Not afraid to badmouth the Boss

So, last night I attended my first indoor rock concert in 13 years -- the final night of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's Magic tour.

According to my newspaper's rock critic, whose review you can read here, the Boss "played nearly 30 songs and delivered many moments of joy and transcendence, including an encore for the ages."

This is why I am not a rock critic.

I like Springsteen, I really do. His music was a big part of the soundtrack for my high school and college years, although I must admit I sort of lost track of his career for several years until I married Jeff, who, like about half of the male baby boomer population of America, is a walking Springsteen encyclopedia. Over the 12 years of our marriage, I have become (not always voluntarily) re-acquainted with the Boss, so I was actually kind of looking forward to this concert.

Let me apologize right here to the three co-workers whose schedules were upended -- including one who came in on his day off -- so that I could attend this concert on a night I was supposed to be at work.

I hated it. Hated, hated HATED IT.

For starters, it got under way nearly an hour and a half late, on a Sunday night at that. Note to Bruce's manager and Kansas City's Sprint Center: Many people actually have real jobs that require them to be somewhere fairly early on Monday mornings. The acoustics at the less-than-year-old, supposedly state-of-the-art venue were atrocious. Second note to Bruce's manager and the Sprint Center: Many people actually have relatively acute hearing and don't particularly care for the eardrum-splitting pain that accompanied last night's "moments of joy and transcendence."

To save my ears and my sanity, I was reduced to roaming the concourses for much of the three-hour show, while Jeff and his baby-boomer cohorts (all of whose hearing was destroyed somewhere between Woodstock and We are the World) screamed and stomped and sang their hearts out.

You may not be aware of this, but a lot of drama takes place in the concourses of arenas during concerts. I witnessed at least one tearful breakup, one medical emergency and countless pitched disputes involving couples who apparently disagreed on the merits of attending a Springsteen show. Plus, I ran into a co-worker and spent 45 minutes or so getting caught up on industry-related gossip, so it was not a total loss (although, as an aside, I'm afraid my industry IS a total loss).

I even took a stroll outside the building for a while -- an excursion that was apparently so unprecedented that it took three arena security staffers to OK my exit with a promise that I show my ticket at the exact same door, to the exact same person, when I wanted to return. They simply couldn't understand why I wanted to leave, unless it was to smoke, so they tried to point me toward the gated-in area where the puffing pariahs were corralled. (I was reminded of an old Far Side cartoon in which a family is visiting the zoo and looking at an exhibit of shirtless, tattooed, overweight people puffing away on cigarettes in their cage. The sign on the cage: "Riff-raff.")

My little stroll brings me to another note to the Springsteen road crew and managers: Do you really need to have all seven of your motorcoach buses idling outside the concert venues for hour after hour while the show goes on, spewing greenhouse gases and pollutants into the atmosphere? Didn't I read somewhere that Bruce, who is rumored to be the opening act for Barack Obama at this week's Democratic convention, is concerned about environmental issues? Perhaps I was just hallucinating.

Lest you think I am a square, sheltered, overly sensitive middle-aged suburban mom who just can't handle a fun night out (well, OK, that's exactly what I am, but that's not the point here), please read some of the comments posted on the review I linked to above. I am far from the only one upset about last night's experience. And Jeff reported to me at 7 a.m. this morning (when my ears will still ringing), that one of our local Web sites for moms also was abuzz with some pretty unpleasant comments about the whole situation. (And no, I have no idea why Jeff reads our local mom site, at 7 a.m., no less.)

In looking back on it, I'm really not sure what annoyed me more: The late start, the horrible sound, or the money we ended up shelling out for the experience. You may recall from an earlier post that Jeff won the tickets, but once you calculate the nearly $100 we spent on baby-sitting ($12 an hour is what our sitter charges) and the money I will be docked on my paycheck for taking a vacation day that I haven't technically earned yet (my shift to part-time hours is the culprit here), it was a very expensive evening at a time when our financial situation is not the greatest.

I have to admit, though, that the one thing that bothers me most is simply this: Why did I wake up this morning feeling like I'd been run over by a truck, while Bruce Springsteen -- who, let's face it, is almost old enough to be my father -- apparently feels ecstatically good up there on stage night after night, city after city, all over the world, expending more energy in one concert that I do in any given six-month span??! How is this possible?

Maybe I just answered my own question -- I need to expend more energy. I'll never have what Bruce has in that department, but it probably wouldn't hurt me to hit the gym more than twice a week and walk Elijah to school more often.

Because if an aging rock-n-roller can leave me flat-out exhausted after a concert that I only halfway attended, something's wrong.

So thanks, Bruce. My eardrums may still be quiviring, but the rest of me is going to be better for this experience. It'll be Magic.