Springsteen at Oracle

I was so far away from Bruce last night I could reach out and touch him, as opposed to Bob Dylan who I saw at The Great Western Forum in Los Angeles in 1978 and whose lead guitarist, the incomparable Robbie Robertson, guitar solos' sometimes took 3 to 4 seconds to reach us poor people sitting in the rafters.

Bruce creates democracy, whether you like what he's singing or not. The class envy I might have felt, perched in the cheap seats, which weren't so cheap by the way, dispelled by the hopeful energies of his music, his music being the main message: live your life as best you can; do good; realize the inherent struggle between the classes and that the socio-economic odds are no doubt stacked against you; choose tunes you can dance and party to by a ratio of three-to-one over tunes that have sad themes and require any sort of complex listening.

The people up in our neck of the woods stood for the most part, dancing around the small spaces we were allotted as The Boss and his fabulous band carried on down below. I turned my binoculars on the people sitting in the front row: some were transfixed,
some were dancing themselves, some looked like they were feeling nothing or that they really wanted to be up high where I was sitting or anywhere other than where they were. Later someone asked me what my favorite Springsteen song was and I answered, "Hungry Heart."