes this city great? Friends. Just like the people you work with are the ones who make your job bearable, the people you walk beside as you maneuver your way through the 50-page Greek Diner Menu of opportunity that is New York are the ones who make living here special.

Two of them made me feel like (y'know) a New Yorker Tuesday. And I don't care how long you've lived here; most of the time you feel like there's so much going on that you'll never be able to grab it all, never mind one or two pieces of it. But then there are those moments when you get to do something that makes you say to yourself, "Now that was a New York thing to do," and you feel connected like you never did before to the heart of this city.

That was Tuesday afternoon and evening for me. My friend Rob had an extra ticket to the invitation-only dress rehearsal of Young Frankenstein; and my friend Bill knew someone with an extra ticket to the Springsteen concert at Continental Arena. Thanks to them, my dreams last night were a wild mash-up of Puttin' On The Ritz and Candy's Room.

Thanks, guys. You rock and/or roll.

Bruce does a Bruce album

Pull quote. A man rides the roads looking for a lost connection, but the only thing he can connect to are his old albums.

Soundtrack to a story. Haunted by the death of a close friend, a man is desperate to feel something, anything, but the old connections are either dead and gone or just gone. He turns to a woman he met in Lucky Town, confident that she'll come his way, and sure in the knowledge that all the bad times that froze them out on Tenth Avenue haven't happened yet. But he knows this woman well--she's her own worst enemy. And thinking about enemies makes him remember his lost friend, and a conversation about right and wrong. It also makes him think of his lost youth, which is everywhere he looks as he watches the lovers walk by, and all the girls in their summer clothes, none of whom stop for him now, because they can see he's been hurt, they can see he envisions his salvation in their eyes, in their company. But they pass him by. So he turns to the current woman in his life and recommits to her, promising to work at her love, even though his vision of faith is like a long staggering walk through the stations of a secular cross. He thinks back to the carnival, to that night in the tunnel of love, the night they saw the sideshow magic performance, but not even sleight of hand can change his life, all it can do is tell him what his future will be as a predestined end. And what is that end but a long drive with his wife beside him and his kids in the backseat, listening to a radio that brings him news of a war that is like his marriage, and a marriage that is like a war that has all been a mistake. He tries to figure out what went wrong, but he's been turned out of his house and can only wander through his home town, remembering the words of his father, words that echo the magician's prediction that "this is what will be" by reminding him that a courthouse flag represents things that are set in stone, things that will never change, defining who we are, and what we can and cannot do. And he thinks back to the carnival again, only now it's mingled with thoughts of the war, with visions of dead soldiers and sunlight on graves, with faith and the woman in his life, and he's back where he started, crying out to feel the beat of a heart. And then silence, and finally, at the end of that silence, he says goodbye to his dead old friend in an empty room in Nebraska.

Is there anybody alive out there?

This is what I'll be listening to all day today: