Sunday, November 11, 2007

This week's column:
Has Springsteen met his Montana?


I’m always looking for ways to bond with my 8-year-old daughter, Jackie. I used to do this by helping her with her homework, until it got too hard for me: Her most recent assignment was to devise and write out her own word problems and then solve them using complete sentences, which I believe is the prerequisite for a PhD in applied mathematics.

Luckily, a new common interest has come up: Our love of music. Not that we love the same music, but it just so happens that her favorite artist and mine currently have the top two tours in the country — I’m talking of course about Hannah Montana and Bruce Springsteen. (And for those of you who think the top tour is Van Halen, all I have to say is that even when he’s 75, I will keep my daughter away from David Lee Roth at all costs.)

My fixation on all things Springsteen, and in particular with seeing him in concert, dates back to the early ’80s, when as a young teen I had a chance to see him with a local youth group. Unfortunately, my parents nixed the idea based on the fact that the bus would get back basically in the middle of the night. “Besides, you just saw that Huey Lewis,” they pointed out. Since then I’ve been searching for a rock critic who has said, “I have seen rock ’n’ roll’s future, and its name is Huey Lewis,” so the scars can start to heal.

For the rest of this week's AT LARGE by Peter Chianca, click here.

And to visit my new Springsteen blog, click here.

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