Are We All Wrong About Bruce Springsteen’s Legacy?
Fifty years ago, Bruce Springsteen released his first album, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.,” named for the beach town 20 minutes up the Garden State Parkway from my family’s summer house in the Pine Barrens. Every June, on the way to our place, we’d pass the Jersey Freeze stand in Freehold where Springsteen took his children for ice cream. But we didn’t turn off the highway to visit the town in the title of his landmark album. Asbury Park was a sad, rundown place that had been losing visitors for years to spiffier spots like Long Beach Island. But Springsteen and I had things in common besides our Jersey Shore roots. One was that we’d both been seen as discipline problems at our Catholic elementary schools. As Springsteen has often recalled, a nun at St. Rose of Lima School stuffed him into a garbage can because, she said, that’s where he belonged.I cared enough to ask a taxi driver, while I was on a reporting assignment near Asbury Park, to swing by the Stone Pony, so I could see the bar where he and bandmate Clarence Clemons started out. I listened with amusement when, at high school reunions, classmates boasted of knowing someone “who knew someone who was in a band with Clarence before E Street.”
0 Comments