About that left-turn at Albuquerqie...

Madame Marie's Temple of Knowledge, Asbury Park Boardwalk

Bruce Springsteen used to busk outside her booth in '66, when he was a skinny, knock-kneed punk of 17. Seven years later he tipped his hat to her in "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)."

Part of what has me questioning the proffered generosity of our Digital Content Overlords (aside from the increasing pressure of their collective knuckle to my ribs) is the thought of Mm. Marie patiently putting up with this hippy kid who's strumming and yowling outside her booth.

He's a young pup, and he is not, goddammit, going to end up like his Old Man -- mean, embittered, cruel, utterly miserable about everything in his life. This guitar, the one thing that makes this kid feel unequivocally alive, is going to be his highway out.

Seven years later, he's got a band and they're completely on-board with what he's after. He gets signed, and they enter the studio. It's time to consider the brand. The tendency in album art is to place the performer at some remove from the listener, emphasizing the exotic and esoteric nature of the content -- you're not here, but you could be. Springsteen's move? A postcard from the armpit of America -- a place that smells like cigarettes, stale popcorn and beef tallow gone rancid.

He places a similar emphasis on the art for the next few albums, and although The Wild... and Born To Run flirt with glamour/respectability their interior art most emphatically eschews it. And just a glance at Darkness on the Edge of Town is enough to get the smell of the young man's armpits permanently entrenched in the viewer's nasal corridors.

The project continues apace, with the album art matching the content intent for the next nine years.

But by 1987 finding that sweet-spot match-up is proving elusive.

"I've traded up from patchouli oil, for one thing."

At this point he is not just a wealthy man -- he is beyond stinkin' rich. He could go the route of some of his contemporaries and quit the struggle for original material, heading out on the road every few years with the same group and trotting out the same hits everyone wants to hear all the freakin' time. He could staff his road-show with hundreds of codgers just like his Old Man and throw 'em a few extra peanuts just for kicks. But he keeps reaching for the pulse that drove him here.

Twenty years later, his latest thing is a protest song.

And it's not really his, he's helping out a buddy -- a hard-working guy who's roughly the same age, doing what The Boss does, except he's putting his shoulder to the wheel every damn day of his adult life even though the grind is only getting tougher.

And people are kvetching that you can't stream it from the usual Digital Content Overlords (not yet, at least) -- which I kinda get, also. Here in the Panopticon we get what we get when we want it, or we forget about it.

But man, oh man: Bruce isn't the only one who's travelled a long way from Asbury Park and the benevolent indulgence offered from the likes of a hard-scrabble fortune teller -- we all have.