Let the Blog Wars Begin! The Boss vs. Ol' Ball Coach and Patti Scialfa too!

Springsteen or Spurrier? Gentleman or Jerk? RocknRoll Vs. College Football?

Normally these two worlds spin on separate axles but reading a little blip about the upcoming Springsteen release and tour in Sean Daly's St Petersburg TImes music column got me in a ranting mode. (Click on the title of this post to read what got me going -- be sure to read all the comments . . . )

It wasn’t Sean's words that got me -- he is very funny, entertaining and knows his stuff. (As opposed to the old music critic where I used to live: Dan McDonald of the Times Onion in Jacksonville. Dan would go to a bar to review a band and spend half his article talking about the chicken wings he ate. Dan wrote a column before the Born in the USA tour that was named something like "I liked Bruce better when he was skinny". It turns out that this musical "expert" had never seen Bruce in concert, yet felt confident in spending an entire column reminiscing about the good old days of Rosalita and what a great job Manfred Mann did with Blinded by the Light.

Here is the thing. I don’t care if you don’t like Bruce. I don’t like Celine Dion but I won't hold it against you if you have all her CDs (to your face, anyway). I can respect someone who has different musical tastes from me. But don't sit there like the great expert, licking the chicken grease off your fingers as you wax poetic about how great Bruce USED TO BE. And then admit you have never seen him in concert. Please.

Well of course Dan came back after having seen BorninUSA tour and of course he had changed his mind. He thought Bruce was great. But it was too late. I had already fired off a letter to the editor asking them to please get a decent music writer who was as passionate about music as Dan was about chicken wings. I probably said some other insulting things about Dan's taste that I can't remember now, but when I met him a few years later I said, "Yeah, I wrote you this letter after you blasted Springsteen BEFORE you went to see him in concert. I was pretty hard on you.” He was like, "You wrote that letter? I still have that letter!"

BTW, Dan is now the Food Critic for the Florida Times Onion. I kid you not.

But I have digressed. The point I wanted to make a couple of paragraphs ago was that my crazy meter goes off when someone says something uninformed about one of my heroes. A couple of dingbats wrote in the comments section of Sean's blog "Pop Music" about how bad Bruce had gotten . . .how political . . . how Pete Seger-ee. And I was off and running. It probably has to do a lot with the fact that the last couple of months have been really bad for me: my cancer has returned and spread to my spine and ribs so I’m back in treatment so my hair just fell out again . . . but that was nothing compared to losing my dad (my ultimate hero) on July 24, the day before my 46th birthday. Then last week I went to hang and mourn and rest at a friend's lake cottage and instead came home with a horrible infected abscess at the base of my spine that had to be surgically drained and yeah, I'm just looking for some poor smoe to make a dumb remark about the Boss.

But I got that out of my system and even was able to work in a little dig at old visor boy himself -- Steve Spurrier. And get this -- the guy who posts after me is so mad I bashed Spurrier he told me to go jump off the Skyway Bridge. Nice! Some people just don’t know how to express their anger in a proper forum. Harrumph.

So please, go read the comments and add your own outrage to the fire. In a couple of weeks, I will be in NYC listening to Patti Scialfa sing her heart out on the David Letterman Show. Mrs. Springsteen and I have both been told to jump off a few bridges before, so I am sure she will inspire my next rant and rave. Stay tuned.