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.
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