Encores
"But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll"

Those words (from "Do You Believe In Magic?" by the Lovin' Spoonful) came into my head yesterday and have been bouncing around ever since. Finally tonight they came in for a landing, right smack on a memory from my UT-Austin days. As y'all remember I was there during the magic years, when Darrell Royal was still on campus, Earl Campbell was running over grown men on his way to a Heisman Trophy and the Armadillo World Headquarters and Scholz's Beer Garden were in their prime. It was enough distraction to drive an otherwise gifted young man to a solid 2.8 GPA.

I lived in the cheapest dormitory on campus, which meant I was surrounded by people for whom a dollar bill really meant something. And one night the group decided to go to the Armadillo to see some guy named Bruce Springsteen. Now I had never heard of this guy (this was way before he was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek ) but if my dorm friends were willing to part with the cover charge (a dollar) to see him I figured it would be worth it. And it was. I don't remember all the details about that night (I'm a firm believer in the old phrase "If you can remember the seventies then you weren't doing them right") but I remember two things with crystal clarity: 1) he played for a LONG time; and 2) he did FOUR encores (the last one after the crowd continued yelling for 20 minutes after the house lights had been turned on and the road crew had already disassembled half the stuff on the stage). It was without a doubt the most phenomenal live event I ever attended - the energy that guy put out on stage and got out of that audience was unbelievable.

That was the night that I learned what rock and roll was all about.