That Bruce Springsteen is a pretty shrewd fellow.<\/p>\n
After a quarter-century of touring the country, he’d gleaned a few insights about audiences, one of which was:<\/p>\n
People really <\/em>like hearing the name of their state.<\/p>\n At concerts, anyway. “The thing is: you don\u00b4t do it at home,” Bruce playfully chided his audience in 1996. “You don\u00b4t sit in front of the TV and every time you hear [your state’s name] jump out of the couch and go ‘Woo !'”<\/p>\n But what’s fun in a loud arena can be annoying in an intimate theater, and on his solo acoustic tour that ran from 1995 through 1997, Bruce was not particularly indulgent of audience participation. So when a fan requested he play “Highway Patrolman” in Kalamazoo, he knew what was going to happen when he sang about the Michigan Line.<\/p>\n “When I sing ‘Highway Patrolman’, the word Michigan<\/em> is gonna come up. And when the word Michigan<\/em> comes up, somebody is gonna shout–either filled with local pride or just because for some reason, that’s the strange thing that people do when they hear the name of their home state.”<\/p>\n But then inspiration struck:<\/p>\n “Wait a minute: instead of being worried that Michigan<\/em> is gonna inspire applause, what I should be thinking is: that\u00b4s where the money is! The money is in writing songs with people\u00b4s hometowns… It really doesn\u00b4t matter what you say in the song at all as long as their hometown comes up regularly!”<\/p>\n So in the ten minutes before he took the stage that night (as his own legend would have it), Bruce wrote a song. “And I do have to tell you it\u00b4s one of the greatest songs I\u00b4ve ever written! Gonna make ’em forget all about that ‘Born in the U.S.A<\/a>.’ bullshit!”<\/p>\n And so without further ado, let’s take a listen to one of the greatest songs Bruce ever wrote.<\/p>\n