My wife came across an online advert for concert tickets for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performing a short drive away at the Mohegan Sun Arena. Officially, the show is sold out and these are 'second hand' tickets so to speak being sold by supposedly private persons vice Ticketmaster. I'd love to go, but based on the North of $8000 ticket prices for (way) upper balcony seats (=about five mortgage payments), I just sort of sighed.
When both he and I were much younger men I used to catch him, as "Bruce Springsteen," as "Steel Mill," and as "Doctor Zoom and the Sonic Boom" on many Friday nights at The Ledge which was the Rutgers University's commuter students lounge and one of the ugliest glass and concrete structures to be found anywhere on the banks of the Old Raritan.
You paid a buck and got in. Beers were a quarter, PBR if I remember correctly and no one seemed especially concerned about IDs of any kind even as Jersey was transitioning from a legal drinking age of 21 to 18 and then a few years back to 21.
Anyway, brew in hand, we checked out the stage and there he was, the same guy under a different name we'd seen the previous Friday. Could not have been the easiest way to make a living as a musician in 1970/71 and a lot of us bought his debut, "Greetings from Asbury Park" as a reflex loyalty reaction.
There were, I'm sure, a lot of long road trips with restive audiences there to see the headliner and not the 'future of Rock and Roll' as Jon Landau called him, and gigs where the promoter shorted the band on the gate but once Born to Run hit the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week, it was high clover. Pretty happy to see it all worked out for him.
That's why I think I was, and am, kinda pissed about the controversy surrounding the ticket prices for the current tour, though I'll admit my anger is a little overly dramatic since I'm not buying tickets so I'm not paying those prices. But I had my annoyance under control until I got this email:
So be of good cheer (and full wallet): if you can't afford tickets for the show(s) for just $12,99 a month (plus tax where applicable) you can listen to each night's performances. And the 15% off CDs and downloads is an especially nice touch; the only thing missing is 'limited time only,' but isn't all of life here on earth just that in the first place?
Just how much money is too much? I don't know but one thing I do know is you remember being hungry long after you've told them to take away the dessert cart.
-bill kenny
No comments:
Post a Comment