Springsteen Parc des Prince Paris, France 27 June, 2008

While we were visiting my Dad and Sister and her kids we stopped into a Starbucks and purchased the newest cd production from Bruce Springsteen. David and I had both been big fans of Bruce’s in the 70’s, some of the eighties but had not really followed him in the past two decades. “Magic” has been on both of our playlists since that week.

iTunes says we have played “Radio Nowhere” 59 times – that’s just on the main computer – doesn’t count the iPods and the cd turning in the car stereo. Listening to him sparked our interest and we started looking for tickets. Lucky us we were able to snag tickets for his concert in Paris when we were planning to be there – after having scored tickets to see Radiohead in Amsterdam at the Westerparc. We had seen Robbie Williams Parc des Prince two years ago and now we were going to see Springsteen. We were really stoked. Our friend Jack and his sister Victoria had decided to join us in Paris during our stay and we kept asking them if they wanted to get tickets to the Springsteen concert – and they could never decide. So we were going to go by ourselves.

The morning of the concert Jack called us and said do you think you could get tickets – I’ve decided I want to come along. Well that was a tall order, but said we would try. We walked down to Les Halles to FNAC to see if there were any GA tickets left for the concert. And guess what there were. We bought one for Jack – Victoria being on crutches wouldn’t be able to attend. So we met up with Jack and took the metro over to the Parc des Prince later than we had gone to see Robbie – it was about 2 in the afternoon. There wasn’t a huge of a line, but there were plenty of people waiting and hoping to get into the stadium early enough to get a good spot in front of the stage. When we got into the line one of the security guards put a wrist band on each of our arms. Wow – we got wrist bands that allowed us to go into the pit area of the stadium – we were only 75 feet from the stage. We sat down on the hot plastic they lay out over the field so as not to ruin the grass and waited for the show to begin.

The videos in this slideshow were captured with a Flip camera. David got alot of footage of the show until one of the security guys came over and told him he had to stop filming. The third film David caught me talking on my Blackberry to Colleen in Palm Desert – I love it that I can be in Paris, in the middle of a huge stadium and talk with a friend in the US. It is an incredible world we live in. I was able during our time spent in Paris to upload videos for the Bravery to YouTube from our Paris apartment, take phone calls from the IT department at work when the servers were down and I was out walking around the streets of Paris with David, Jack and Victoria and talk to my Dad while we were out bicycling in the Le Bois de Boulogne. The last video in this slide show is of the crowd going down into the metro after the show.

The energy level of the concert was over stimulating. When he and the band played Candy’s Room I was filled with a great deal of wonderment. He played almost all of the songs from “Darkness on the Edge of Town”. I couldn’t believe it – here we were two decades later and he was playing the songs I felt the closest to of all his music. How had we come to this point in our life – where we were able to travel so far to see someone we both truly enjoy as a music maker. Luck is all I can think of as the answer. And we are both enjoying this luck as long as it will last. Who’s to say when it will run dry, but in the mean time we will continue to follow our dreams.

I have so much more to say about Bruce Springsteen and what a big difference he made in my life. “Darkness on the Edge of Town” came into my life when I was very unsure where my life would be headed. I was married at the time to my high school sweetheart and yet my desires and wants were not fitting into that world. The music from that album spoke to me about turmoil, about yearnings, about going to the edge. I was in a great deal of denial and anger, i was distroying myself inwardly and distroying the friendship i had with this woman I had been close to for almost 10 years. Everyone of the songs filled me up with different emotional experiences and I was so twisted in my head I couldn’t see them just as music and songs at the time. When we finally were able to make the decision to make the break things had been distroyed that could never be recovered – much like the destruction in the songs – at least I thought so at that time. I put Bruce’s music away from that point on because I just couldn’t see it as part of my new world and life. I occassionally listened to the LPs that we had and they just didn’t fit anymore. But when he sang those songs there on that stage that night I felt the music come back to me – felt that the past had been wiped away from the pure essence of his music and I was just overwhelmed.