Forgive me: Oh my bootleg news
I'm not as deep into collecting Springsteen bootlegs as I used to be.
I started midway through college and collected a couple hundred until easing off a few years ago. All of this was through downloading (which subverts bootleg profiteers, which the Bruce camp has tacitly backed), not buying (which helps the profiteers, earning the camp's annoyance and occasional legal chase). But the hobby got to a point where it was taking too much of my time. I quit vanity plates for the same reason.
The great sportswriter Giles Smith has a quote, which I posted on this blog once before, amid writer's block, caputured the Freudian nature:
What is it about small boys and completion? [Collecting cricket programs, if I recall Smith's story correctly] I could say I was displaying a precocious interest in the aesthetic of wholeness, but the truth is I was just being reposterously anal. Small boys are pushed that way by the makers of bubblegum cards, by the designers of petrol station promotions, by Stanley Gibbons [apparently it's a British stamp thing] and countless others who encourage us to "collect the set" and are never made to answer for the psychological implications of what they do.
All of this personal background is to explain to why I missed the news in December that Wolfgang's Vault, the great concert-archive site, has acquired the original tapes of one of Springsteen's killer 1978 Passaic shows and plans to restore, digitize and release the video in 2012. I hear the show isn't my favorite all-time bootleg (September 19, night one of the stand, booted as Passaic Night and as Piece de Resistance), but you have to imagine the subsequent night was damn good too.
But wait! You can do more than imagine. A beat-up, not-yet-restored copy of this video is online. It's damn good. Can't wait for Wolfgang.
