History in the making - in front of me?

Bruce Springsteen's first show AFTER "Born To Run"

We had been playing baseball up at Nashua’s Greeley Park. My friend Gerry “Francois” Dube and I had entered into a home run competition a while back - we even were going to have to buy a trophy for the winner - (and he was wayyyyy behind. Not that I would have brought it up or anything.)

We piled into Gerry’s blue beast of a car, the radio tuned to Boston’s WBCN - as always - and we’d driven just a few miles when we heard “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band coming to the Capitol Theater, Providence, Rhode Island on Sunday, July 20 at 8 p.m. Tickets on sale now.”

We drove immediately to Ticketmaster and got tickets for the show. Having already heard “Born To Run” on a regular basis on that station, an advance track released before the album, it was a great enough song (along with “Rosalita” and “Kitty’s Back” to send me scurrying to Paperback Booksmith at the Nashua Mall, buying Springsteen’s other two albums a few hours after I’d heard it. The rumors were that Bruce was sensational in concert and I was going to go!!!

And I did. And if it wasn’t as monumental a show as the one Springsteen’s future manager Jon Landau saw in Boston, prompting him to write the famous “I Have Seen The Future Of Rock And Roll And His Name Is Bruce Springsteen,” it might have been a close, damn close second. And it might even have been better.

Bruce Springsteen cuts loose after finishing the “Born To Run” album

And comparing Springsteen shows, of course, is like putting one Van Gogh next to another, trying to decide which was better. Or “Godfather I” vs. “Godfather II.” Or “Blonde On Blonde” vs. “Highway 61 Revisited.”

If there was a difference, and since I didn’t see the Boston show I don’t know for sure, it had to be minimal. For Bruce Springsteen delivers on stage. And the reason I suggest the performance might well have been better because the “Born To Run” album, eight absolutely epic songs, (well, OK, maybe six) was behind him, music that would transform him from a really talented, highly unusual B-level performer/recording artist into a ground-breaking, foot-stomping, stadium-filling, rock and roll legend.

His on-stage persona, his ability to write songs and deliver them with cinematic drama - what better than “Thunder Road” or “Backstreets”, his tireless, driving, surging energy that couldn’t help but spill into the crowd, made his shows - as many have attested - near-religious experiences.

Which, of course, sounds like incredible overkill. Except let me tell what happened to me. My friend Tom Lavoie and I and two dates who shall remain nameless (they have reputations to uphold, after all…(and I can only remember one) made the two-plus hour trek to Rhode Island and when I got home, early, way early Monday morning, I was so jacked up by what I saw, I immediately got on the phone and woke up my friend, Sean Heaney (wrote about my late friend yesterday) and PLAYED THE ENTIRE “THE WILD, THE INNOCENT, THE E-STREET SHUFFLE” album to him OVER THE PHONE. It might have been, 8-9 o’clock in the morning, certainly an hour that Sean, a teenager, would have visited in those summer hours.

We didn’t find out until many years later that the Capitol Theater concert was Bruce’s first after completing work on the record and therefore, historic. And when a Facebook post (attached at the bottom) reminded me again today that I was there, it made me want to sit down, play some Springsteen and write about that night.

What struck me first about that show was how it began, with a bearded Springsteen, clad in a white Montgomery Ward’s T-shirt, came out, sat on “Professor” Roy Bittan’s piano and sang his musical version of “West Side Story” - “Incident On 57th Street.” Just he and the Professor, a ballsy way to open a concert, immediately quieting everybody down and, maybe this was his plan, getting them to listen.

From there, he brought rest of the band out, saxophonist Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons, drummer Max Weinberg, bassist Garry Tallent, guitarist Steven Van Zandt, organist Danny Federici and they slipped into “Sprit Of The Night” from Bruce’s first album. And he was off.

Interestingly, he only played three songs from the new album, including “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” “Thunder Road” and “Born To Run.”

The rest of the show were songs from his first two albums like “Growing Up,” “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City” and Bruce had the Capitol Theater rocking, the audience hollering, the band cooking in the steamy little joint.

When he got down to the final three songs of the show (pre-encore) “New York City Serenade” and “Kitty’s Back” and “Rosalita” - longer story songs with rises and falls and lots of dramatic, moving parts, he swept you up in his urban street-tough vision, almost to the point where you were looking for fire hydrants and trash cans and Bronx cops walking the beat. It was thrilling, it was unlike any concert you’d ever see and I was absolutely enthralled and I was not alone.

There was no question that this performer was going to be around, do big things, great things. When I got back to campus a few days later, I was bragging to everyone how fantastic he was and people looked at me as if I was nuts.

“Stringbean? Is that his name?” “I don’t hear his songs on AM Radio. If he’s that great, how come I don’t?” And then, suddenly, he was on the covers of Time and Newsweek - in the same week.

Which gave Bruce to ad-lib a nice amendment to the lyrics of “Rosalita” - “tell your parents I ain’t no freak. I got my picture on the covers of Time and Newsweek.” I still have those magazines. This one time, I was ahead of the curve. And it was exciting.

The album itself wasn’t officially released until August 25, two days after my 22nd birthday. WBCN got one of the first copies and as I recall, they aired the whole album early that morning. I distinctly remember lying in bed in a guest room at the Heaney’s farm, listening to an album that was going to certainly change Bruce Springsteen’s life, popular music and to some extent, mine.

And I remember thinking EXACTLY THAT as I heard “Backstreets” and “Jungleland” and the rest of the actual record for the first time.

Nobody makes records like this, I thought, then. Nobody has EVER made records like this. Nobody WILL ever make records like this. This is, hell, I thought, this is HISTORIC.

And you know what? It was.

Here’s the Facebook Link… https://www.facebook.com/share/p/jCGdiiz8Zt4ubS9j/

and the beginning of the story.