Time for a Spring Break! Off to Fort Lauderdale for a couple shows! In years past, Teri and I have taken trips to Florida for baseball spring training so this year we do a Springsteen training! We did take in a couple of spring training games and went to Key West. A great trip over all.
Kicking off the new year with the first Springsteen show of the new century! We are off to Happy Valley, Penn State University, PA. This was an interesting trip. One of my friends from the local Springsteen group, Shannon LaVoy, got a few people together and I ended up taking a group of 5-6 people in my van to Penn State for the show. It turned out that my friend Flynn McLean gave Bruce the suggestion for the opening song, Lion’s Den (Nittany Lions are the mascot for Penn State). A great way to kick off the year of a bunch of Bruce shows!
The final concert of the 20th Century (I know the whole century thing) for me, The Barenaked Ladies! Went on a double date with Dave and Cindy Brown. I think we had a good time. We saw them earlier in the year at the Farm Aid show, and they do put on an entertaining event. While I didn't know ALL the songs, I think we enjoyed the ones we did know. Now it's off to the 21st Century! Who knows what it will bring!
First time seem Melissa on a solo tour. Teri and I attended the show and we were very impressed! I don't have a lot of information at this point (it was many years ago). One thing that we really interesting was her drummer, Kenny Aronoff. He is one of the best out there. During one of the songs Melissa went back to the drum riser and he played the a beat on the strings of her guitar, fantastic to experience.
I can't find a setlist for this show.
These shows were originally scheduled for my birthday! But, the schedule was a bit hectic and the shows were moved to September 8 & 9. Teri and I flew in for the shows. Our first time traveling for shows since the R&R HoF show in 1995. We had good seats for the first night, but GREAT seats for night two. For the show on September 9, they were second row seats. For this tour you had to pick up your tickets in the the first 17 rows from will-call. The attendant who gave us our tickets remarked, she had never given anyone second row seats before. Being right on the stage makes a difference, and a much more enjoyable show.
Technology catches up with music.
In the mid-1990’s the Internet became useful. I know it had
been in academia for some time, but the common folk got their first taste of it
around this time. This led to the raising of various newsgroups and forums
about various music. Specifically, Bruce Springsteen. A couple of the well know groups at the time
were Lucktown Digest, Bruce Ticket Exchange (BTX), and RMAS (rec.music.artisit.sprignsteen).
This gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about Springsteen, and music in
general. Before this, I was dependent on local radio, and the occasional
Rolling Stone piece. This kept me up to date on rumors and facts about the
artists in near real time (or at least within a week). This also made it easier
to meet up with other, local, Springsteen fans. I met several people this way,
and we are still friends to this day.
Also around the mid-1990’s CD writers became affordable to
the masses. My original unit that I bought from CompUSA was a Sony 2.4x writer
for $300. At the time, this was a bargain (previously similar drives were over
$800). When I bought it I had planned to use it to copy software. But I soon
figured out that it could copy music CDs also. I had a couple of bootleg cassettes,
but copies would degrade after a couple copies, so I really wasn’t a big collector.
CDs never degraded. I borrowed a couple of CDs from Flynn ‘The Boots’ McLean
and started from there. Also, at the time, blank media was pricey,
about $5/disc. Many of the bootleg shows were 3 discs, which would be about $15.
I didn’t get every bootleg I could get, just a few that seemed interesting.
Moving forward to the late 1990’s, on Internet sales pages
like eBay, you could buy some shows at a reasonable price. I bought a few that
would seed my collection, put my list of shows out there on the Internet to
make trades, upgraded my hardware, the price of CDs fell to less than $1 per
disc, and I was off to the races. Technology also improved to make this easier.
In the fall of 1998, Bruce Springsteen released a boxset of
4 CDs called Tracks. This was a set of B-sides, outtakes, and unreleased
music that spanned his career. This provided the catalyst to reunite the E
Street Band. In 1999, the band got back together and was off to a year and a
half World Tour. This is what I had been waiting on most of my adult life,
since 1985 anyway, and I didn’t want to miss it.
From 1999 to the present, there are A LOT of Springsteen
shows. I probably have attended over 100 in this time-frame. I’ve joked with
Teri that she knew I liked Bruce the first 5 years of our relationship, but
didn’t quite understand what the level of this obsession truly is.
