SXSWORLD

New Jersey Rockers Born to Run With Springsteen's Legacy by Jim Testa I've been the guy from New Jersey who goes to SXSW. Do you have any idea what kind of additional baggage that carries? New Jersey has given the world Frank Sinatra, baseball, Abbott & Costello, Th omas Edison and the Miss America pageant. But unless you spend a lot of time studying American history, you are far more likely to think of the Garden State in terms of pop culture fi gures like Snooki and Th e Situation, or Tony Soprano and Jon Bon Jovi, and that funny smell you can't avoid while you are driving through the Meadowlands. Simon and Garfunkel once sang of the New Jersey turnpike as a majestic symbol of freedom and progress, but most people only know it as that short stretch of toxic industrial wasteland that stretches from Liberty- Newark Airport into Manhattan. How about politics? Our last governor misplaced a billion dollar hedge fund, and our new governor has been made the butt of a nasty fat joke on Th e Simpsons. Yes, we do have an elite quarterback named Manning and a magnifi cent new football stadium, but that might mean a bit more if people would stop joking that Jimmy Hoff a was buried under the old one. But all of that will change in March 2012, when L et's get this out of the way: I'm from New Jersey. More than that, for over two decades, discovered Bruce Springsteen in the fall of 1973 when a dorm mate handed me a copy of Greetings From Asbury Park. "You like Dylan and Van Morrison," he said, "you'll love this guy." And indeed I did. Th e intricate lyrics and rhyme schemes of that fi rst album played right into my college sophomore's love of words, even if many of them, like "madman drummers bummers / Indians in the summer / with a teenage diplomat / In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat" didn't make a lick of sense. Asbury Park had once been the jewel of the Jersey shore, but race riots devastated the city in the late '60s. Its fabled boardwalk fell into sad disrepair, and by the time my friends started driving and making weekend trips "to the shore," we avoided Asbury like the plague. We spent summer vacations on the far more family-friendly beaches of Long Beach Island; I had never seen a boardwalk, so Springsteen's tales of tilt-a-whirls and hot summer nights – and lines like "I could walk like Brando right into the sun / then dance just like a Casanova / with Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen – the bard of the boardwalk, "Th e Boss" himself – steps up to the mic to deliver this year's SXSW keynote address. As a college student at Rutgers and an aspiring music journalist, I 38 SXSW ORLD / FEBRUAR Y 2012 Bruce Springsteen in 1978 University's Th e Daily Targum assigned me to review Springsteen's second release, Th e Wild, Th e Innocent, & Th e E Street Shuffl e. Gone for the most part was the New Dylan folk-rock, replaced by red-hot forays into rhythm & blues. Th at fi rst album might have been called Greetings From Asbury Park, but many of the songs talked about heading into the city, while on his second album, Springsteen truly embraced the romance, danger and electricity of the Asbury he knew as a teenager. Th ere were still songs like "New York City Serenade" and "Incident on 57th Street," but now Springsteen gave us "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" and "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," songs that truly embraced his Jersey roots, fi lled with colorful characters and wondrous vistas. I played that record so much that my roommates threatened to break it in half; they (like most of America at the time) much preferred my blackjack and jacket and hair slicked" – seemed impossibly sexy and romantic. Could that really be New Jersey he was singing about? Soon after I delved into that fi rst album, the arts editor at Rutgers FRANK STEFANKO

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