Photo by Tony Nelson

A friend suggested I look on www.backstreets.com, the Springsteen fan site. Within five minutes I was talking with a woman named Kim from the western suburbs who said she had an extra general admission ducat and that she’d meet me at the Xcel Center, door #1, in an hour. I dumped the kids on my neighbor and called my wife at her new job and asked if she minded if I spent the anniversary of our first date with 19,000 other hotties, and she admitted that she was bummed because she wanted to go to the show but gave me the go ahead, and as soon as I hung up I had a skip in my step and the money moment of “Badlands”—“I wanna go out tonight and find out what I got”—ratcheting up from my solar plexus.

I hit the cash machine and the highway and got to the X and did the deal with Kim, who showed me what line to get into for the neo-mythical wristband lottery that determines which lucky 470 people get to be in the front section of the arena floor. At that point, I would have done anything Kim said: I was in. I was flying; on my own, unencumbered by anyone else’s needs or any semblance of a schedule. Some friends were meeting for a pre-show beer at Patrick McGovern’s Pub on W. 7^th Street, but I ran into some of my hardcore Bruce fan friends who were getting in line, so that’s what I did—with about 4,000 other people hoping to get closer to the stage, the altar, the party.

I won the lottery.

So did some guys whom I’d just met, just like back in the day when we’d all spend the night together waiting in line for Springsteen tickets and then reconvene months later at the show. So did a bunch of new comrades—musicians, writers, photographers—who I met through hootenannies and live music this year, and so did several old friends. There was Jackie and Jeannie Heintz, who I wrote about here. There was James and Brianna and Brianna’s dad Brad, who wondered aloud if this might be the last time we see Clarence Clemons, who, after two hip replacement surgeries, was looking typically bad-ass but frail. There was Alexa Jones and her mother, Vicki, both of whom I met this year.

Last week Alexa wrote a beautiful piece about life and death that gets at what it felt like to stand around with all these people, waiting for the E Street Band to hit the stage. Her thesis graph: “Maybe I don’t go to church or have a religion in the traditional sense but I believe in the spirit of life. That energy that pulsates through your guts and mind and out into the world, into another person, can’t disappear when the body is gone. It’s electricity that’s released into the air, maybe the heavens.”

Heaven this night was a hockey arena, where our group was joined by Paula, a Brooklyn-born mother of three, including an autistic child and a U.S. Marine serving in Iraq. Tough girl. St. Paul girl. Republican, I’m pretty sure. Had nothing but good to say about Norm Coleman, who got the arena built where her beloved Wild play in.

In short order, I learned that Paula’s mother died when she was 19, and that she adopted and raised her five siblings. She’s from a family of cops and firefighters, a number of whom walked away from the twin towers on 9/11. This night she was on her own, too: her husband had told her to go have fun, and so she was. She had that Lords Of Flatbush thing going on in her voice and said, “Get a couple more beers in me, and I’ll be talking like Rosie Perez.”

I sprinted up the arena steps to take a pre-show piss and get a beer, and ran into one of my oldest Springsteen running partners, Rita, and her sisters, and moments later found myself standing in the beer line with Paul Molitor and his sister and moments after that ran into Dan Wilson, whose soul-igniting existential anthem “Free Life” was heard a few days earlier by the 10 million viewers of Dirty Sexy Money.

It was around this time, with the flickering arena lights signaling the start of the concert, and all this oneness shuddering through the place, and all these people I love inside and outside that pit pulsing through me, that I had the very real sense that everyone you meet prepares you for the next person you meet, and that all we’re ever doing in this life is meeting and re-meeting ourselves—not a stranger or an acquaintance or old friend or new lover, but the latest version of the new or long-lost you.

Photo by Tony Nelson

When they lurched into “No Surrender,” I wedged myself behind Alexa and Vicki and steadied myself. Martin, Jason, Jen and Kyle had my back. I raised my beer and prayed along, “We made a promise, we swore we’d always remember, no retreat, baby, no surrender.” Springsteen looked right at me, the guy with the chalice held aloft, and grinned and nodded.

When it was done I touched my face and hell if it wasn’t wet with tears. I can name the last time I cried, and trust me it was a long time ago, but the pushing-60 little garage rocker with the Telecaster-on-fire who described his job on 60 Minutes as, “I make grown men cry and women dance” got me. Again.

Photo by Tony Nelson

I am not making this up. I am not exaggerating, and you can yawn or make fun of me or Springsteen but the shit really, truly, was flowing from him into me and I know I wasn’t alone. I was flat-out lifted. It was intense, as life-changing as it had been when I saw him the first time at Met Center in 1978 when I was 19. It felt more important this time, because I have kids, the world is in the shitter, and the voice in my head that says I’m not always on my game, not always inspired, not always doing the best I can, was quelled by an echo of my best self, and the music allowed me to forgive myself, and showed me yet again how to be tougher than the rest of my former selves and keeping going.

That is why I write. That is why I write this today: To let anyone who happens to read this message in a cyber-bottle know that Bruce Springsteen is barnstorming North America, changing the world, ripping open the wounds of America, making it better, and when he’s gone, when he leaves the arena or the world, that feeling lives on, just like Alexa said, and I’m glad she did because I was starting to think it was just me.

Photo by Tony Nelson

Around the end, I returned to the military mom, did the bump with her and put an ice cube down her back. Then I did an Irish jig to “American Land,” said my goodbyes, and went over to McGovern’s, where I walked through the place several times in my “South Minneapolis” t-shirt, which prompted huge St. Paul guys to bang shoulders with mine. I kept going, daring anyone to pick a fight, break my spirit, break the spell.

It hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it never will.

Setlist:

Photo Gallery by Tony Nelson