A Baptism in Springsteen's Church of Rock & Roll

I'D HEARD ABOUT EVENTS LIKE THIS, the fanaticism, the ecstasy, the rapture and delirium brought on by four hours of pure joy. Yet I still wasn't ready for what I witnessed that night.

Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, live on stage at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey. He was midway through a 10-night stand somewhere in the swamps of Jersey, in the middle of the epic Born in the USA Tour, at the peak of his career.

The official tour program.

And then, right in front of everybody, the biggest star in rock and roll -- still a bachelor at age 34 -- danced with his mother.

Just like that.

It was August 12, 1984 and I was seeing Springsteen live for the very first time. Me, Richie, Wayne and Big Ed had driven across New York City from Long Island to the arena New Jersey's favorite son christened with a concert on its opening night just three years before.

Big Ed remembers: Rich Fields was also a big Springsteen fan. He and I became close one winter when he missed a semester at school recovering from a tumor. Born in the USA was out and a huge success on radio and this new thing called MTV. I had just gotten home from a Mets game, crawled into bed, and then my phone rang at around midnight.

It was Rich, with the news that Springsteen tickets were going on sale in the morning. He suggested I pick him up and we go camp out in front of the ticket store. This was before Ticketmaster and the Internet. We got there, and there were only 25 to 30 people in front of us. I thought that was great, but the process was also excruciatingly slow. I could write a whole article about just the ticket experience. We bonded with lot of people, I even went on a lunch date with a hot blonde from North Woodmere with a Datsun 280ZX, whom I never saw again. Finally around 4 p.m., Rich and I had the tickets.

Eddie and Rich slept outside our local Ticketron outlet. There, for $16 a piece they nabbed four seats in the front row of section 211, the upper level near what would be center ice.

Four hours of jubilation for $16.

The stage was to our left. Though we had seats, I don't recall sitting very much. I do recall the entire tier bouncing to the beat, not just the people, mind you, but the stands themselves.

The dance song was, of course, Dancing in the Dark, a smash hit by a guy who wasn't about dance songs. But this was a new Bruce -- Megastar Bruce, MTV star Bruce -- and he could get away with doing pretty much whatever the hell he damned wanted to do.

"That's my mom!" he shouted.

Big Ed: It was more than a decade before Friends premiered on TV, but half the male Springsteen fans were already in love with Courteney Cox, Bruce's dance partner in the DitD video. Well, I was expecting there to be some hot chick that would come up on stage and dance with Bruce. Instead he pulled his mother Adele on stage for that song.

In June Springsteen released Born in the USA, his seventh LP. Though the name evoked his breakthrough album Born to Run, issued nine years earlier, this was no sequel. The nation had changed and so had The Boss.

The Interval

Between those recordings, Springsteen had an all-out legal war with his original manager that kept him out of the studio and on the road for more than a year. He'd written a surfeit of songs out of which emerged Darkness on the Edge of Town, a searing blue collar crie-de-coeur.

This was a bitter album for post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America, a time of double-digit inflation, gasoline shortages and the national malaise President Jimmy Carter later labeled "a crisis of confidence."

Two years later, Bruce and the E Street Band released The River, a two-disc mix of rock-and-roll rowdiness and melancholy story songs about accidental pregnancy, metaphorical adultery and despair. Among those 20 tracks was a song about a man who'd walked out on his wife and kids, set to a party beat.

Clocking in at a radio-friendly 3:19, the song -- Hungry Heart -- spent 18 weeks on Billboard Hot 100. Topping out at number five, it was Springsteen's first bona fide radio hit. The River LP went to number one on the Billboard 200. [Ridiculously, improbably, 14-year-old me had been offered a ticket to a River tour concert and turned it down, a mistake I'd not make again.]

The original vinyl release.

Most artists would have looked at that hard won success and ordered up more of the same. Bruce Springsteen isn't most artists. What carried over into the next album wasn't the hootenanny of Hungry Heart, Sherry Darling or Cadillac Ranch, but the loneliness of Stolen Car, Drive All Night and the album closer, Wreck on the Highway.

Titled Nebraska, Bruce's 1982 release was bleak, stark and spare, a collection of vinyl-pressed demo tapes featuring The Boss alone on acoustic guitar and harmonica.

The title track was based on the 1958 midwestern killing spree of 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather, accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate. Her parents were his first victims.

What to expect after that?

The Boss Goes Boom

The answer came in the stadium scale heartland rock of Born in the USA, an LP containing a dozen songs. Seven of them reached the Top 10, including Dancing..., Glory Days, I'm on Fire and My Home Town.

Ronald Reagan was president, the national mood was different, and crowding into Springsteen's genre were rockers John Mellencamp and Bob Seger plus Canadian counterpart Bryan Adams.

The Boss's sound was now bigger and bolder, right from the opening title track.

If one ignores the lyrics, Born in the USA the song can easily be mistaken for a patriotic anthem. It's really an indictment of a nation indifferent to a generation of people it sent to fight an ultimately pointless foreign war. It was precursor to the more overtly political music Springsteen would make in the ensuing decades.

Glory Days -- Me and college friend Laura K.
circa 1985. I still have that shirt somewhere.

It opened his show on that August night, a four-hour marathon punctuated by The Boss's trademark stage stories and banter. There were three songs from Nebraska, though not the one about Starkweather, five from the double-album River, four from the first Born and eight from the new Born.

Among the most memorable: Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, the Hungry Heart sing-along and show closing covers Twist and Shout and Do You Love Me?

Big Ed: I am finally at a Springsteen concert and my first event at this new arena named after the former Governor of New Jersey in what Springsteen would refer to as The swamps of Jersey. My memories of the set list are fuzzy, partially because it was a lifetime ago and partially because I would go on to see Springsteen another 13 times over the years.

To me, it was the equivalent of a Jew's Birthright trip to the Holy Land or a Muslim's Hajj to Mecca. I never saw a more enthusiastic crowd in an arena as I did when the band played Born in the USA.

The four of us -- really the 20,000 of us -- danced and sang all night. I've no idea how Bruce and company did that night in and night out. I was exhausted well before he introduced his bandmates during the rousing Rosalita (Come Out Tonight). Little did we know (and who knows if he did) that the newly-added Patti Scialfa would one day be his wife.

Big Ed: It was also our first sighting of Nils Lofgren, who'd replaced Miami Steve Van Zandt. He'd appeared on the Born in the USA album, then left to reinvent himself as Little Steven, fronting a band called The Disciples of Soul. Later he'd return to the E Street Band before reinventing himself again as Silvo on HBO's The Sopranos.

Thirty-five years and a couple of dozen concerts later, some starring The Boss and some not, this first time seeing him live on that summer night remains the best time. It made me a believer in Bruce almighty and the power of his music.
________________________

Thanks to Eddie and Wayne for helping to reconstruct our memories. This entry is dedicated to our friend and fellow concert-goer Richard Fields, who died on Aug. 22 of last year. He was just 54.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Forty Years of Darkness on the Edge of Town

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN LOOKS LIKE a doofus. Admit it. He does.

The cover pic for Darkness on the Edge of Town does him no favors. Bed-headed, bleary eyed, lips midway between pursed and puckered, he looks like photographer Frank Stefanko rolled him out of bed at 3 a.m., said, "here, put this on..." and before the Boss could say, "Wait. What?" they were done shooting. It is not a flattering picture.

Which is odd because the album it graced is about a lot of things, work, faith, hope, sex, anger, resentment, resignation, determination and driving, literally and figuratively, but I wouldn't put weary dishevelment on the list.

Still, Springsteen's fourth studio LP turns a biblical 40 years old on June 2, so maybe it's only fitting that the journey with him to The Promised Land also starts with a bit of skepticism about the intended destination. The ransom note-typewriter typography of its title and track listing seem to beg the question: would you buy a record from this man?

Badlands, you've got to live it every day, 

let the broken hearts stand as the price you've gotta pay. 

We'll keep pushin' till its understood

 and these badlands start treating us good.

I did. More than once. In different formats. Others did too. And looking back across four decades, it's not hard to find the reason: Darkness -- sandwiched as it was between the fabulously bombastic Born to Run and the two disc tour-de-force The River -- is the definitive Springsteen album.

"It's a meditation on where are you going to stand? With who and where are you going to stand?" he said in a 2011 documentary.

More than any other release, this one is responsible for his enduring image as a voice of the forgotten blue collar man trapped by circumstance and grinding it out until that nighttime rendezvous in the field behind the dynamo, or after walking the darkness of Candy's hall.

Springsteen was just 28. Success, as he defined it, was still eluding him. Any guy in his mid-20s, working for unreasonable bosses, chasing unattainable girls and realizing that adulthood meant fighting for what you want and who you are, could relate. I certainly did.

But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold. 

Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.

My dad once called him, "the working man's millionaire." After many years of success, even the Boss himself admitted being "a rich man in a poor man's shirt." But we all know he didn't start out that way... that all this wiry kid from Freehold, New Jersey, had was that burning ambition to be somebody and it took some time for that image of who, exactly, to come into focus.

On his first three LPs, Springsteen was something of a chameleon: a stream-of-consciousness lyrical poet for Greetings From Asbury Park, a soulful troubadour on The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and then the leather jacketed street hustler with the spectacular B.T.R., an album that put him on the cover of Time magazine and Newsweek in the very same week.

Full stop.

All that momentum slammed to a halt when Springsteen decided to break up with manager Mike Appel. Their three-year legal battle keep him out of the recording studio but continuing to tour and more importantly, to write. He poured out his frustrations and anger at The Man in a torrent of lyrics, enough for several albums. Out of that frenetic activity emerged Darkness, a record unlike anything he'd done before: a collection of angry, chip-on-his-shoulder rockers, full of searing guitars, slamming drums, coarse vocals and testosterone.

He comes across as angry, defiant, forever done taking shit from anyone. There's none of Born to Run's romantic optimism, none of the good time bonhomie that would temper the more fraught moments of The River. Darkness is 10 tracks of darkness and Old Testament thunder.

Beneath all that there's a recognition that life doesn't play out the way its planned. Despite the bravado of driving 'cross the Waynesboro County line, down Kingsley and from Monroe to Angeline*, there's the sad surrender of the trophy girl in Racing in the Streets and in the title track finale where the narrator admits the enemy is within.

I lost my money and I lost my wife, 
them things don't seem to matter much to me now. 

Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause l can't stop, 
I'll be on that hill with everything that I've got, 

Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost
I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost,
for wanting things that can only be found 
in the darkness on the edge of town.

Despite its significance, Darkness seems more respected than loved. Its songs inspired a spinoff,  covers, imitation and parody, but when it comes to ranking the Boss's records, it's almost never the fan favorite. Not here, nor here or here and definitely not here, although finally, here.

It's often second-best, which is a shame, because while others may better define his career, none of them better defined the man.

* For Bruce, geography is a thing of the mind. The Promised Land opens with the narrator driving out of the Utah desert and across the Waynesboro County line, but there is no Waynesboro County anywhere in the U.S.  Nor, Prove It All Night fans, is there a place called Angeline, though there are plenty of starting points called Monroe, including Monroe Township, New Jersey.

Something in the Night lovers take heart, you too can drive down Kingsley with the radio up so you don't have to think. It's in Asbury Park, NJ. Send a postcard if you go.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Come to See Herschel Walker and Stay for the Beer War -- One Night Out With the United States Football League

WHAT I REMEMBER MOST is the beer fight.

It happened to just our left and I've no idea what started it. Suds and cups flying across rows of the upper deck section 313, accompanied by angry words and then by fisticuffs. That last component attracted what seemed to be every security guard on duty at Giants Stadium that evening. They appeared to be old policemen wearing yellow rain coats.

Monday night football, USFL style

Somehow they restored order, allowing me, Ed, Lonny and the rest of the fans in the neighboring sections to turn their attention back to the matter at hand: the New Jersey General vs. the Birmingham Stallions, a contest capping week 10 of the United States Football League's inaugural season.

It was Monday night, May 9, 1983. Earlier that evening, me and my buddies had set out from Long Island, driven across New York City and to the New Jersey Meadowlands to bear witness. To what, we didn't really know.

It was really baseball season, but the Mets were at the Astrodome and the Yankees were off, so... it was springtime... for football... in East Rutherford. Newfangled football, starring Herschel Walker, a precocious 21-year-old Heisman Trophy winner who'd turned pro after completing his junior year at the University of Georgia.

Though a year too young for the National Football League draft, he was just what the Generals and the nascent USFL needed. Signed to a $5 million three-year contract, his job wasn't merely to carry the ball, rather it was to carry the league.

Pssst.... they're from New Jersey.

Not yet on the scene, New York real estate mogul and entrepreneur Donald Trump -- yes that Donald Trump -- who later bought the team from its original owner, Oklahoma oil baron J. Walter Duncan, then fatefully decided to take on the far wealthier and entrenched NFL.

Walker held up his end of his deal, entering the game as the league's leading rusher. He was aided by fullback Maurice Carthon, who would later play for the NFL's New York Giants at the same address, receiver Mike Friede who had played for the Giants and center Kent Hull, who would play in four Super Bowls with the Buffalo Bills.

But that was pretty much it.

The General's field general was 34-year-old Bobby Scott, who spent nine years with the New Orleans Saints, backing up star quarterback Archie Manning while starting only 14 games himself.

The Stallions' signal callers, Bob Lane and Reggie Collier, weren't significantly better, but on this night they wouldn't have to be.

The $5 million man

Though Scott connected with receiver Tom McConnaughey for a first quarter touchdown and a 7-0 lead, Birmingham's running game quickly got the equalizer. Then, the visitors turned the game over to their stout defense and a place kicker named Scott Norwood -- yes, that Scott Norwood -- who booted five field goals, while missing a sixth.

The Birmingham D stifled the General's star running back, holding him just 28 yards. New Jersey's offense fell silent, somewhat justifying the attendant excitement of watching grown men throw cups of beer at each other. The final score, Stallions 22, Generals 7.

Paid attendance: 38,734 in a stadium that held about 80,000, so half empty or half full, depending on your outlook.

Walker earned his keep, rushing for 1,812 yards on the season to lead the league, but the Generals failed to live up to their five-star billing, finishing just 6-12, among the worst in the league. That would change under Trump, who lured Cleveland Browns star quarterback Brian Sipe for season two and then Heisman winner Doug Flutie for season three, also known as season last.

The league's quality of play was generally considered good, though its top tier of talent was thin, but launching a league to rival the NFL was a daunting task. The under-capitalized World Football League had tried to do so a decade earlier and didn't survive its second year before collapsing.

Not Gatorade, but still available today

The USFL lasted twice as long before a pyrrhic victory in its antitrust lawsuit against the established league that left them with $3 in damages when they were counting on substantially bigger award to endow their shift to a fall schedule and head-to-head competition.

For the new league, it wasn't just about securing talented players like future NFL star quarterbacks Jim Kelly, who played for the Houston Gamblers and Steve Young of the Los Angeles Express or even running backs Mike Rozier of the Pittsburgh Maulers or Marcus Dupree of the New Orleans -- and later Portland -- Breakers. It was also about securing sponsors, and like the players, most of the best were already committed to the established league.

Still, the upstarts had 12 franchises arrayed from coast to coast -- including the Tampa Bay Bandits part owned by movie star Burt Reynolds, the Chicago Blitz led by longtime NFL head coach George Allen and the Denver Gold led by Super Bowl XII Denver Broncos coach Red Miller -- and there were sponsors eager to get in on the ground floor with the new venture.

Their presence, backing a league also comprised of the Arizona Wranglers,  Michigan Panthers, Philadelphia Stars, Oakland Invaders and Washington Federals gave the enterprise an off-kilter, parallel universe kind of charm.

That wasn't nearly enough to sustain it, but it gave the USFL a look and style all its own.

Lots of red, white and blue, but..

... none for the Washington Federals.

Special thanks to www.usflsite.com for filing in some of the blank spots in this 35-year-old memory.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Perdition on Ice: The Rocky Start of Jersey's Devils

MY MACHINE SHE'S A DUD, out stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.

Bruce Springsteen penned those lyrics in 1973, part of the 7:04 love song-turned-concert jam fest Rosalita (Come Out Tonight). Nine years later, with a little bit of metaphorical foresight, those words could have applied to the Garden State's first National Hockey League team, the New Jersey Devils, who debuted 35 years ago.

Strangers in a swamp land.

Far from a random appellation, the Devils got their name from the legendary Leeds devil, rejected spawn of Mrs. Deborah (Smith) Leeds of Galloway Township, a mother of 12 who wanted nothing to do with a 13th. "Let this one be a devil," she reportedly said.* And so it was that said child, once born, fled into the Pine Barrens from which it periodically emerges to terrorize the locals.

Its namesake hockey team too was rejected, twice. Born in 1974 as the Kansas City Scouts, the franchise lasted just two years in western Missouri before relocating to Denver as the Colorado Rockies. There they languished for six more seasons before being shipped east by John McMullen, owner of Major League Baseball's Houston Astros.

Ensconced in the brand new Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, the Devils were comprised almost entirely of players other teams didn't want, a kind of icy purgatory if not exactly hell.

Their primary benefactor was the reigning Stanley Cup champion New York Islanders, whose castoffs New Jersey general manager and coach Billy MacMillan readily acquired, despite having been voted off the Island himself as a player six years earlier.

Among the luminaries stocking the original Devils roster:

• ex-Islanders goalie Glenn Resch, former NYI forwards Dave Cameron, Hector Marini, Steve Tambellini and Yvan Vautour, plus ex-Isles defenseman Bob Lorimer**;
• ex-New York Rangers defenseman Carol Vadnais;
• future three-time Stanley Cup-winning Chicago Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville
• World Hockey Association survivor Mike Antonovich;
• struggling former first-round pick Paul Gagne;
• reluctant Finnish defenseman Tapio Levo; 
• team captain Don Lever;
• U.S. Olympic hockey star Neal Broten's brother, Aaron
• and MacMillan's brother, Bob.

They were a talent-poor squad crashing a metropolitan area that featured an Original Six franchise and, arguably, the best team in the world. The Rangers lost the Stanley Cup finals in 1979. The Islanders won the chalice in 1980, 81 and 82. The Rockies had been to the playoffs. Once. In 1978.

Homesick Finn Tapio Levo, the team's best defenseman and
forward Hector Marini, whose solid first half made him the Devils first all star

If there was any chance of alchemy by proximity to their Long Island progenitors, that likely vanished just days into the season when MacMillan dealt center Merlin Malinowski to the Hartford Whalers for still another ex-Islander, enforcer Garry Howatt, and speedy forward Rick Meagher.

Clad in red, white and green sweaters emblazoned with a stylized red NJ crest, those first edition Devils finished Hades in the NHL's Patrick Division with a record of 17-49-14.***

For a time, their breakout star appeared to be Marini, an energetic forward unable to break into the Islanders talented lineup. He started the season strong and was New Jersey's lone delegate to the All Star Game at Long Island's Nassau Coliseum. Marini even assisted on one of three goals scored by the Prince of Wales Conference in a 9-3 Campbell Conference blowout. Wayne Gretzky scored four times for the winners. It was downhill from there.

The inaugural season ticket pitch. It wasn't entirely hyperbole.

Though Marini soon faded, MacMillan assembled the Kid Line, featuring Broten, 22, flanked by 20-year-olds Gagne and Jeff Larmer, an early-season call-up who potted 21 goals and 45 points in 65 games.

Broten lead the Devils in scoring with 16 goals, 39 assists and 55 points.

Their top-scoring defenseman, Tapio Levo, posted seven goals and a team-best 40 assists, but he didn't want to be there. Coaxed to rejoin the team in October, at season's end he left for home, never to return.

It was not all for naught. Their lousy finish enabled them to take forward John MacLean sixth overall in the 1983 NHL draft. He lasted 14 years, scoring 701 points, second in franchise history. Already in the pipeline, defenseman Ken Daneyko, their all-time games leader, whose sweater number 3 is retired, and high scoring forward Pat Verbeek.

Those three men would team with Broten and the yet-to-be-drafted Kirk Muller to lead the team to the playoffs in 1987-88. Though the road was long, the Devils finally won Lord Stanley's cup in 1995 and again in 2000 and 2003.

*Though accounts of her fateful utterance sometimes differ.
** With the Devils' first first-round pick, in the 1982 draft MacMillan took Rocky Trottier, whose older brother Bryan already starred for the Islanders.
*** That's ties, not overtime losses, which weren't introduced until 2005-06.

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