As someone who got to know Bruce around the time he was the biggest living rock star on the planet, Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ,  was not an easy bite to chew. Just accepting the fact that it was the same person who bawled out bigger-than-life rock ‘n’ roll anthems at gigantic football stadiums as the bearded weirdo who stared back at you from the back cover of the Greetings album took years.It didn’t help that one of the first Springsteen albums I owned - long before.... Read more

   

We survived the Mayan apocalypse, but if the tinfoil hats had been right and the world had gone poof from under our feet, 2012 wouldn’t have been such a bad year to be the last one. At least if you see it from a Bruce Springsteen fan point of view.After a two-year hiatus, during which Bruce was never really that far off the radar (can you say Darkness box?), in 2012 he was back with a vengeance. The highlights were as high as they were plentiful, and the big question that fans had asked.... Read more

   

2012 is turning out to be a great year for Springsteen books. I recently reviewed Marc Dolan’s excellent The Promise of Rock ‘n’ Roll; November will see the release of the authorized biography “Bruce” by Peter Ames; and in between those two we now have “Bruce Springsteen FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Boss” by John D. Luersson. What separates “Bruce Springsteen FAQ” from most other Bruce biographies is the characteristic.... Read more

   

Greasy Lake confucted an email interview with the author of Bruce Springsteen FAQ, John D. Luersson. Here are his replies to our questions. Greasy Lake: Why does the world need another Bruce Springsteen book?John D. Luersson: Bruce Springsteen FAQ is designed to be an entertaining reference book – one that hardcore fans can enjoy as much as passive fans. When I was quoted as saying “It’s the only Bruce book you’ll ever need” by Backstreets, it might have.... Read more

   

Which was the bigger surprise is hard to say, but yesterday two announcements were made that were both rather unexpected. One was that Bruce has added a final show for 2012 in Mexico City, and the other was that this Thursday he will once again take time out of his calendar to perform in support of Barack Obama, in Ohio and Iowa respectively.Bruce Springsteen has never played in Mexico in any shape or form. The country has never seemed to exist on Bruce’s personal world map, but that is.... Read more

   

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band are about to hit New Jersey again. When that happens these days the whole state knows it and a couple of percent of the population are present (all right, that would require no repeat customers and no out-of-staters, but still...) . Of course, it wasn't always so. Guest writer and photographer James Shives takes us back to a time when things were very different: the September 22, 1974 gig at Kean College and shows us some of his famous and not quite so.... Read more

   

 [Note: this review is based on a preview copy of the book. It is therefore possible that some of the information referred to in the book is not part of the published version.] When you’ve read as many Bruce Springsteen biographies as this Bruce Librarian has, you don’t often come across one that is full of new information and interesting facts and analysis. There’s rarely much true insight, and a lot of them contain more than a little repetition of Dave Marsh’s.... Read more

   

In my 24 years of seeing Bruce Springsteen live, it seems like part of what I’ve been doing is to try to get back to that night in 1988 when the 19-year-old me stood under the starry night in a stadium in Copenhagen and watched as “Twist and Shout” came to an end with 45,000 people dancing as one communal soul.Before last night I had tried to reach the same emotional heights more than 50 times. With the E Street Band, solo, the Sessions Band, and that other band. Not once have.... Read more

   

You would think it was 1967 and not 2012 when the police cut the sound of Bruce's show at the Hard Rock festival in Hyde Park last night. The show had run 30 minutes past the curfew, which to Bruce is standard procedure, but in London rules are rules. "Twist and Shout" had just ended. Paul McCartney had been on stage for it, joining Bruce for the first time ever in an intercontinental summit of rock 'n' roll legends. But even the presence of perhaps Britain's biggest rock star wasn't.... Read more

   

The Bruce world woke up this morning to a sensation. No, Clarence wasn't resurrected from the dead. No, Electric Nebraska wasn't released. No, Bruce didn't reunite Steel Mill. So what happened? Well, Bruce decided to spend a few minutes of the show last night in Barcelona playing a guitar solo as an intro to "Prove It All Night". But why is that a sensation? He usually plays several guitar solos during his shows. Not to mention that Nils Lofgren makes stadiums go wild with his.... Read more