No Retreat No Surrender...

It's been a 2 month hiatus since I last published anything new here...perhaps I should have at least announced a break however it was non intentional...Simply, a day turned into a week...then weeks...and next thing I knew...2 months had passed...

I knew it was going to be an action packed 2 months but had lofty ideas of at least posting some random updates...In the end...it wasn't the lack of time as much as it was lack of focus, lack of direction, lack of energy, and lack of answers to my own questions...Unexpected changes in plans popped up as well...and then there was fear...Fear that where inspiration was being birthed was leading to the closing of a chapter...not only one chapter...but of many chapters...

Rewinding time back to October...

I was preparing to begin an onslaught of shows and travel plans with friends from near and far...I had been so looking forward to it...I had been in over-drive at work during the two months the tour was overseas in preparation for knowing I was going to be away from work for much of October and into November when the tour would end...October's plans began on the 1st-as I headed to Giants Stadium for the last 4 of the 5 shows to close out the stadium before the 'wrecking ball' came to town...October ended up including 9 shows and 17 days away from home...It was the beginning of a sudden shift in the tour where albums in their entirety were being inserted into the middle of the entire show...Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Born in the USA would all make stadium history...

The Born to Run album is iconic...to hear it live? Meeting Across the River into Jungleland? Oh good lord...what a sweet gem this was going to be...

But, I was excited to hear Darkness on the Edge of Town most of all...that would be the 1st of the 4 shows for me...It's an important album in the evolution of his career...it's full of the demons that tested him to be a man...and even though he wrote "Growin' Up" on his first album...Darkness is the album that forced him to really grow up...There was no turning back... and if we're all lucky enough, we too scrap with our own demons within inches of our lives...and fight to conquer ourselves...

I was least excited about Born in the USA; the weakest of the 3 in my book...and something about the fist pumping, pushing and shoving, beer spilling drunken frat boys who had invaded RFK stadium some 25 years prior during that tour just left me with something distasteful...Bruce had been catapulted into a superstardom and with it, had left behind much of what made him a poet...I always chuckled to myself when I said, "I forgive him for that album"...It would now be the finale' at Giants Stadium...and now, it made perfect sense...

Maybe it was my larger than life anticipation and grand expectations but Darkness turned out to be a tough sell to the drinking masses in a stadium...It's an incredibly intimate album...one I connect to alone...so the incongruency made perfect sense...It's like trying to have a candlelit dinner in the middle of a shopping mall a week before Christmas...Food & wine might be glorious...Atmosphere?...just all wrong...It would definitely be better the next time around in an arena...

Now, here's a slight detour ~

The following day, I was walking the perimeter of the stadium dodging wind gusts and waiting for friends to arrive...It's amazing that of the thousands of faces passing by...there's that 2% that are familiar...When I think about it, it's now been a decade since the Reunion tour...and ten years later...the shows have become the vehicle for many friends to have their own reunion of sorts...It doesn't seem to matter the time in between seeing one another...or the city or country...Once reunited...it's like we've never really been gone all that long...That familiarity and comraderie provides a unique sense of comfort...I know that should I travel overseas the next tour time...I have no doubt there will be friends who will help me find my way...

As I walked into the wind, my phone rang so I ducked into an alcove so I could hear...It wasn't my friends I was expecting but rather my mother...I don't know if it was the wind that sucked my breath from me...or the devil in disguise...Test results indicated that my 79 year old father had cancer...I don't recall much after that...it was as if someone was speaking to me in some foreign language...It wasn't making sense to me...they were all just words that my brain just couldn't wrap itself around...I was trying to make sense out of it but the fragmented thoughts racing through my brain was just stripping the gears...And to compound my confusion and shock...to hear my mother say that my father...who is the most level headed, forward thinking and wise individual I know...had resigned himself to death and was seemingly throwing in the towel...I was speechless...what do you say about the unknown...nothing. I wanted to say everything would be alright...but those were empty words of false promise...not to mention i couldn't get anything oout...other than I would call him the following day...For once, walking the parking lots waiting for a Bruce show just seemed so...inadequate...

Slowly I found myself again...my friends finally showed, 'normalcy' began to return and I decided to just let it all be for the night...Once in the stadium, I shared the news with a friend who I would travel with over the next month and a half...Maybe somehow..if I let it out, the words would unscramble...That evening...the stadium rocked...The show I had the least expectations for...ended up being liberating...It was a blessing that the Darkness album had been the night before...

I returned the following week for the final 2 shows...Collectively...those last 4 shows became a powerful chronicle for the archives...It was the beginning of an end...an end to something much larger than the end of Giants Stadium...an end much more significant than the tour coming to a close...It was the beginning of the end of the E Street Band as we know it...there were no guarantees they'd be back...For the finale'...they pulled out all of the stops...And although we were marking an end...the fireworks that lit the sky reminded us that this was about celebration, not sadness...Somewhere in there, I'd find the message...