PRELIMINARIES: THE LINE

The morning the Meadowlands tickets went on sale I was in a parking lot outside a record store at the mall at 4:45 a.m. with a lawn chair, a thermos and the Sunday crossword from the week before. There were already about sixty people ahead of me. They handed out wristbands with numbers and then drew a random number to decide where the line started, which is fair and which I hate. My number came up near the back.

I got two seats for opening night anyway, high up and off to the side, and I was happy to have them. The other two nights came later, one through a teacher in my department whose brother-in-law couldn't go, and one from sitting on the phone with my thumb on the redial button for most of a Saturday. My wife says I have never once been that persistent about the gutters.

A note before the reports. I am not going to give you set lists, except for a few things I'm sure of from the first night. I didn't write them down, and the people who did have already posted them all over the Internet, and they would catch every mistake I made. These are about what it was like to be there.

Donnie and I have taught across the courtyard from each other since 1981. He grew up in Freehold, which matters to this report. We left the shore at three, stopped once on the Turnpike, and tailgated in the lot off his little hibachi with about twenty thousand of our closest friends. You could feel it out there. People were walking around grinning like it was the last day of school.

When the lights went down the noise was a thing you felt in your chest. And then the band was there, all of them, and Bruce counted it off, and they opened with a song most of us only knew from the box set, My Love Will Not Let You Down, which had sat in a can since the early eighties until it came out on Tracks. That was a statement. You don't open the homecoming with an oldie; you open it with something they kept in the drawer.

Three things from that night I'll keep:

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out. They stretched it out and Bruce used it to introduce the band, one by one, the way a preacher would introduce the elders at a revival, with a long tall tale about how they all came together. I won't try to retell it. When he got to Clarence the place came down.

Freehold. In the encores he played a song about his hometown, a funny, rough, loving song I had never heard. Donnie went quiet. He told me in the car that his father had worked in the rug mill there, and that he hadn't thought about that in years.

The end. The last song of the night was a new one, Land of Hope and Dreams. It's a big rolling train of a song, gospel underneath and loud guitars on top, the kind of song that leaves room for everybody in the building. They played it like they had been playing it for thirty years. Right before it they did If I Should Fall Behind with the band members passing the verses around between them, and if you know the history of those people you understood exactly what that was.

We got home at two. I taught summer school at eight. My students that morning learned a great deal about the Progressive Era, quietly, while their teacher drank coffee.

Bobbie is not a fanatic. Bobbie is a woman who has put up with a fanatic since 1977, which is its own kind of devotion. She came because the seat was free and because, she said, she wanted to see what I looked like when I wasn't grading.

From behind the stage you see a different show. You see Max's back working like a machine and the roadies handing guitars up in the dark. You see the band looking at each other, which you can't see from the front. That was the thing that got me. They kept looking at each other and laughing, like old friends at a reunion who'd forgotten they liked each other this much.

Bobbie's report, in full: the saxophone player is a big man, it was very loud, and she had a wonderful time, and she would like it noted that I sang along to every song, including the ones I claim not to like. I can't dispute any of it.

Michelle grew up in the back seat of a Buick with Born to Run on the cassette deck. She used to fall asleep to Jungleland on the way home from her grandmother's. She's a senior at Rutgers now, and she has always been polite about her father's music the way you are polite about your father's ties. This was her first show.

The last night of a run like that is its own animal. The crowd knew it was the last night. The band knew it. It ran long and nobody wanted to leave, not the people in the seats and not the people on the stage. At one point I looked over and Michelle was standing on her chair with her arms up, and I thought, well, that's it, it's genetic.

In the car on the way home she asked to borrow Darkness on the Edge of Town. I have taught for twenty-six years and I don't think I have ever been prouder of a student.

CONCLUSIONS

Twenty-five years ago I saw a kid in a bar in Asbury Park play like nobody would ever let him play again. This summer I saw a man nearly fifty play like he'd finally figured out that they would. The essential question for this unit was whether you can go home again. My answer, after three nights, is yes, if you bring the whole band.

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