music reviews

If you only see one concert this year, make sure you see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Okay, say you’ve already seen one concert this year and it was not Bruce Springsteen. Say you are Puerto Rican and you saw something that relates more to your culture. Say you don’t even know who Bruce Springsteen is. What then? Well, I think you have two choices and no they are not causal and don’t involve a noose and an erection. Instead, I think you should, one, buy a dog and, two, name it Bruce Springsteen. That’s it. Nothing super dramatic like killing yourself or getting off at the thought of your own strangulation, nope just a puppy and naming it Bruce Springsteen. To be honest, it’s pretty dumb, but I like the thought of all these Puerto Ricans yelling "Bruce Springsteen" and puppies running to them.

When I saw a few weeks ago that Bruce Springsteen would be taking his traveling freak show of aging rock musicians to Foxboro, Massachusetts, I knew I had to go. I mentally prepared myself for the pain of paying Ticketmaster $233,849 in convenience charges for the privilege of buying tickets to one of the many concerts for which they are the exclusive ticket distributor, and clicked on “buy”.

The day of the concert I borrowed my friend Farooq’s car. Farooq’s car is a piece of crap. It is a Nissan Pathfinder from (I believe) the late eighties which has no shocks. Driving over a manhole cover or a small crack in the road feels about the same as getting punched in the face.

I will punch Fancy Boy in the face the next time I see him just to prove this point. After he is hit I expect him to lie on the ground making steering motions with his arms while saying things like, “Boy, Farooq’s car sucks.”

The drive would normally take about a half an hour, but this car tends to shake at speeds above 65 MPH, so it took a little longer. There is another reason it took a little longer and this is the fact that everyone else in Boston also decided to go see the Bruce Springsteen concert that night.

Except for all the Puerto Ricans who decided earlier in the year that they would see some other concert. It is okay. They now all have puppies named Bruce Springsteen.

The last five or six miles of the drive took over an hour, because Gillette Stadium is strategically placed in the middle of nowhere, so that thousands upon thousands of people must drive a combined hundreds of thousands of miles and then all park in the same place. I was surprised to see that oil futures were not trading higher on Monday due to the excess demand created by the mass exodus out of the city to the Bruce Springsteen concert. When we finally parked we walked about a mile to the stadium, pausing to hide from the lightning storm that immediately descended upon us. In the end, the drive there took over two hours and, after leaving at 6:00 PM, we arrived to our seats at about 8:30. This was actually pretty good timing, as the Boss and his elderly friends started playing at about 8:45.

They band was very good live, as I had been told they would be.

The concert ended after midnight. I really don’t understand what it is that allows the 58-year-old Bruce Springsteen to dance and shout and slide around on his knees for over three hours.

I talked to my grandfather today. He is seventy-five and still cuts trees in the forest for firewood. He says he has no problem moving around once he gets going. He says it’s when he stops that he feels it. By ‘it’ I guess I mean that it takes him a half-hour to stand up if he sits down in a chair. The same goes for Uncle Bob. He cuts wood with my Grampy. He moves around just as well when he’s in the forests, but once he stops he has to use a cane to get around. I am not joking. This is not some kind of bloated truth meant to be funny. My uncle Bob will probably have to get his hip replaced next year. He will probably still cut wood. I believe it is probably similar for Bruce Springsteen. Probably once the concert’s over he immediately sits in a wheelchair and is wheeled to his bed inside a tourjet or whatever they use on tour.

Maybe he is on steroids.

I have no problem with Bruce Springsteen using steroids.

All I know is I am 25 and in pretty good shape and even I was tired by this point, and I was sitting down for about half of those three hours. It took over a half an hour to find our way out of the enormous space station/imperial death star/Gillette Stadium and back to the parking lot. Once there, we sat in a line of cars waiting to leave the parking lot until after 2:00 AM. Not everyone was lining up to leave. Some concert-goers instead sat outside of their cars, drinking and listening to Bruce Springsteen. I thought it would not be a terrible idea to just relax like these people and wait for traffic to un-jam, but I realized that I didn’t really want to be on the road at the same time given how long they had been drinking. By the time we got to leave, traffic was not as bad as it was on the way in and the drive back to Boston was relatively quick and painless (and by painless I mean marred by constant bone-jarring collisions with minor bumps and cracks in the road). I was back home only 10 hours after leaving for the concert.

Driving to an event at Gillette Stadium is a pain in the ass. If you gave me free tickets to the 2008 AFC championship game at Gillette Stadium, I would not go (or at least I would not drive).

Oh, that’s good to know. I was going to give you 2008 AFC championship game tickets at Gillette Stadium (if they make it…haha if?) for your birthday. Instead, I think I will take a piece of cake, drop it on a piece of paper, eat the cake, lick the piece of paper until most of the crumbs and frosting are gone, and then give you the piece of paper with the words, “donkey ghost shit” written on it with an arrow pointing to the stain the cake left.

I arrived to the show late because my toilet backed up from eating three burritos. I should not blame the wonderful burritos. I would have eaten a fourth if I had the opportunity. Instead, I blame the toilet. It was unfortunately installed without an overflow prevention mechanism. I will have to look for a software upgrade on the internet at some point.

Because of the latrine problems I can’t comment on the first three bands. As it turned out I wish there had been more shit to clean up because the fourth band, The Project, was no more enjoyable to watch than it was to mop up crap water. I could go on about them and say they are no different than what any other college campus has to offer. I could even describe them as being the illegitimate child of Rob Thomas if Rob had the ability to have sex with himself and the only genes that were passed onto the eventual aborted child were body odor and a propensity to eat celery. Anyway, The Project was in love with themselves and played two encores even though it was only three of their friends calling them back.

The night finally became memorable when two sweater vests walked on stage. They were known as Isthmus and the Lisps. I’m guessing Isthmus was some kind of joint name for the two sweater vests and ‘the lisps’ were the other three members in the band that weren’t wearing sweater vests. Granted the drummer had on some kind of safari hat and the backup female vocalist had an eye patch, all of which worked well to complement the two sweater vests. The only oddity in the group was the cello player who was just wearing a blue t-shirt.

The two sweater vests, big red sweater and little red sweater, began playing their first song the same way I would prod, poke, and question the existence of a fine French Prostitute if I found her in my room paid in full. Each plucked string seemed to ask, “Are you real?”

This did two things. One, it cleansed the stench from the previous mess up on stage. Two, it helped suggest to those who had only come to see The Project to that it was time to leave.

By the time the second song began the place was breathable again.

At the start of the third song, Big red sweater vest said, “This is a true story.”

I was hoping he was going to tell about the time in third grade when he had been nothing more than Pippy, the-boy’s-small-yellow-cardigan. Instead, he sang, “You said my mom was a bitch and she never loved you.”

The little red sweater vest sang the fourth song. At first I wanted to say he sounded like a tiny choir boy, but about midway through the song he changed his tempo to more of the former choir boy who comes forward after twenty years of silence to reveal that he had peaked at his Christmas presents every year of his childhood.

The fifth or sixth song, I can’t remember, my mind wandered. I became fascinated with this girl in front of me. There wasn’t anything special about her except her boots. She had on knee high cowboy boots. I couldn’t help but think of pushing her over and stealing them. I would go down the block and throw one through the back windshield of a caravan. And then I would be gone into the night.

I couldn’t steal them though because some marble head came up to me and began telling me about how his band was playing the next night and that I should come back to “check it out.”

“Are there going to be any sweater vests?”

“No.”

“You can leave.”

This was a hypothetical set of questions I made up in my head. Anyway, finally the guy left and I dropped his flyer on the ground. When I looked back to the girl with the boots she was taping both of them to her knees. My opportunity was lost. My perverted intentions must have been more known than I had originally thought.

At that point the big red sweater vest was telling me to “Look him in the fucking eye.” So I did and he looked at me. My chapped lips begged me not to blow kisses and so I held in my urges and just maintained my stare. He blinked first and I was delighted. I could take his soul and put it in my back pocket.

And that’s when someone broke a glass. This is also when I began wondering if I would ever grow a mustache, hug a panda bear, sniff dirt from below the equator, or remember when my mother’s birthday is.

review by Mark Baumer