INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
The locals look, but there's a zone of privacy they afford the uncommon man in
their midst.

Lillian Africano did a double-take, not because she was surprised to see Bruce
Springsteen in the video store, but because of his wheels. As a rule, rock
stars don't drive ratty station wagons.

As usual, no one at Video on the Ritz bothered the Boss - though Africano did
note what her famous Rumson, N.J., neighbor was renting. (It was A Night to
Remember.)

"He's laid back," says Meredith McHeffey, 21, a clerk at the Fairhaven store.
"He wears the same baggy pants as my boyfriend, as opposed to Geraldo, who
comes in with dark glasses and a hat."

Maybe their respect is out of gratitude that he's returned. After a fling with
Beverly Hills, Springsteen married the girl from the neighborhood, singer Patti
Scialfa of Deal, N.J., and has reunited with his boys, the E Street Band, whom
he fired in 1988. Their six sold-out dates at the First Union Center and
Spectrum, which begin tomorrow, will be the guys' first in Philly in 11 years.

These days, when you go searching for Bruce Springsteen, you don't look for
Madame Marie's booth in Asbury Park (shuttered) or clubs like the Stone Pony (a
failed swing joint) and the Student Prince (now a go-go bar).

But you might try the Victory Market in Red Bank, where the proprietor has been
known to push frozen Italian bread by saying, "Bruce just bought some."

And you'd have gotten lucky had you attended Jim and Donna Andreen's wedding
last September. Their guests spotted Springsteen at the American Hotel in his
hometown, Freehold - escorting his mother to her high school reunion.

A note was slipped, and soon Springsteen was posing for the photograph now
displayed in the Howell, N.J., couple's living room, the bride between her
husband in a tuxedo and Springsteen in black.

"I was thinking of cutting my husband out of the photo and sending it to the
National Enquirer," says Donna, 39, a travel agent. "Bruce's Mystery Wedding."

For most of the decade, Springsteen, 49, has called New Jersey home again.
Though he still owns what one of his songs calls that "bourgeois home in the
Hollywood Hills," the $14 million mansion from his former marriage to actress
Julianne Phillips, he's rearing a family in Rumson, a town of old money and
occasional celebrities such as Geraldo Rivera, Jon Bon Jovi and Heather
Locklear. When school's out, the Springsteens - including their children Evan,
9, Jessica Rae, 7, and Sam, 5 - are on their 378-acre horse farm in nearby
Colts Neck.

"What you see and what you hear is real, not a pose, not an image-builder to
support the working-man ethic that runs through his songs," says Robert
Santelli, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame official who is writing a book about
Springsteen and the Jersey Shore scene.

"The rock-star posturing that others have to enforce and live up to, he's free
of that. As a result, he's probably a freer man than certainly most rock icons
- and he is indeed that, especially in New Jersey."

It makes you wonder about the burden of celebrity that seems to weigh on other
stars.

Anthony DeCurtis, who interviewed Springsteen for Rolling Stone last fall, says
it's all in how artists present themselves.

"If you're walking around with 20 models trailing after you, that generates a
certain kind of energy, and that's what comes back to you," DeCurtis says. "If
you're sitting in a restaurant with the wife and kids in a city you've grown up
with, that also comes back to you. People treat you like you should be there."

As Springsteen himself said in 1997: "Ninety percent of rock star isolation is
invented. . . . To me, I go to the grocery store. It's not an issue. If
somebody on the way there says to me, 'Hey, I like your music,' well, if that
bothers you, stay home."

When Springsteen was growing up at the Shore, "this was the Park Avenue of New
Jersey," says Africano, a travel and romance-novel writer, leading a tour of
Springsteen's neighborhood of meandering stone walls and new construction made
to look old. Rumson, half an hour and several tax brackets from Freehold, is a
town in which a miniature backhoe picks up garden trimmings on trash day.

Like most properties in the area, Springsteen's $2.5 million home doesn't call
attention to itself. A half-dozen SUVs are parked in the driveway. Springsteen
is off this day, between the Boston and Washington legs of his tour.

A call to the security force on the property doesn't yield an invitation to
chat. "You want me to lose my job?" a guard tells a go-between. The security is
necessary because fans have found their way onto the property, emulating
Springsteen's own flight over the Graceland fence in 1975. Elvis' people put
him in a cab.

Africano says that when Springsteen moved in, to discourage unexpected company,
he would appear often at a local school, "just so they could look at him."

He's managed an almost-normal home life - dressing up to receive Halloween
trick-or-treaters, attending functions at the children's school (the name of
which he prefers not to publicize) and driving himself around, such as to the
Electric Factory in Center City four years ago, where he backed his old
bar-scene buddy Joe Grushecky.

Loyalty and generosity are words heard a lot in Springsteen country.

In April, Springsteen donated a guitar to the Rumson Country Day School
auction, and when the bidding wasn't high enough, he threw in a 30-minute
lesson. That brought in $27,000. Since 1995, low-income residents of Monmouth
County have received $350,000 for home repairs, unaware that their angel was
Springsteen until the Newark Star-Ledger reported on his charity, the
Foundation.

The tale that most shows Springsteen's soul resides with Steve Eitelberg, who
owns a clothing store in Deal and who has known the man since he was a shy
teenager who couldn't even make eye contact.

Two and half years ago, Eitelberg's wife, Lynn, was dying of lung cancer. One
morning at the Monmouth County Medical Center, a nurse told him "someone on the
phone says he's Bruce Springsteen." Springsteen asked if he could visit. He
stayed the whole afternoon, telling stories, singing "Secret Garden" - her
favorite song - just stroking her arm.

The next afternoon "there he was again in the doorway," says Eitelberg, 53,
over an extra-large cheese pizza in Neptune. Springsteen settled in and started
doodling a stick-figure portrait of his family. "This is Bruce, this is me.
Let's put notes here, because I'm Bruce. Let's put the kids here."

Lynn motioned. "Oh, you want me to sign it. You want it to be worth 50 cents."

He returned on a third day, with his guitar, but by then she had sunk into a
coma. "He showed up at her funeral and sang 'Secret Garden' over her casket for
me and my kids," Eitelberg says.

Since then, on the same day each year, Springsteen has walked into Eitelberg's
shop, and they've polished off a few bottles. Last year, Springsteen noticed a
set of congas that Eitelberg's therapist encouraged him to take up after his
wife's death.

"You're gonna play drums in my band," Springsteen told him. When he came to
pick up clothes for the European leg of the tour in April, he walked into
Eitelberg's office and asked, "You been practicing?"

Eitelberg made his musical debut on Aug. 9 before 20,000 people at the
Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford. Calling "my haberdasher" to the
stage, Springsteen had him join the band for "Spirit in the Night," a song
nearly as old as their friendship.

"He's just what his song says," Eitelberg adds. "He's a local hero."

The Boss and me
Bruce Springsteen's music spoke to pop music writer Dan DeLuca when he
was coming of age in Ventor. Twenty years later, the connection is still
there.
By Dan DeLuca
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

I can remember the day in fifth-grade music when I first heard Bruce
Springsteen. It was 1973 and Mr. Dempsey was trying to impress us Jersey
Shore kids with debut records by two promising young songwriters,
Springsteen and Dan Fogelberg.

But despite his best efforts to raise the musical standards of the
Ventnor Middle School, I resisted the Dylanesque jumble of Springsteen's
Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. And a couple years later, when Born to
Run landed the scraggly-bearded guy from up the Garden State Parkway on
the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously, I was oblivious -
probably preoccupied with Avalon Hill war games or the trauma of being
cut from Little League.

At 16, though, listening to the stereo in my bedroom after torturous
days in Catholic high school, Springsteen finally got me.
The urgent promise to "Prove It All Night." The clenched-fist
determination of "Badlands." The elegiac despair of "Racing in the
Street." No record had ever spoken to me like Darkness on the Edge of
Town, the pivotal 1978 album that Springsteen is sure to draw on during
his sold-out six-show stand with the reunited E Street Band, which
begins Monday at the First Union Center.

More than The Who or the Clash - or the Knack and Styx, whom I admit I
was heavily into at the time - it was Springsteen who woke me up and
made me think about a life larger than my boardwalk town bordering
Atlantic City, where casino gambling had just arrived in a last-ditch
attempt to restore the resort's faded glory.

Some of the appeal was Jersey-specific. We had an intimate bond
understood by the thousands of fans who made - and still make - the
Philadelphia market a Springsteen stronghold second only to New York. I
hadn't been on the Tilt-A-Whirl Springsteen referred to in "4th of July,
Asbury Park (Sandy)," but I'd lost my lunch on the same ride on Atlantic
City's Million Dollar Pier. My parents' Chevy wasn't chrome-wheeled and
fuel-injected, but once I got my license, I was known to go steppin' out
over the line on Highway 9, all the way to McDonald's.

For me, Springsteen and Darkness couldn't have come at a more crucial
time. Where Born to Run was essentially about getting away, Darkness
delivered pressurized dramas about what happened if you never made it
out.

"Some guys they just give up living, and start dying little by little
piece by piece," observes the narrator in "Racing in the Street," who
vows to drive his car fast to avoid a slow death.

Even more profound was "Adam Raised a Cain" and "Factory." Inspired by
Springsteen's father, Douglas, these blue-collar psychodramas told of
the rage and despair that come from a lifetime of meaningless work. It
was impossible for my older brother and me not to think of our own
middle-aged father and his faded dream of becoming a behind-the-scenes
political mahoff or striking it rich in real estate.

Darkness was about laying it on the line and refusing to settle. Just as
I was moodily groping for an identity, along came Bruce, celebrating
"the swamps of Jersey" and declaring "Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a
man/And I believe in a promised land."

The music was romantically defiant - and it rocked. It was brooding and
desperate without being nihilistic, a lot more available than the
stylish naysaying of the British punks and New Wavers who also had my
ear.

What clinched my Springsteen allegiance, of course, was the Boss'
legendary live show. And my rite of initiation was a night none in my
party is likely to forget.

It was Dec. 8, 1980, after I'd moved to Philadelphia to go to college,
following the release of The River. Sated after a 31/2-hour marathon in
which Springsteen put out more than seemed humanly possible, a gang of
us headed to Pat's Steaks. First we saw E Street pianist Roy Bittan,
then drummer Max Weinberg. The whole band except Springsteen and
Clarence Clemons was there, pumped after a great show. We noticed Steve
Van Zandt hunched over in the E Street van. He appeared to be crying.

The news was spreading: John Lennon had been murdered. Our little party
was over. We wondered if the next night's show would be canceled. What
could Springsteen do to make rock and roll matter when the genius Beatle
had just been senselessly snuffed out by a nut job?
My brother Nick and I returned, of course - grief notwithstanding, we
weren't about to give up stageside seats. Speaking of "an unreasonable
world" in which "you get asked to live with a lot of things that are
just unliveable," the 31-year-old Springsteen sounded devastated. "It's
a hard thing to come out and play tonight," he said, "but there's just
nothing else you can do."

And with that, he put on what my romanticized memory and medium-quality
audience tape tells me was the most wrenching performance I've ever
seen. All night, he fought an I-can't-go-on/I-will-go-on battle before
our eyes, and won. He blew the roof off with "Twist and Shout," but the
high point came earlier, with that fist-pounding line in "Badlands"
about how "it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive."

The contract was sealed: I was a Springsteen loyalist for life. Through
the '80s, as he rode high on The River, the stark masterpiece Nebraska
(1982), the stadium-sized success of Born in the U.S.A. (1984), and the
conflicted beauty of Tunnel of Love (1987), there was many a pilgrimage
in pursuit of the cathartic Springsteen experience.

There was the all-night drive to Chicago in 1984, lured by fourth-row
seats, a scalper's bargain at $50. And a night at the Stone Pony in
Asbury Park that summer, when Springsteen sidled up next to my brother
at the bar for a shot of tequila. Before he joined John Eddie on stage
for ZZ Top's "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide," the elder DeLuca got in a
handshake and a word: "Thanks."

And there were other times when the karma was not so good.

My brother - now a behind-the-scenes political mahoff in London who saw
four shows in Europe in the spring before flying in for a Jersey date
last month - would howl if I didn't come clean about the July 1981
Spectrum show I never saw.
It was the day before my birthday, and grain-alcohol punch (I wasn't
driving) led me to pass out in the back seat on the Atlantic City
Expressway. As Nick tells it, he only went into the show after doing
everything possible to rouse me. At intermission, he convinced a
ticket-taker to let him retrieve me, only to find me still passed out,
this time with the car door open, flopped halfway onto the blacktop. The
story ends, with the author coming to on the way home, asking, "When's
the show start?"

Other, not quite so pathetic mishaps include numerous nights at the
Stone Pony - including the club's final hurrah last fall - when rumors
that Springsteen would appear proved to be false.

Springsteen taught me to be a fan. He showed me how rock and roll can
reflect the world around you and shape a life. And his reverence for his
roots has sent me on all sorts of journeys from Bob Dylan to '60s
rhythm-and-blues to Hank Williams.

This decade, Springsteen has operated on the periphery of a fractured
pop-music world in which he once stood front and center. He has released
a trio of flawed albums and busied himself raising his three children
with his wife, E Street singer Patti Scialfa. And I've been getting my
professional satisfactions elsewhere, from Public Enemy and the Chemical
Brothers, Lucinda Williams and Sleater-Kinney.

But since Tracks, last year's four-disc set of unreleased material, I've
been back in Springsteen mode. In New York covering the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame gala in March, I broke out of the press area and sneaked
into the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom to see Springsteen and the E Street
Band cut loose with "Backstreets," "Prove It All Night" and "Tenth
Avenue Freeze Out."

And when tickets went on sale for the first E Street tour since 1988, I
was on the Web and, just for old time's sake, lined up at HMV in Center
City. The three (out of 15) concerts in Jersey I went to were the best
rock shows I've seen this year. The band - particularly Conan O'Brien
drummer Weinberg - is in top-flight form.

And for a guy who turns 50 on Sept. 23, Springsteen remains a remarkably
impassioned, energetic performer. In a culture overrun with irony, his
forthrightness is more welcome than ever.

But I'll never be 18 again, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences are just
that. Part of what is missing has to do with Springsteen: As much fun as
he now has onstage, it's not life or death for him either. Gone are the
soul-baring, between-song monologues. He rarely speaks to the crowd at
all. As a friend said, "He's not married to the audience anymore."

This is the first time Springsteen has toured without an album of new
songs to give him focus, and while he's working in some '90s material,
such as the we're-all-in-this-together closer "Land of Hope and Dreams,"
the current shows are about giving fans what they want, more than
telling us where his head is right now.

For the most part, that's fine. In Jersey, I was continually struck by
how well warhorses such as the operatic "Jungleland" and sage "Born to
Run" have aged.

Way back, on Nebraska, Springsteen wondered how it was that "at the end
of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe." These
days, my Springsteen expectations aren't as high as they once were. I'm
not counting on him to change my life. But I'll still be there, looking
for reasons to believe.

1999 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.