Employee of the Year(s)

NOTE: This blog originally appeared February 26, 2005

I can remember riding in the car with my dad; I couldn’t have been much older than eight or nine, when what should have been just another classic rock song on just another classic rock radio station, came on.

The music was so vibrant, so much larger than life and it caught my ear. The singer belted the tune with so much force, yet so much agony as if it were carried straight out of his soul. And it jumped straight into mine. Though I only caught but a few phrases, something about “runaway American dreams” or being “born to run,” I had to have a name to go with this musical discovery.

“Dad,” I asked. “Who is this?” “Son,” he answered. “That’s The Boss.” The Boss? I later came to know The Boss as Mr. Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen made quite a trek to rock and roll stardom from the backstreets of Freehold (his birthplace) and Asbury Park, New Jersey. He grew up in a family similar to many normal middle class clans around America, which would later become his staple for songwriting. But Springsteen never had to fabricate any of his stories that were made into songs.

He lived every one.

That was another reason I have almost all of The Boss’s albums. His sense of down-to-my-side-of-the-globe realness is a factor of why Springsteen has a place on my wall back home. No other poster comes close to touching it. Springsteen, although he was old enough, never went to Vietnam.

I thank God he didn’t, because in the turbulent early 1970’s Springsteen was laying down the tracks that would start his triumphant stand as “Rock’s Savior.” I know full well he saved what little relationship my father and I had together. As an eight or nine year old boy, when my father and I were alone, it seemed we didn’t have much to say to each other. I guess we just didn’t relate on many things. But all that was needed was for my dad to pop in his cassette version of “Born in the USA,” and that got us talking.

Home, and my dad, are hundreds of miles of road away. But with The Boss at hand, he’s never more than a couple tracks off.