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I first heard a song by Bruce Springsteen while crammed in the back of a red 1989 Ford Explorer. It was April of my freshmen year of high school, and I was headed back with other schwetty boys from a tennis tournament in Houma, Louisiana. (I don’t recall the precise results of the draw, but I’ll assume that I won the whole thing.)

It was 1992, and the radio was set to a Top 40 station. In retrospect, it wasn’t a bad year for hit music: a variety of tunes and hooks from Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart” and Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” to Philly’s own Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” and “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot. Throw in one of the best novelty hits ever in Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy,” and Carl Weathers’ stew is going strong.

Springsteen’s new single, “Human Touch,” didn’t chart on Billboard’s Hot 100 for 1992, but it was the song that caught my ear in the back of the Explorer.

“Who’s that?,” I asked my fellow travelers. None of the other students had any idea, but my tennis coached chirped from the driver’s seat, “Bruce Springsteen. New song by him,” after which my tennis buddies groaned in unison, “Bruce Springsteen is so old.”

So, Bruce was old in 1992. He’s older now, but I myself have more years under my belt than Bruce did when he released “Human Touch.” Sobering stuff.

In the greater scheme of things, “Human Touch” isn’t a Springsteen all timer—more like a small pleasure—but it was a sub-optimum Boss song that hooked me from the start. His voiced carried a piercing directness, the tune rocked, and Bruce wasn’t afraid to sing about grown up stuff. I had never felt like a teenager when I was a teenager, anyway.

Since 1992, I’ve bought all of his albums, read all of the message boards, in the 2000’s collected hundreds of bootleg CD’s, and have seen Bruce Springsteen in concert between 20 and 30 times. I’ve tracked with him for a long time, and I was thrilled that through a ticketing miracle I was able to be present at the Wells Fargo Center on Thursday night when Bruce returned for his first concert with the E Street Band since 2016.

Thursday’s show is what I’m driving towards, but a little more background first. What do I love about Bruce? It was rock critic (and occasional Springsteen biographer) Dave Marsh who in the 1970’s remarked that only in this one artist do we find a combination of the songwriting sensibilities of Jackson Browne with the hard-driving rock instincts of Pete Townsend. Those artist comps are obviously a bit dated now, but the point remains. If you want singer songwriter chops, Bruce is one of the best. And if you want to prove it all night and rawk out, the Boss has your back with as much volume as you’ll ever need.

In addition to Springsteen’s being the complete package, I’ve always considered him to be a sort of Rosetta Stone of 20th century American music. So many threads of pop history run through him—folk, gospel, jazz, R&B, country, early and later rock and roll—that if you begin with Bruce, you can end up in any and every corner of your record store.

Two other ways in which I believe that Springsteen separates himself from other musicians. For one, he’s always held a strong and focused sense of artistic vision and purpose. Admittedly, for this same reason plenty of music lovers find Bruce insufferably self-important, but for the overwhelming majority of Springsteen’s recorded and performance career, I’ve never had to ask the question, “Why?” Sure, some albums, tours, and shows are more musically successful than others, but I best enjoy a work of art when I have at least some inkling of what the artist is aiming for. (This impulse is probably what drew me to Christianity later on in college: it’s a religion and worldview that unabashedly asks big why questions, and to me gives satisfying answers.)

There’s also Springsteen’s secret super power that was first noted in a Time magazine article that covered his 2002 The Rising, a record that explored our mess of feelings and impulses, our devils and angels after 9/11. The author of the Time piece penetratingly observed that even if you can identify lots of musicians that can do this or that better than Bruce, no one communicates empathy like he does. Yes, Bruce is a white dude, but his subject matters range more broadly than you might think—in his catalog, you’ll meet a young woman coming to grips with the fact that she’s settled on the wrong guy-and-life (“Racing in the Street“), a gay man dying of AIDS (“Streets of Philadelphia”), a migrant worker who has lost his brother in a meth lab explosion in California (“Sinaloa Cowboys”), and many more.

I don’t think you can truly love musical artists without truly believing, “They get me.” Millions upon millions of Bruce Springsteen fans, and not just fellow white dudes like me, have felt that about him.

Don’t forget the live performance piece of the Springsteen experience, too. While his first two albums in the early 70’s were fairly uneven affairs, the buzz nevertheless was building––“but you’ve got to see him live.” By this point, with Bruce having sweated out decades of marvelous shows, even many music types that care little for Springsteen’s music would allow that he’s one of the top live acts of the late 20th/early 21st century.

Famously (in terms of rock journalism), LA Times music critic Robert Hilburn was interviewing Springsteen in 1981 as he was in the midst of a tour behind The River. It was a softball question, “Bruce, why do you perform like a maniac on stage night after night? Why don’t you ever coast?” Still, Springsteen didn’t give a softball answer. He replied, “Well, I remember what it’s like to be in the audience. I love playing New York, I love playing Los Angeles, but I also love playing for that kid who’s in Cleveland and will never get to New York or Los Angeles. That’s what rock and roll is—a promise, an oath. To be as true as you possibly can at every moment.”

When I saw Bruce Springsteen in Philadelphia last Thursday, I couldn’t help but realize that perhaps that promise, that oath had been broken. It was by far the worst Springsteen show I’ve ever witnessed, and not at all because Bruce was too old or not in great shape. (He was.)

It was something else. I’ll process some more with you next week.

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