Caryn Rose's jukeboxgraduate.com

Tonight’s Gaslight Anthem show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg was, at least in my mind, going to be an album preview, a taste of the new music to come. Alas, this was not to be. After the opening half dozen oldies but goodies, I was ready for the band to dive into the new material. Instead, we only got two new songs, the single ’45′ and “Biloxi Parish,’ which had already made its way into the intertubes by virtue of having been performed live once in Australia. I kept waiting… and waiting… and waiting… before it became obvious that this was going to be just a TGA small club show. That threw things off a bit for me emotionally, the anticipation of “Okay, will the NEXT song be a new one?” having to be replaced with “okay so I’m just going to jump around to everything I already know.” Which is not bad, by any means, just not what anyone thought it was going to be.

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This is obnoxious and obscene and don’t let your kids listen to it. Or if you’re a kid listening to it, just don’t tell your parents.

This was their first single. I heard it on WNYU, which is where I first heard of the Beastie Boys. I may or may not have seen them play as a hardcore band, back in the 80s I once tried to figure it out but never could. I do know that I took my life into my hands going out to the Capitol Theater in Passaic to see them, back when they had the go-go dancers in the cages, and scalped tickets in front of the Garden when they opened for Madonna on the Like A Virgin tour. (Really, I wanted to see Madonna, but the Beasties just made it more interesting.)

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I am not shy at saying that the experience of seeing Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey is highly overrated; that New Jersey crowds (outside of Asbury Park) are horrible; that you would be better off at seeing him in Boston or Philly or at Madison Square Garden. Tonight, the audience at the Prudential Center in Newark proved all of that wrong by being the best audience I have ever been part of in New Jersey and probably the best this tour so far. I turned around during “Rosalita” and saw leaping, jumping, dancing people in every single row, all the way up to the ceiling. They sang along — in harmony! — to the Levon Helm tribute “The Weight.” Signs were for things like “Acoustic Open All Night” or “Ain’t Good Enough For You.”

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I wrote this piece back in 1999, during the Reunion tour, when I found myself having too many discussions with music fans in their 20s who just refused to tolerate the very idea of Bruce Springsteen. It has been revised and updated.

I am often asked by music fans where they should start if they wanted to acquaint themselves with Bruce Springsteen’s catalog. This is not an easy question to answer. If your entree into Springsteen was your parents’ copy of Nebraska, I will tell you to go to the very beginning, because you won’t be surprised by the quieter, acoustic numbers (but you may feel alienated by the copious amounts of words and rhymes used). If you know Born To Run, get Darkness and then the Live box set, If you came in on The Rising, start at the beginning because you need to know the whole story.

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I cut this exact ad out of the New York Times one Sunday, and hung it on my bedroom wall. I couldn’t go into the city to see it, but went down to Ridgeway Cinemas one Saturday afternoon to see it, all on my own. When it was done — before it was done, even — I had gone out to the pay phone to call home and ask if I could stay to see it again. It wasn’t because I thought it was amazing (although I certainly did think that), it was because it was so enormous, so mind-blowing, so more-than-I-ever-thought to my 14 year old brain that I couldn’t possibly take it all in at once, so I stopped trying and told myself, “Don’t worry, it’s a movie, you can just see it again.”

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When I was old enough to remember listening to and caring about music, we lived in the middle of nowhere, a town in Michigan so small that when I visited it for the first time in 25 years, my first question to my mother was, “Where did you shop? Where did you buy clothes?” But there was a local FM station and at night I could twist the gold dial of the radio my mother gave me and could pick up Chicago radio, WLS, and Detroit radio sometimes, in the summer when the sky was clear. I would ride my bike to the discount store that had a tiny music department, sheet music and some albums and cheap acoustic guitars. I would pick up the goldenrod-colored fliers that had the Billboard Hot 100 and mark the songs carefully, the ones I knew vs. the ones I hadn’t heard vs. the ones I wanted to own. I would make a purchase of one or two 45′s and reverently flip through the albums. The only albums I owned were K-tel compilations, it wasn’t until my 8th birthday until I had enough cash of my own to buy an actual LP (School’s Out and We’re An American Band, for the record. There were also some David Cassidy purchases, later).

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After Friday night’s bulldozer of an intro, Bruce clearly decided he liked it enough to try it again tonight, but this time, with mixed results. Things were a little odd, a little off balance, a little not quite all together for this second MSG show. “Badlands” didn’t have the same punch, but “We Take Care of Our Own” and “Wrecking Ball” (which has grown on me) felt solid as ever. I didn’t think we needed to go the “Out In The Street” route again, given that the people behind the stage weren’t the ones sitting on their hands tonight, but sure enough, we went there.

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Madison Square Garden is still one of the grand rooms of rock and roll. Magic can still happen there. You expect magic when the E Street Band is in the house on a Friday night, and things certainly began with a take-no-prisoners opening: “New York, New York” on the PA, and instead of the band taking the stage in darkness and Bruce coming to the mic for his “Star Time” intro, the band walked on with the house lights full up and slammed straight into the most balls-to-the-wall version of “Badlands” within recent memory. Immediately, the entire Garden was on their feet, screaming every single word, everyone, in the cheap seats and the luxury boxes, leaning over the balconies.

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There you are, having survived a party trick duet on “Sunny Day” and a brisk but standard “Promised Land,” and then the stage goes dark and maybe Bruce said something, maybe he didn’t, but all of a sudden there are those piano notes and the crowd roars in recognition and then immediately goes silent. Suddenly it is as though there is no one else in the room, there is no one else between you and that stage. It is a moment, somehow Bruce can turn this behemoth on a dime and create the space in which to unfold “Racing In The Street.” All of it is grand, and majestic, and despite standing absolutely still the entire time my heart is racing and I am just trying not to breathe too hard so I don’t miss something.

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Once you’ve been to a Springsteen show in Philadelphia, it will be hard for you to not be at a Springsteen show in Philadelphia. More than Jersey, more than New York, the audiences here are a combination of diehards that make the place vibrate and elevate the performance. Bruce always responds to this with high energy and inspired setlist choices.

Night two in Philly especially has a lot to live up to, especially after what was by all accounts (and according to the various live streams) a barnburner of a show night one. Night two started off promising, with “Night” taking the #3 slot after “We Take Care of Our Own” and “Wrecking Ball,” which remains a fantastic one-two punch, and was only enhanced by “Night.” There was an instant shout of recognition at the opening notes. This was a crowd that was on their feet the whole time, all the way up to the last row, all the way up to the luxury boxes.

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