A Springsteen concert is akin to a religious experience — but I don’t mean emotionally, I mean literally. It’s like going to church. He works the crowd like a Fundamentalist preacher, the congregation raises their hands in the air in supplication, there are call-and-answer periods with required responses from the congregation… It’s the Church of Bruce. And, hey, I’m a believer.

So it was a pretty good show. Not a great one, but the old joke about pizza and sex applies to Springsteen concerts too: even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. Which is not to to say the show was bad at all, it just wasn’t as good as others I’ve seen. He’s touring to support a new album (The Rising) and I’m a bad fan — I don’t have it, I’m not familiar with the songs on it — so he did some material I didn’t know (and didn’t like all that much), and most of the old stuff he played wasn’t my favorite old stuff. No Jungleland, no Racing in the Streets, no Thunder Road … but we got Darkness on the Edge of Town, we got Rosalita, we got Born to Run. Pizza. Sex. Springsteen.

As he was getting into his standard two and three encores, my fellow L.A. crowd members began to horrify me: they started leaving. This was Dodger Stadium, where leaving in the 7th inning is standard, but leaving early from Bruce??? I was aghast. Look, if you’re going to be that worried about getting stuck in traffic or being out late, maybe you should just stay home. It’s a concert — it’s going to go late, there’s going to be traffic. Accept it. Fucking amateurs… But it was comical to watch all the early-leavers spin around and sprint back to their seats (or try to talk their way back in if they’d already left) when he started playing Born to Run.

By the end of the night my hands hurt from clapping and my voice was raspy from cheering. Beth and I had a good time.

And the raspy voice came in handy this morning when I called in sick to work. Heh.