If you are a Springsteen devotee, age and other predictors of taste are irrelevant. What matters is that the man offers redemption and hope.
Again and again last night and Monday, Springsteen's followers spoke of him as a savior, a superb teller of tales about how to start over again.
If this tribe had a motto, it would be, "It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive," a lyric from the Springsteen song "Badlands." Its members pump their fists to his songs in their cars, sigh at friends who "don't get it," and can often recite entire albums.
Before Monday's show, Ed Roselle and three female friends spontaneously ran down a verse of "Blinded by the Light" and didn't stumble even on the tongue-twisting lyric "Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer."
"Nobody brings more passion and energy to the stage, and I've seen them all," said Roselle, a Harrisburg resident who was to see Springsteen for about the 35th time last night. "The man gives everything just for the moment, just so everyone can have a good time."
Many enthusiasts came to Springsteen in their teenage years, with the obsessive passion that only a teenager has. When Karin Helmlinger of Lewisville, Chester County, and her siblings listened to Born to Run in the 1970s, it was akin to attending church. No one could talk while the album played, and if the phone rang, they had to restart the record.
She may have inherited the insanity from her mother, a Bruce fan who spent hours on the phone in the mid-1980s trying to get tickets to a Springsteen show even though she had emphysema and used an oxygen tank.
"My mother would say, 'He's from Jersey, you know.' He was an everyman. He had a heart, and he still does," Helmlinger said.
