Bruce Juice 1
Originally, when I conceived of this blog, I thought it would be equal parts arts, local politics and my occasioally twisted take on the nature of life in general. Looking back over my blog entries since August, I see I'm skewering a lot more towards the political than the artistic.
That's probably due in large part to this being an election year - even though that won't technically happen until next year, but it feels like an election year already. So politics is in the air on the national level and we're also getting a nice dose of it at the state and local levels as well. A lot of people seem to turn up their noses at politics as being one of those lower order activities that only the power hungry and the debased among us find interesting. To me, politics is what makes the world go around. Finding compromise, even with people you don't like personally or whose positions you find noxious is the essence of how we get along in civil society.
All of which is a long-winded way of getting to my main topic of today — the iminent arrival of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Albany, N.Y. this coming Nov. 15. One month away to the day!
Almost five weeks ago, on the day of the running of the Maple Leaf Half Marathon, tickets went on sale for this event. But I was running in the race and wasn't going to be able to order tickets online when the balloon went up at 10 o'clock that morning. What to do?
I should tell you that I nearly did a major number on myself running on that insufferably hot day, but that's another story. Thanks to the Manchester Rescue Squad, Lynn Greiger and Jay Hathaway, I made it home alive.
The lightbulb went on and I got one of my college-age daughters to log onto to Ticketmaster and wait patiently in front of her laptop screen for nearly an hour, as it turned out, before she could nail down two tickets. I had been so eager to get the tickets — the occasion of which was an anniversary celebration for my wife and me — I had even given her my credit card number.
There are so many interesting aspects to all of this. Just getting concert tickets, for one. There's been a lot of press lately about how secondary buyers and resellers of concert tix jump in and grab the tickets, and have figured out ways around the system, and then they go off and re-sell these at vastly higher prices. Ordinary fans get ripped off. Then there are pre-sell passwords, supposedly the province of fan clubs, that get bought and tickets purchased, and then re-sold again at what the market apparently will bear. Is that free enterprise? Maybe. I've never understood why ticket scalping is a crime. It's annoying, but if you don't want to pay $300 to see Madonna, the Rolling Stones or the Boston Red Sox, you don't have to (why would anyone pay $3 to see the Red Sox?). The world has changed since my concert-going days of the 1970s, when you mailed in the check with your order form and hoped for the best.
I've never seen Bruce before. At this point, I've seen just about everyone from the halcyon days of yesteryear I deemed important. I never saw Eric Clapton in any of his bands — please tell me Cream is going to be staging a reunion tour— but that's about it. Oh yeah, I also need to see John Fogerty. I picked off Simon and Garfunkle last year, Fleetwood Mac the year before that. Crosby, Stills and Nash and the Doobie Brothers fell during the mid-90s. Sometimes I wish I could see concerts in split-screen - once when they/we were young, and what they're like now. I wonder which would be better. The Who, for sure must have been more interesting back in the 70s. CSN shocked me. Those dudes look OLD. But Simon and Garfunkle were GREAT. I can't believe that musically speaking, they were any better way back when. But it wasn't just about the music in 1968-72.
Speaking of Clapton, have you seen his autobiography? It sounds pretty interesting. I've just read some excerpts in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Brings back some memories. How is he even still alive?
So anyway, i'm terribly excited about seeing Bruce. I've bought his new album, I mean CD, and have heard a few of the tracks. Again, back in the old days, I would have listened to it a dozen times already. Somehow, when the work day is over and free time beckons, I'm not in the mood.
So this has gone on long enough. I'll be giving out my critique of the music and then the concert as we go along. After all, Bruce and poitics mix well.