The Day I Met The Boss
I swear I wasn't that far from highway nine
I think the adage “Never meet your heroes” is generally good advice. I can’t say for sure, though. I haven’t met many of mine. Except one time. When I was in high school, I had a chance run-in with my greatest musical hero. It made me think that maybe some of our heroes are worth meeting.
I originally wrote this story for
’s publication Jagged Time Lapse. Since I’m on vacation right now, I thought it would be a great time to share it here. As always, this newsletter is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or click play at the top of this page.Sprung From Cages on Highway 9
I had the weird situation growing up where getting a cavity wasn’t that bad. Sure, nobody wants a cavity. And getting one filled isn’t pleasant. But my dental visits were usually coupled with a trip to the beach.
Though I lived in a northern New Jersey suburb with many pediatric dental care options in close proximity, my sisters and I went to a dentist just over an hour-and-a-half away from our house. While these trips were of course for the benefit of our teeth, they were also for the benefit of our mom. One of her best friends was a pediatric dentist on the Jersey Shore. In short, we’d make the long trip to get our teeth cleaned so my mom could see her friend. Then as a reward, we’d drive a bit further to either go to a beach or a boardwalk arcade.
We made one of these trips in August 2010. It was a sweltering summer day, and I needed to get three cavities filled. “We’ll go to the dentist,” my mom told me, “and then we’ll go to Manasquan to pick up your sister.” My little sister had been down in Manasquan — a tiny seaside town — spending the week with her friend’s family. The plan was to go to the dentist, spend the day on the beach, and then drive home with my sister in tow.
After the uneventful cavity-filling, my mom and I got to the beach around 12:30. I was happy to see that my friend Mike was there. He was my sister’s friend’s brother. After swimming for a bit, I decided to relax among the circle of mothers while Mike went to surf near the inlet.
His mother quickly began to bug me. “Chris,” she began, “go get Michael James out of the water.” She always referred to him by his full name. “He’s been in there for too long. I don’t want him to leave you here by yourself.”
To be clear, I did not care that my friend was surfing. But I knew his mother would keep pestering me until I went to retrieve him. So, I got up and headed toward the surf. Nameless faces passed me by as I mozied along. But one caught my eye. “That looks like Bruce Springsteen,” I thought to myself.
I had heard Springsteen’s music for years, but I’d only been fanatical about it since my dad had shown me an acoustic version of “Growin’ Up” a year prior. And when I say fanatical, I really mean it. Overnight I went from having a passing interest in The Boss’s music to needing to hear every note he’d ever recorded. That fanaticism led to me seeing Springsteen and his mythology in everything. In fact, just a few months before, my friend and I were convinced we saw Springsteen’s guitarist Nils Lofgren walking out of a Goodyear Tire near where we lived despite the fact that Lofgren did not reside in The Garden State. In other words, thinking that some middle-aged man walking down the beach was Bruce Springsteen was par for the course. Plus, why would a multimillionaire rockstar be on the public beach?
Then I walked ten feet further. “Did you see Bruce?” a random man stopped to ask me. I didn’t answer. I turned around and ran back to the circle of mothers. “Mom,” I shouted as I approached, “Bruce is on the beach!” My mom flew out of her beach chair with the same fervor that I’d approached. We went bounding down the sand to find The Boss talking to a few fans. After they shook hands and parted, we stepped up.
“Bruce,” my mom started, “my son is such a big fan. He wants to be a musician.” I was awestruck. “Thank you for the music,” I croaked. “No problem,” he responded with a chuckle.
My mom, a woman who has never been at a loss for words, continued on: “While we were driving down here, we were listening to ‘Born to Run’, and my son asked if we could drive down Highway 9 because you mention it in the song.” She wasn’t lying. I was a born-to-run-a-holic at the time. And I loved seeing the local sites that Bruce mentioned in his songs.
He chuckled again. “If you look, you’ll find it,” he intoned in a rasp that felt all too familiar.
And that was it. Bruce shook my hand and walked into the water. My mom and I headed back to our spot in the sand in a daze. I’d just met my hero. And he was so normal. And he’d given me a mysterious piece of advice: “If you look, you’ll find it.”
Those words banged around inside my head. Bruce was often searching for something in his music. What was he telling me to look for? My teenage brain couldn’t stop thinking about it as the sun crawled across the sky. And any chance there was of getting my mind off of the six-word statement was stymied by the fact that Bruce was sitting nearby.
What I was witnessing was the paradox of Bruce Springsteen. Though you knew that selling millions of records and touring the world made him fabulously wealthy, you still sort of believed that when he got offstage, he clocked in at the local steel mill. And he’s well aware of this perception. In fact, he acknowledged it near the beginning of his one man show, Springsteen on Broadway:
I've never held an honest job in my entire life. I've never done any hard labor. I've never worked nine to five. I've never worked five days a week until right now. I don't like it. I've never seen the inside of a factory and yet it's all I've ever written about. Standing before you is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which he has had absolutely no personal experience. I made it all up.
As I watched Bruce and his kids drive off in a pickup truck later that day, this Springsteenian deception was on full display. “There goes a normal guy,” I thought to myself, despite the fact that he was likely headed back to a mansion paid for by songs about things he’d never experienced firsthand.
And there’s not really anything wrong with that. Art doesn’t have to be autobiographical. I don’t think you’d enjoy reading Shakespeare any more or less if you found out that The Bard didn’t experience Hamlet’s existential dread and Macbeth’s lust for power. It is fascinating that we can hold these contradictory images of Springsteen — the world famous rock n’ roll shaman and anonymous, working-class everyman — in our head at once, but it shouldn’t affect how we perceive his art.
A few days later, I was recounting all of this to my friend Tom. Like me, he was intrigued by Bruce’s seaside directive: “If you look, you’ll find it.” We pondered the short statement for a bit and then parted ways. Later that night, I got a text from Tom. “We’re so dumb,” the text said. “I think all he meant was that if you look on a map, you’ll see the road is there.”
I walked to the family computer and punched “route 9 nj” into the search bar. Indeed, it was there. All 167 miles of coastal roadway. Sure, Bruce Springsteen might be some irresolvable musical contradiction. But he also might be something much simpler: a rock n’ roller singing about the people he met and the places he saw.
A New One
"My Hometown" by The Bones of J.R. Jones
2024 - Americana
As a big Springsteen fan, I’m happy that his music gets covered often. What I’m not happy about is that when artists choose to cover his work, they frequently stick with one of three songs: “Dancing in the Dark”, “I’m on Fire”, and “Atlantic City”. I’m begging artists to pick other songs. Those three are great, but Springsteen’s catalog is so much deeper.
With that in mind, you can imagine that I was quite happy when I saw The Bones of J.R. Jones release a cover of Springsteen’s “My Hometown” on the deluxe version of their most recent album, Slow Lightning. “My Hometown” isn’t even one of my favorite Springsteen songs. But anything is better than someone else singing about how you can’t start a fire without a spark.
An Old One
"Protection" by Donna Summer
1982 - Rock
In 1982, Donna Summer would release her 10th studio album. I mention it here because Springsteen wrote a song for it. When he was approached about working on the album, he initially put together a song called “Cover Me”. His manager John Landau convinced him to keep that one for himself. It would later crack the top 10 as a single from his album Born in the U.S.A. His second attempt, “Protection”, did end up making Summer’s record, though.
“Protection” is a fast-paced rock number that was also allegedly close to making Born in the U.S.A. While Summer’s vocal is powerful, the song is most notable for being a who’s who of 1980s pop music. Members of Toto played the instruments. Quincy Jones helmed production. Springsteen even ripped a solo and sang back-up vocals. If you ignore “We are the World”, I think this is the only time Quincy Jones and Bruce Springsteen ever collaborated.
Shout out to the paid subscribers who allow this newsletter to exist. Subscribers get four additional newsletters each month and access to our archive. Consider becoming a paid subscriber today!
Recent Paid Subscriber Interviews: Royalty-Free Music • Big-Time Concert Promoter • A CEO Becomes a Rockstar • Running an Independent Venue • John Legend Collaborator • Broadway Star • What It’s Like to Go Viral • Adele Collaborator
Recent Newsletters: Diss Tracks & Answer Songs • I Miss You, Buddy Holly • Blockbuster Nostalgia • Pop Songs & Baby Names • Recorded Music is a Hoax • On Dying Young • Selling Out
Want to hear the music that I make? Check out my latest single “Late Nite Kicks” wherever you stream music.
I met Bruce on a beach once. Well, not exactly, I’d been on the beach relaxing before his gig in Brighton, England on ‘The River’ tour. I went for a stroll and he was leaving The Grand Hotel IIRC. There were only about five of us holding him up and the conversion was entirely around the songs he might play later. His answers were mumbled and brief. “Yes, we might do that one.” “No, not tonight.”
Obviously the gig itself was unforgettable.
I ate fried chicken with Syl Sylvain