Springsteen Challenge Day 5: Favorite Bruce Photo

It’s day five, and today’s Bruce challenge prompt is: your favorite Bruce photo.

This is another prompt that I’m going to choose to define on my own.  I’ve been to more than a dozen Bruce shows in my lifetime.  I’ve been up against the stage, I’ve been in what I assume to be the furthest possible seat from the stage at Madison Square Garden, I’ve been three rows from the top of the Gund Arena in Cleveland, and I’ve been front and center on the Oval at Ohio State as Bruce was introduced by former Senator and Astronaut John Glenn.  I’ve seen Bruce close up and far away enough that I’ve got some phone pictures.  In fact, there is one phone picture that, when I sent it to my wife, who was working for the newsmedia in New York at the time, she had a friend make a comment “My friend may actually kill himself if he sees that photo.  Let me send it to him.”  But, that’s a story for another prompt.

Springsteen Challenge Day 4: Song that Cheers You Up

There are obvious contenders for this – I mentioned earlier how I used to listen to Thunder Road on the days where I came out on the losing end.  But, that was more a “I want something to remind me I can do this.”  It wasn’t a cheering up, so much as a reassurance.  I may be splitting hairs here to not duplicate prior posts, but I can only write from my thoughts, and I promise, I’m not trying to cheat on the Bruce Challenge.

Springsteen Challenge Day 3: Song that Makes You Sad

This is a prompt that I considered for a few minutes, because it made me think two things in response:

A)   What kind of sad? I mean, you can talk to me about the holocaust, or suicide, or hunger and malnourishment, and I become extremely sad about our world. But I can shake that off if need be. I can paste a smile over it, and it goes away by sheer force of will.

B)   This prompt very quickly becomes a literary trope.  I’ll explain momentarily.

Springsteen Challenge Day 2: Favorite Lyric

This is like choosing which finger to cut off.  There are so many fantastic lyrics.  The easiest way is to give a countdown from five to one, identifying the four that it’s not, but why they are in the top five.  To me, Bruce’s lyrics are poetic.  They are expressive in a way that gives meaning to many, while being written from the perspective of one.  Bruce is our modern American poet laureate, the common man’s voice; he’s blessed with the uncanny ability to tap in to the zeitgeist, transcending the rapidly changing American landscape, understanding the unique individuality we possess within our communal society.  He is politically liberal; so am I, but his struggles, his fitful anger against his own unhappiness with himself, and his look at the American landscape as he sees it.  So, while I don’t intend to make this a soapbox for my own brand of progressive politics, much of my connection to Bruce is that we see the world similarly, so there may be some political under/overtones.

Springsteen Challenge Day 1: Favorite Bruce Song

It was inevitable that I’d undertake the 30 day Springsteen challenge, and quite apropos – yesterday was the 30^th anniversary of the release of Nebraska, one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen albums – one that is dark, and brooding, and overlooked by casual fans.

The 30 day Bruce Challenge can be found, by the way, at http://fuckyeahtheboss.tumblr.com/post/908819375/30-day-bruce-springsteen-challenge

The 30 day Bruce Springsteen Challenge consists of 30 days of writing about your favorites with regard to Bruce Springsteen – song, album, moment, live performance, lyric.  All of them.  They’re in there.  I won’t completely rip off that website – click the link to see what each writing prompt is.  I’ll preview the following day’s post at the end of each post.  I’ll be writing these a few days in advance, so that, in case something happens, I don’t miss a day.