The Ties That Bind

Across New Jersey this week, the music of rock, punk, and pop helped us roll back the clock while our teenage sons and daughters celebrated their coming of age.

Bruce Springsteen at Giants Stadium Monday.

Backstreets.com

The young crowd at Warped Tour.

We graying boomers, paunchy and battling wrinkles, sang, stomped and fist-pumped for the Boss at Giants Stadium. Our kids, girls in tanks tops and tiny shorts, guys bold and shirtless, moshed and crowd-surfed as Warped Tour stopped in Camden and Englishtown.

At the Meadowlands Monday night, the Springsteen clan on stage and drummer Max Weinberg’s son made the huge venue an intimate family affair. The whole crowd even sang “Happy Birthday” to first lady Patti Scialfa.

At Warped Tour, hugely popular bands like All Time Low and Gym Class Heroes led a day/night bacchanal marathon as tattooed teens pushed and shoved in the circular fantasy fight, the mosh pit, that sometimes drew real blood. With multiple stages and dozens of vendors this endless street fight/festival is a promoter’s dream. 

No mosh pits at Bruce, though. The differences in these events are deep. But the common thread, the tie that binds, is rock; Springsteen’s near-mythic portraits of archetypal Jersey, a gallery of rogues, roads, and roadsters — the longing for the bar stool romance that helps keep back the demons. At Warped Tour, the boy bands use bad words to keep the hormonal crowd happily evil with thoughts and songs that seed explicit dreams. 

They desperately want to be older. We, just as desperately, want to roll back the clock. The music makes both possible, even if only in our minds eye for only a few hours…when sweet summer nights turn into summer dreams, like Bruce sang a long time ago.

Tags: Music | Camden | Springsteen, Bruce | Englishtown | Giants Stadium | The E Street Band

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