I became a Springsteen fan at age 11 when my summer-camp counselor, Matt Rosengart, took me under his wing. This probably had something to do with my bunkmates, a ragtag collection of future bully fodder who enjoyed sketching and listened to the Dead Kennedys (“Holiday in Cambodia,” “Too Drunk to F*ck,” etc.). These kids had entered their tortured-adolescent phase even before their balls had dropped. We didn’t have a lot in common.
Matt was a jock and had a way-cute girlfriend, which established him in my unshaped mind as the greatest role model ever to tread the camp’s clay-dirt roads. So when he preached the virtues of Springsteen, I listened. That summer, I heard the Darkness on the Edge of Town record roughly 65 times over 8 weeks and Born to Run 41 more. In the years since, I’ve multiplied those totals many times over, shoving the records down the throat of anybody unfortunate enough to cross my path.
So last night’s show at the decrepit Count Basie Theatre in Jer-Z, when Bruce performed both albums back-to-back, had a everything-comes-full-circle feel to it. I’m not sure whether it was the music or the alcohol that triggered my sentimentality – it was probably the coda to “Racing in the Street” more than anything else - but I woke up today wanting to Google my long-ago camp counselor and thank him for being a pretty OK guy. Maybe I’ll even check for evidence that my former bunkmates survived high school. The mastheads of magazines like Monocle would be the first place to start my search.
