A Jersey Girl and the Poet Springsteen

This story about a rock star begins with a crumb bun. Well, a crumb muffin. I came down to breakfast this morning and there was a crumb muffin on the counter. Reader, I know you, like me, would never take a bite of that muffin, but that one big crumb on top that looked as though it would fall off if given just enough encouragement. How about that? Of course, to save the counter from the messiness of it all, you are duty bound to pluck that crumb and plop it on your tongue.

And with that morsel of remembrance and this week's New York Times, the journey to Giants Stadium and the last Springsteen concert to be played in its doomed walls begins. The crumb had a hard and mixed sweetness, the taste of so many mornings back when I was growing up in New Jersey, when my weary factory worker dad would celebrate Saturdays by getting up at 7 a.m. instead of 6, and driving to the Newark bakery he favored.

By the time I rose there would be the aroma of coffee, the scent of bacon and the seduction of crumb cake in the kitchen, and we would have our only time alone all week. Country music on the cardboard radio (it's here in my office as I write), 75 watts of un-recessed lighting above us and dad whistling as he fried the eggs in butter -- as deft as a dancer, and as light on his feet as he wasn't on the scales or in his heart.

Bruce Springsteen played the last concert ever to be played in Giants Stadium on Friday, October 9. The Stadium is slated for demolition this year. In Monday's Times the discerning Jon Pareles wrote reverently of the moment without reviewing the music at all. That's as it should be, because even those of us who weren't there know the music was ancillary to the event though probably anthemic and pitch perfect. It had to be all about the words and therein lies the confluence of memory and one man's songs and the irony of it all as well.

For the rest of the country, Jersey is a long-running joke about refineries, highway exits, the mob and worse. Conan O'Brien has condensed the whole state into a mockery of a decaying Newark and its failed dreams. (The genial and brilliant Ivy-league educated Mayor Booker is holding his own in presenting the real picture.) New Jersey is synonymous with inarticulateness, with rage, with ugly belching tanks and endless macadam. And yet night after night 75,000 people have packed its largest arena to listen to the poetry of a man who speaks for them with a plain spoken eloquence, to listen to the modern-day equivalent of that other Jersey bard who just happens to be the grandfather of American poetry, Walt Whitman. He's a superstar who grew out of the same zeitgeist that spawned them and their ambitions. And though we know he's got the brainpower of any Mensa member and the energy of the CERN Collider, he's everyman and that's what matters.

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Comments

[JR Jake]

Bruce (The Boss) has always been a big fan of mine, of course more when I was using and abusing but that was not his fault by any stretch. I have liked the passion he exhibits for causes many don't or won't touch. I guess that is his Jersey roots because most people I have met, and called friend from that area have that same passion for life and others. He is a poet, a master at his craft, and he does things based on his terms. Somehow he has been able to maintain his stance and not offered up himself to elitism. That can be taken many ways, but to view the man you notice those things. Good luck Bruce I am just sorry I never got to see for real in concert.

[mikeodd]

A forklifts worth of kudos for a poignant, appropriate post. So Proustian, yet so quintessentially Jersey!!
I've noticed that after listening to Bruce many other artists sound completely full of s**t in comparison.
I was lucky enough to see the 2nd to last show at Giants Stadium and I'm still gushing about it.
Pure magic.