Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: this is a great Springsteen story:

"Thirty years ago this fall, Bruce Springsteen released his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey. I knew from whence he greeted, having grown up in the same state a few years behind him. One of Springsteen's teenage bands, the Castiles, had been the entertainment at my friend Doug's eighth- grade graduation party; so when Columbia Records sent the twenty- four-year-old and his new group, the E Street Band, on a tour of midsized Northeast colleges to promote his record debut, Doug and I decided to see him in concert at Seton Hall University, an event conducted for a couple of hundred people in the cafeteria of the student center. I still recall much of the show--the kaleidoscopic original tunes, the party-song oldies such as "Twenty-Flight Rock," a funked-up Dylan cover ("I Want You")-- and one moment most vividly: About midway into "Spirits in the Night," one of the more soulful numbers on that first Springsteen album, he broke a guitar string. (Springsteen was the only guitarist in his band at the time.) He signaled the rhythm section to vamp on the tune's slow shuffle pattern, and he launched into a monologue, swaying in time as he told a sweet, funny tale about getting his first guitar and trying to learn how to play it while his father, who hated the instrument and everything it represented, tried to smoke the boy out of his bedroom through a heat vent in the floor--nonchalantly restringing the guitar as he talked. He finished the story and had the string tuned on beat, right on time for the band to kick in for the final chorus. The audience, small as it was, roared. Springsteen had simultaneously endeared himself to the crowd as a regular guy and thrilled them by proving that he was no such thing. "