{"id":6248,"date":"2018-12-03T05:00:21","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T13:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/estreetshuffle.com\/?p=6248"},"modified":"2021-12-14T19:19:04","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T03:19:04","slug":"roll-of-the-dice-freehold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/estreetshuffle.com\/index.php\/2018\/12\/03\/roll-of-the-dice-freehold\/","title":{"rendered":"Roll of the Dice: Freehold"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long before\u00a0Springsteen on Broadway <\/em>and\u00a0Born to Run\u00a0<\/em>(the book), Bruce wrote the beginning of his autobiography as a song.<\/p>\n

The impetus was a very special stop on his Ghost of Tom Joad solo acoustic tour, at Bruce’s old grammar school, St. Rose of Lima, a benefit for the school’s Hispanic community center.<\/p>\n

The show was intimate (it was literally held in the school gymnasium), familial (only residents of the borough were allowed to buy tickets), and ribald–Bruce seemed to take great pleasure in playing songs like “Red Headed Woman<\/a>” in front of the assembled nuns, no doubt a cathartic experience for a graduate of a repressive Catholic school education.<\/p>\n

We can only imagine what Bruce must have felt like returning to “the scene of the crime.” (Bruce certainly gave us much assistance to do so in his 2016 autobiography.) As the November 8th date approached<\/a>, Bruce decided to do more than just play a standard tour show; he invited some special guests (Patti and Soozie) to join him on stage, and tour premiered a whopping eight songs for the hometown crowd.<\/p>\n

But he saved the biggest and best surprise for the very last encore: he’d written a brand new song for the occasion: a tender, funny, pointed, and affectionately disrespectful remembrance called, simply, “Freehold.”<\/p>\n

Listen to that performance below (including an unintentional interlude where Bruce is reminded why he uses his Telepromptr most of the time).<\/p>\n