Preface

The shows were the easy part.

Thankfully, the good folks at Brucebase have them cataloged from top to bottom, so I know exactly what to look for in YouTube, newspaper archives, and the like.

The challenge–and the fun–was the stuff in between.

Touring musicians are bound to explore new cities on their days off or vent some steam after a show, so I learned to search local newspapers for Springsteen sightings the days preceding and following a show.

Most of the time, I came up empty. But once in a while I found a gem like Bruce leaving his expired Amex in an L.A. restaurant. And who would have expected him to turn up backstage at a Melissa Manchester taping? Both of those anecdotes turn up in these pages, and discovering them was my absolute favorite part of compiling Kingdom of Days.

Also fun: reading all the newspaper reviews. Often I had several to choose from. (In the early days of Bruce’s career, it wasn’t unusual for a city to have multiple local papers plus independent suburban ones.)

I tried to pick ones that were provocative, prescient, funny, or somewhat against the grain. I think my personal favorite in this volume is from February 16th, by a writer who refuses to be “brainwashed” but who you can tell is struggling mightily to resist.

Letters to the editor were often entertaining as well, and there’s a delightfully indignant one in these pages for you to discover.

Not fun: figuring out what to do with fake news. Or even figuring out if it’s fake to begin with.

You might think that a recent phenomenon, but then there are things like the rumored Central Park show that never happened. Was that ever a real possibility? Beats me. But it generated quite a bit of newspaper coverage for a week in February 1992, so I included it. But then again, so did a rumored gym affair about fifteen years ago, and I didn’t include that.

Even including real news could be discomforting at times. What to do with coverage of Bruce’s DWI  charge? I included it because Bruce has made light of it and “United States vs. Bruce Springsteen” caps become a solidarity symbol among artists. But that part wasn’t fun either.

But by far, the part I struggled with the most was all of the “in the wild” Springsteen sightings. I sometimes included interesting personal encounters from the pre-social media era, but if I were to included entries for every time Bruce was spotted at Federici’s, the beach, or out and about in Asbury Park in recent years, this would be a much bigger book.

And yet, you’ll find some from time to time. I tried to only include ones that had an interesting angle to them, but in the end it was just a judgement call (and in a couple of lucky cases in later volumes, self-indulgence).

In the end, it’s all a judgment call. Maybe I left out a few things I shouldn’t have; maybe I should have dropped a few things I included.

I’ll leave it to others to pick up the baton and build a bigger and better “This Day in Springsteen History.”

I hope someone does.

(c) December 4, 2025