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(Excerpt from "Reason to Believe: An Introduction to Backstreets Magazine and this Book" by Charles R. Cross in "Backstreets. Springsteen: The Man and His Music")
Yeah, it was great; it was magic; it was something. When Springsteen ended his third and seemingly final encore with "Quarter to Three," declaring himself "just a prisoner of rock 'n' roll," I remember distinctly thinking to myself, "This is the best concert I've ever seen in my life." By three encores I don't mean three songs as part of an encore set, I mean he left the stage on three separate occasions, only to be drawn back out by the applause... I was sitting in my chair completely exhausted. (It wasn't my chair, but I'd rushed the stage about three hours earlier and hadn't seen my chair since then, so who cared?) I'd been on 20-mile runs that had left me with more energy. My knuckles were bleeding, my ears were ringing like an errant auto alarm, and I was so hoarse from shouting that I sounded like Sally Kellerman with a head cold. I wasn't doing too much talking, though - my friends and I just sat there staring at each other, and there was nothing to say. There were about 200 people left in the hall at this point, and all of us seemed too confused or too tired to know what to do with the rest of the evening, maybe with the rest of our lives. I imagine we were all asking the same questions of ourselves: Just what do you do to follow this experience? Is there an encore in life that matches what we'd just seen Bruce Springsteen accomplish? We sat and pondered the answers while the roadies ripped down the speakers. I was lucky enough to grab the set list from the front of Springsteen's monitor - the set he'd drawn up had ended about two hours earlier, and the rest had been uncharted. The hall was silent as I read, since all the applause had ended ten full minutes earlier. Those of us who remained were just too tired to leave, so we sat and watched fat guys rip wires out of sockets and drop speaker cabinets. Then it happened. It was such a strange thing to see that I at first actually wiped my eyes to make sure it wasn't some apparition. From stage left, with a towel around his neck and carrying a guitar, Bruce Springsteen was running onstage. When I said before that there was no applause left, I meant there was absolutely no applause at all (almost everyone had left) when Springsteen came running onstage. He wasn't walking or sauntering, either, the way most performers would go onstage for an encore; he ran as if in some mad dash, like the character in the movie D.O.A. in a desperate search to locate an antidote that would be the only thing to save him from certain death. Not only did the sight of him stun me, but the whole audience watched in disbelief. I think they, like myself, were half expecting him to go up to the mike and announce that some horrible national tragedy had occurred, or that maybe he'd say, "The building is on fire, get the hell out of here!" But when he ran up to the only remaining mike stand, the one usually reserved for Steve Van Zandt, he started yelling and strumming his guitar. He wasn't yelling anything about a fire, though. He was unamplified, but I could hear him yell "Rave on!" Around this time the rest of the band started to waltz back onstage, and maybe 20 people in the crowd started politely clapping. Springsteen was already into the second verse at this point, which was a little strange since he had no amp for his guitar and "Rave On" is not exactly "This Land Is Your Land" when it comes to intimacy. Finally, Bruce pulled up and waited as the roadies madly dashed to get equipment plugged back in. Everyone - the band, the audience, the roadies - just sort of stood there for a while, looking at Bruce. And there he was, with a big grin. After three years of nasty lawsuits; after a time he described even ten years later as his own season of hell; after a three-hour concert that had exhausted even the hot-dog vendors; after it seemed he'd already said everything that could or should be said about rock 'n' roll; after all that, Bruce Springsteen just stood there with that stupid gap between his teeth, looking for all the world like the Cheshire Cat. It was one of the handful of times in your life - like your first kiss with the woman you'll eventually marry - when you know you are experiencing a moment that you will never forget. I've never forgotten that grin. I never will.
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