E Street Shuffle on an iPod Shuffle

Home to some of Springsteen's first concerts

Way back in the pre-iPod days, I would walk our family beagle around the block with a portable cassette player stuffed uncomfortably into my pocket.  My “Discman” was too vulnerable and required a flat, stable surface to function.  So I was stuck with the sturdier tape player and limited to the dregs of my parents’ small tape collection.  Luckily, I only needed one: Bruce Springsteen’s, “The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle.”

During dog walks alone, I must have listened to that album 100 times.  I’m especially partial to side two.  I don’t know exactly what “Incident on 57^th Street” is about, but I loved imagining myself in the rich setting of that song.  I would “drive in from the underworld,” hang out in back alleys next to worn down fire ladders, and plead with a beautiful Puerto Rican girl to make a better life for ourselves.  Of course, I’ve done literally none of those things and I probably wouldn’t actually want to do any of them.  Still, every time I hear that song I’m drawn in by the allure of that world.

I spent this past weekend in Asbury Park, New Jersey.  It’s a city filled with Springsteen lore and a place he references in album titles, song titles, and lyrics.  On Sunday morning, I abandoned my usual Colin Cowherd or Bill Simmons podcast during a run.  Instead, I threw on “The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle” and headed to the very boardwalk described in “4^th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).”  It was daytime.  There were no fireworks.  And I don’t think the “Tilt-A-Whirl on the South Beach drag” exists anymore.  It didn’t matter.  It was a sacred 47 minutes, and a wonderful reminder of the rapturous power of music.  Besides, it was much more comfortable to hear the album through a tiny iPod shuffle and not a clunky, falling-out-of-my pocket cassette player.

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