My name is Steve Todd. I'm 49, and I have taught United States history at a high school in Monmouth County, New Jersey, for twenty-six years. My students know two things about me before the first week is out: I will not accept a paper without a bibliography, and I will relate anything, the Missouri Compromise, the Teapot Dome scandal, the interstate highway system, to Bruce Springsteen if given an opening.

This summer the E Street Band came home on their first tour together in eleven years, and I was there for three nights of it. So I've written it up the only way I know how. Consider this a supplementary unit. There will not be a test. There will, however, be grades.

I. BACKGROUND

I first saw Bruce in the summer of 1974 in a club in Asbury Park, a few blocks off the boardwalk. I was 24, a year out of college, and I'd gone because a girl I was seeing said there was a local guy worth hearing. I don't remember her last name. I remember the show. It went on for well over two hours in a room that held maybe three hundred people, and the man played like it was the last night anybody would ever let him play anywhere.

The band was different then. The drummer and the piano player that summer were Ernest Carter and David Sancious, and they left that August. Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan came in that fall, and the next year was Born to Run, and Bruce was on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week in October 1975. Everybody I knew acted like they had discovered him personally. I'm no different. I'm just more honest about it.

Then, after Tunnel of Love and a long world tour, Bruce let the band go in the fall of 1989. There was a short reunion in 1995 to cut a few new songs for the Greatest Hits record, and that was it. Ten years. I saw him with other musicians in 1992 and by himself on the Tom Joad tour, and both were fine shows, and both times I kept looking to the left of the stage for a saxophone that wasn't there.

II. KEY FIGURES
Students should be able to identify each of the following.

III. RECENT EVENTS
A brief chronology, November 1998 to the present.

November 1998: Tracks. A four-disc box of sixty-six songs Bruce recorded and didn't release, going back to his audition tapes. For a fan this is what the Dead Sea Scrolls would be to a theologian. I gave it to myself for Christmas a month early and played it in order, one disc a night. Then in the spring came 18 Tracks, a single disc of highlights plus a few others, including a new recording of The Promise, which people like me had been hunting on bootlegs for twenty years.

Monday, March 15, 1999: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bruce was inducted at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. I watched what I could and read the rest. Here is my one complaint, and I'll make it politely: the band was not inducted with him. In my classroom we call that leaving out the primary sources. Someday the Hall will fix it.

April 1999: Barcelona. The reunion tour opened in Europe on April 9 and went around the continent for two months while those of us at home read reports off the Internet at two in the morning.

July 15 to August 12: The Meadowlands. Fifteen shows at the arena in East Rutherford, every one sold out. The sign out front says Continental Airlines Arena. It will be the Brendan Byrne Arena to me until the day I die. I went to three, and I wrote them up as field trip reports: read them here.

This fall. They are out on the road around the rest of the country. If they come anywhere near you, go. Bring your kids. Bring your parents.

A note to my students, should any of you find this: I keep a list of every song title that has turned up in an essay of yours on the Gilded Age. It is long. I am impressed and I am also on to you.