Can there have been an enzyme change among Bruce's fans?  They're such nice people.  In the well-mannered nuttiness of the Met Center (during the Tunnel of Love tour), while trying to scribble notes, I felt a tap on my shoulder.  It was Tom Boehland, a vendor of "institutional juices" to hospitals and nursing homes in Minneapolis/St. Paul.  He was celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday right there with Bruce.  He'd seen my triangular "Tunnel of Love" press pass, pasted on my lapel at the insistence of Barbara Carr, the iron-faced number two man in Landau Management, and guessed I might be Dave Marsh.  Evil thought! No, I explained, Barbara Carr was closer to Dave than I was, and the triangular pass was useless, a kind of placebo for rock-crit types.  All it could do was get you into the "hospitality area," where they serve up fruit juice and potato chips.  To really get backstage you need a big rectangular pass, and that only holds the security guards off for a little while.  Eventually they go for your legs, snarling like pit bulls: "Where's a photo pass?  Huh?  You're not Full Access!"

Boehland thought I was exaggerating, so on the way to the men's room I tried a quick dash past a security guard by way of demonstration.  One of the guard's hands flew to his bat; the other groped his Securo-Phone, ready to beep in reinforcements. "Landau Management!  Just testing!"  I smiled broadly and went to join Boehland on the long line waiting to micturate.

Springsteen was a veritable elder statesman to Tom, like John Lennon.  Jagger was too kinky, a sort of degenerate monkey, and Dylan was a Salinger hermit.  Steve Tyler of Aerosmith and Bono of U2 were all right, but they didn't have any business longevity.  What interested Boehland about Bruce was his ability to put rear ends in seats and keep them there, year after year.  As entertainers go, the guy was as practical as a can opener.  Plus, he was optimistic.  Everybody Boehland knew was fed up with irony.  Where could it lead?  (He liked George Bush, too.)

The West sisters, up from Tracy, Minnesota, felt no need to philosophize their presence.  They were plucked out of their "garbage" seats by two members of Landau Management and installed in the middle of the first row.  "He always does that," Jill, sixteen, a high school student, gasps, "but we never thought it'd happen to us!"  Landau Management, it seems, has a policy of reserving the two best seats in the house and then going into the crowd and selecting the most deserving-looking fans it can find and moving them up, no strings, no charge.  Obviously, it's of a piece with the Boss's last-minute ticket drop beneficence, part of Landau's populist humanism, a way of compensating loyalists for the necessary but depersonalizing sales procedures of the last few years: because of the great demand for them and in order to avoid "price discrimination," all Springsteen tickets cost the same.  When a Bruce concert is announced, you rush to predetermined outlets and get your hand stamped.  This entitles you to rush to a later line to get a number, which guarantees you a seat, though you have to stand in a third line to get it, and you never know where the seat will be.  "Ours were way in back, up top," Jill says.  She's pretty but flushed and sickly looking, and her eyes are bugging slightly, as if someone had just hit her in the liver with a left hook.  "You see how great he is?  He knew we were here!  He wanted us up front!"  She twists around, literally unable to sit still, adrift in the hormonal sea that has helped populate the earth since Circe came on to Ulysses.  Her sister Julie, twenty-six, a graphic artist, is behaving in exactly the same way.

Susan Hamre, thirty-four, a blond Minneapolis book editor, is far cooler.  "Why do I like him?  His songs tell stories; he's not a little kid; he's got great buns."