An actually living Springsteen holds up his guitar
Fans of Bruce Springsteen expected an exciting concert experience at Madison Square Gardens last weekend. But none of them were prepared for the biggest bomb of all, dropped from The Boss himself:
“Hey there, New York City!” the veteran rocker shouted out. “It’s great to be alive!”
He went on to play a three-hour set of his most beloved tunes. But for the audience, Springsteen’s news rocked them to their core.
“I guess I’m a little surprised,” said long time fan Ellie Carou after the concert. “Springsteen is my favorite musician of all time. And I went through a real grieving period back when I thought he was dead.”
Carou is only one of thousands of fans who were convinced that Springsteen had been dead for at least a decade.
“I seriously thought The Rising was a compilation album,” Carou said. “I mean, it sort of sounded like a bunch of B-sides from the ’80s.”
Other fans set his demise at different points in his career.
“Right around 1991,” claims die-hard fan Allan Perdot. “He went down in a plane crash on his way to Los Angeles.”
As for The Boss, he’s a little surprised at the reaction.
“What the hell?” he said the next day. “That was just something I threw out there. People thought I was dead? What did they think they were going to see at the concert?”
A brief survey of the post-concert crowd revealed that most of the attendees were prepared to see a hologram, “like will.i.am or something.”
“You know what? I never really thought he died,” confided Perdot. “I have a theory that he went into hiding and changed his name into Mark Knopfler. Or Jon Bon Jovi Mellencamp.”
Image credit CaBLe27 on flickr.com.
I think those of us in the group of 2,198,353 who went to the 2007-08 Magic Tour won’t get this joke.
In that case, could you explain it to those 2 million for me? Or if you like, we could split up the duties and take 1 million each. Afterwards you can come round and I’ll put on my live vinyl box set of Springsteen and the E Street Band.