From Peter King today in his MMQB article on
www.si.com “I just do what I do, and don’t worry about being famous. Being famous, in itself, means nothing.”
—Bruce Springsteen, 40 years ago Friday (April 1, 1976), to The Post, the student newspaper at Ohio University, on the occasion of his concert stop at the school’s campus in Athens, Ohio. He made the comment while touring the uptown bars on his trip, Heineken in hand.
That was my first Springsteen show, out of about 23. I was a freshman at Ohio U. The ticket was $6. It was general admission seating in the on-campus Memorial Auditorium, and we got a taste of why general admission seating at a concert was a dumb idea. I got in line for the show at about 4:30 (for an 8 p.m. show), and when doors opened just after 7 p.m., there was a surge to the front, and we were carried along, like it or not, with this tightly packed crowd of people. One of the heavy wooden doors got ripped from the hinges. Once inside, I ran down the left aisle and got the aisle seat in the third row—I’d say about 20 feet, as it turned out, from Clarence Clemons. A fun night. I remember “Backstreets” most of all, and returning to my dorm on the West Green afterward and annoying the crap out of my roommate by immediately playing both sides of “Born to Run” on the turntable in our room.