My Father’s House: A Moment With Bruce Springsteen

Winding from the entrance around the back of the building and down Sixth Street, the line at BookPeople on Thursday bustled with hundreds of people waiting to get a picture taken with Bruce Springsteen. The event, supporting his memoir Born to Run, allegedly sold out 1,200 tickets in one minute. I’m somewhere in the middle of the queue, trying not to throw up.

Everyone around me recounts their Springsteen memories – those who got to see him for the original run of The River tour, someone who flew with his daughter to Germany, etc. And once the line starts moving and people are flowing out, all of them elated, they keep saying one thing: “It’s just a quick moment – don’t blink, or you’ll miss it!”

Can a lifetime of Springsteen adoration compress into a fleeting exchange, especially for those of us who devoured his brilliant, enormous memoir like I did – in two sittings?

My family’s ardent love for Springsteen predates me by a longshot. When my mom was preparing to go to one of his shows back in the Eighties, my grandma Margaret, who loved him, told her, “I always imagine I’m that girl in the ‘Dancing in the Dark’ video!” Both my parents were obsessed.

I couldn’t tell you the first time I heard a Springsteen song, since I was fed a steady diet of the great American songwriters by my dad from a young age. The turning point came when I was 8. That’s when he decided to sell off all his records in favor of CDs.

My dad goes to Newbury Comics in Boston to buy his fill of new music every week, and has since he was in his 20s. He sold all those records to a kid in a pickup truck, but kept a handful of LPs – Springsteen’s iconic Born in the U.S.A. among them. Into an LP frame and onto the wall that went, and still sits, 16 years later. It said something very clear to me: There’s the way you love music, and then there’s the way you love Springsteen.

For The Rising tour, in the famously uncomfortable seats at Fenway Park, I finally got to see Springsteen with my parents and little brother. I was 11, without the vocabulary to articulate what was about to unfold, although I realized it was something wonderful. On the drive out of the city, my brother fell asleep, and I thought, “Man, that was really something,” put The Rising into my CD Walkman, and started re-living it immediately.

I grew up in the shadow of Springsteen’s blue jeans on that cover of Born in the U.S.A.. The music my parents loved slowly seeped into me, unshakeable even in my teenage rebellion and too-cool phases. Darkness on the Edge of Town, The Ghost of Tom Joad, The River – the bleak, Northeastern lonesome in his lyrics tethered me to my family, the way they grew up, the landscape of my home.

In line at BookPeople, everyone has those stories. Springsteen’s grown into such a rare and special cultural phenomena – unabashed positivity, vivacity, and proud adoration. Every person descending the stairs is met with a breathless, “How was it?,” and not a single one of them looks anything other than thrilled – or says anything other than, “Too quick!”

How do I sum up everything Springsteen represents to me and my family in five seconds? Everyone around me practices what they want to tell to him, their own long, personal legacies with the Boss’ music. Once on the stairs to get to the store’s third level where Springsteen’s taking all the photos, I try to figure out the best way to not fuck up this moment.

Nebraska was the last piece of the puzzle for me. Driving with my unfailingly kind college boyfriend, Sean, we argued over the playlist. Pale blue twilight, dirty snow on the sides of the slick roads; February in my New England hometown. My car, my rules, so I insisted I wanted to listen to whatever obscure basement jangle I was into at the time – the height of my art-school hipsterdom. Sean pushed for Nebraska, an album I’d never taken the time for.

Five seconds into the impossibly desolate opening harmonica and melancholic acoustic guitar, I was a goner, promptly and completely in love with both Sean and the album. We aren’t together anymore, but my love for Nebraska endures. It’s my all-time favorite album.

Which is what I end up telling Springsteen once I’m finally in the room with him. Or sort of end up telling him. It’s all garbled and high-pitched.

I inexplicably reach out for a handshake as he’s already putting his arm around me for the picture, which results in him holding my hand – his was rough and calloused, like a real working man – while also laughing and saying, “We’ll figure it out.”

Snap – quick picture – done.

I stutter out an idiotic, “Nebraska is my all-time favorite album, it’s the best ever, thank you so much!” He laughs, undoubtedly a professional at handling this sort of mania, and that’s it. Not much of anything, really, but by the time I’m out in the parking lot (I think I blacked out getting from the third floor to my car), I realize I’m shaking, probably too giddy to drive, totally hyper about a fleeting moment.

I pull out my cell phone to call my parents. I need to wait ’til I feel like it’s safe to drive. When my mom answers, she gets it immediately.

“I remember the first time I heard Bruce Springsteen!”