This is something that is seemingly difficult – would I want a guitar pick Bruce handed me, or maybe the hat in Bruce’s back pocket on the cover of the Born in the USA album, which I always thought was a rag. Upon closer inspection, it’s clearly a hat. What, really, is memorabilia? I don’t think a photo counts. Realistically, it’d be great to have a photo of Bruce with my wife and me – just hanging out, oh, hey, look, it’s Bruce Springsteen! Boss! Can we get a quick photo? Not right now, I mean, you look to be knuckles deep in that Quiznos hot and toasty sub, but just, whenever you’re ready to wrap up the other half and take it home for lunch tomorrow. Let me show you the inscription on my wedding band, and our save the date – you won’t think it’s completely creepy at all! That’d be awesome. But, I don’t consider personal photographs to be memorabilia. I consider things that have multiple copies made – it doesn’t need to be mass-produced, but it should be available to more than just the people who were there – those are memories.
The one thing that has eluded me thus far, that I wish I had, is something that I’ve mentioned here before. As I may have mentioned, either in person during one of my long, boring yarns that usually (always) goes nowhere, I have gotten in to Vinyl. In fact, my favorite piece of Bruce memorabilia was my One Step Up 45. For whatever reason, I just like the notion of owning vinyl. There’s something wonderful about the analog sound. The clicks, pops, and white noise are a part of the experience of listening to music. Further, vinyl requires care. One needs to wipe it down with water and a cotton cloth, handle it only by the center label and the outer edge, and avoid touching any part of the record with too much oil, grease, or dirt on your hands. What’s more, they aren’t making most records any more, and there isn’t a way to preserve the experience. There are a finite number of these pieces of nostalgia, and I own as many of Bruce’s releases on vinyl as possible for me right now. On my wish list are four specific albums – Live in New York City (which does not include most of the second CD; it’s a double LP album, but it cuts off after American Skin (41 Shots)), Greatest Hits (I’ve seen it on eBay, and it surprises me that it’s available on vinyl), The Ghost of Tom Joad (I like it. I don’t love it, but I like it.), and the piece of Bruce memorabilia that I most wish I had.
I’ve actually mentioned this item in a post that was NOT a “Springsteen Challenge” post. I did a few hundred words on the virtues of this item in a Springsteen Challenge post, and what I mentioned in the previous paragraph about the finiteness of vinyl is what makes this so coveted for me: The Rising LP. There are a few reasons why this is the piece of memorabilia I most wish I had, including my wish that I’d purchased it in the past.
The Rising LP is out of print. When it’s available on eBay, it routinely sells for over 150 dollars, some times as much as 200 dollars. It, obviously, wasn’t always this way. Here’s a seemingly non-sequitur story going back ten years. When I first moved to New York City to attend school at NYU, I got a work-study job in the library in Washington Square Park. I worked at the reserve desk, which meant I was the person nervous chem students would come up to three times a semester, like heroin addicts looking for a fix: “Do you have the Chem practice exam two? DO YOU?! WHY ARE YOU HORDING IT?!?!”
But, mostly, I sat, doing nothing, or re-shelving books. I always picked hours when the supervisors were out of the office, not that there was much to do anyway. From what I can remember, there were four or five full time supervisors that worked there. I don’t know what they all did, except for this woman named Maria. She was responsible for getting books from the upstairs stacks and putting them on reserve when a professor asked for them. Occasionally, she would accrue a list, and send someone upstairs. This was absolute screw off time, because Maria had no clue how long it took to actually pull books from the shelves (25 minutes to an hour, depending upon number of books. It took me at least an hour and a half each time); occasionally, when Maria wasn’t working, I’d say she left me a list of books to go get before she left, then I would go upstairs, wander around, and just pick out random books to put on her desk. I never knew what happened to those books. At worst, they were placed on reserve. At best, they were sent back upstairs. No one was the wiser, or maybe they just didn’t care.
For my meal breaks, I would head from Washington Square South to West 4th (they were the same street… just called different things at different places) and Broadway, and go in to Tower Records, a horribly expensive store, except for their sales rack, which seemed to be anywhere from 2/3rds to 3/4ths off. I bought U2’s the Joshua Tree album there after listening to a few of the songs on VH1’s I Love the 80s. I read a good chunk of the Tom Shales book “Live from New York” – the oral history of SNL, just by remembering what page I’d left off on, coming in the next day I worked, and picking back up. I wandered through the DVD section, especially the concert DVD section on the 2nd floor. I’d also meander through the country section on the 3rd floor (country music in New York City gets put away like it’s midget gimp porn in a regular Video store – it doesn’t go near the Disney movies – it gets put in the leaky attic propping up a roof truss.
One of the odd sections, I always thought, was the “Vinyl Albums” section. They still make albums on vinyl? That’s nutso! I’m sure, by now, you can see where this is going. One of the albums that always had three or four copies there was Bruce Springsteen’s the Rising album – it was new in 2002, and this was late 2002/early 2003. I say I kick myself for not buying this as though I’d walked halfway to the register, thought better of it, and returned it to the rack. That’s not the case. I had no interest in Springsteen, nor did I have a record player, or any appreciation for Vinyl. The simple fact is, I had the album in my hand, in the format I so cherish now, and I thought “Why the HELL would anyone want to listen to a vinyl album – SPRINGSTEEN of all people – when you could just buy the CD. And they don’t even have Born in the USA, or Born to Run! This is dumb.”
When I did get in to Bruce, Tower had closed down. Apparently having a pricing model that either completely molests your customers to the point of mockery, or undercutting your own profit margins with sale items that are popular is not exactly a fantastic business model. Even still, I wouldn’t have bought it – I wasn’t interested in vinyl until I bought my Born to Run album in 2006. And when I bought that album, I still didn’t really get in to vinyl until 2007 or so when I got a turntable of my own. When that happened, The Rising was available on eBay, readily, for $50 or so dollars. I thought that was too steep, and figured I could find it elsewhere. Like Obi-Wan about Darth Vader, I was wrong, and here I sit, wishing I had bought an album that I didn’t want and couldn’t play way back in 2002/2003, when I was making six bucks an hour doing my best to not work at Elmer Holmes Bobst library at NYU.
Tomorrow’s topic: The Song/Album that Turned You On to Bruce Springsteen. Giggity.
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