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Heavens no. Perish the thought.
    7 . I wore out my copy of The Saint, the Incident and the Main Point Shuffle, the bootleg of this show, listening to “Incident.” It’s a transcendent performance, utterly breathtaking, and here’s the best part: it opens the fucking show. Yes, he opened the show with a song and a performance that it would be nearly impossible to top, then proceeded to top it, song after song.
    8 . I would, of course, never encourage you to collect bootlegs. Heavens no. Perish the thought.
    9 . I added that “damn near” under duress, and due to not wanting to look like a complete geek. I’ll correct it here: it’s a perfect show, and the bootleg would be one of my ten desert island discs, no question.
    10 . “Santa Ana” was eventually released on Tracks, but nothing rivals the one-two punch of these songs in the early Springsteen sets.
    11 . It was a terrible place to warehouse hundreds of hormonal, scared seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. We used to hear stories of undergrads who “dove a stairwell,” attempting suicide, and I always wondered why more people didn’t do it.
    12 . All of “Thundercrack” reminds me of Cori, not just because of how much she loves to dance, but because the lyrics get her so hilariously, directly wrong: she does have curls, her hair is brown (or was then), and her eyes are too. It makes me smile every time I hear the song.
    13 . I would like to be able to claim that, as I’ve matured, I’ve gotten better, both with the social anxiety and with limiting my alcohol consumption. Can we pretend, for the sake of argument, that this is true?
    14 . I had never asked her, outright, so I asked Cori tonight if she did it on purpose, if she had cockblocked with intent. Tonight, twenty-two years later, she smiled. “Of course not,” she lied.
    15 . Not coincidentally.
    16 . So does she, apparently. We were talking about it yesterday. Telling Xander the story. Apparently I was clumsy, and practically falling over, and a little slobbery. And she was smiling as she told him all about it.

Side Two
    Yeah, I know I ain’t nobody’s bargain
    But, hell, a little touchup
    and a little paint . . .
    BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “Human Touch”

Tunnel of Love
    Album: Tunnel of Love
    Released: October 9, 1987
    Recorded: January–July 1987
    O NE OF THE secrets of a good mix-tape lies in the recognition that you’re dealing with two separate entities, each with its own concerns, but each working in tandem with the other. 1 Each side of the tape should tell its own story, develop its own themes and movement. Sometimes the two sides build off one another (this is useful for mix-tapes intended for wooing). Other times, the two sides will create a contrast. Light and dark, happy and sad, that sort of thing.
    It’s appropriate for both my life and Springsteen’s that the tape flip here happens with “ Tunnel of Love .”
    It’s pretty clear that the Tunnel of Love album was a turning point for Springsteen. Prior to Tunnel, Springsteen’s work was largely external to himself. From the doomed greasers of “Jungleland” to the blue collar workers of “Factory” to the disenfranchised Vietnam veteran of “Born in the U.S.A.,” the songs were clearly and deliberately stories. Until then, Springsteen dealt in emotional veracity without treading too close to personal emotional truth.
    With Tunnel of Love, however, he changed tack. Yes, there were still story-songs (Springsteen has never been a desperate single mother trying to decide not to drown her young son in a river, as the heroine of “Spare Parts” finds herself doing), but there were also songs that seemed, at least, to come directly from his own experience. 2 Given the albums that followed, it’s easy to see Tunnel of Love as the moment that Springsteen began to turn inward, exploring himself at least as much