On Monday morning, I sat in the meadow by the lower creek at my ranch, the third day in a string of absolutely stunningly glorious spring days in Texas.  My intention had been to meditate, in sheer solitude and privacy, but I found myself instead just sitting and looking around at the wildflowers and fluorescent green new leaves, listening to the birds chirp, and scenting honeysuckle being delivered by the breeze from somewhere deeper in the forest.

Suddenly, the cell phone, with me in case a client called, rang.  It was my brother: One of the attorneys in his office had extra tickets and would I like to go see Bruce Springsteen that night?  If I did, I would have to drive back to Houston in the afternoon.

Did I even want to go to the concert?  Brother told me it would be at the Toyota Center (to which I had never been but assumed it was a large impersonal arena) and our seats were probably way up high.  I thought back to high school when I went to see the Rolling Stones at the Astrodome and walked out after a handful of songs, so awful was the sound and so miniscule the ants on the stage.

He pressed for a decision.  Would I get up from my paradise and drive to Houston to see Bruce Springsteen?

I hadn’t been to a big rock show in a long time, although my experience is that the older I get the more disappointed I am by such events – all of them, whether it’s big rock n’ roll, big sports, big political events, and so forth.  I had actually seen Springsteen in 1980 when I was 14 years old, twenty-seven years ago.  Young and already famous, he was a major cultural figure with an edgy angst, writing about the dreamers, schemers, workers, husbands, wives, the losers, the frayed, the brokenhearted and the hopeful of the American (white) working class.  He was the authentic thing, hailing from Asbury Park, New Jersey, and his energetic show was terrific, a mixture of dark odes and upbeat boisterous rockers played for hours until both performer and audience were thoroughly tired.

And then, almost right after that concert, my musical tastes began to change as I discovered other genres - and I stopped buying Springsteen’s albums.  But other people didn’t; in fact, with the album and song Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen became an American icon, packing stadiums to hear his anthem.  It seemed to me that many of his new fans missed the deeper concerns in his songs and focused only on the righteous patriotic anger in the chorus of that one song.  And so the years went, Springsteen releasing more music, some of it vital and urgent, and some of it missing the earlier intense high water marks, while I discovered and listened to other things.  And so it was odd to me that there on that extraordinarily beautiful spring day, sitting in a meadow of flowers on a cell phone, I heard myself tell my brother “Okay pick me up at seven.”

We sat in the upper deck smack in the middle facing the stage.  As the roadies prepared the stage I noted with disappointment that they were the same size as Mick Jagger had been decades before in the Astrodome; thankfully, two large projection screens flanked the stage.  When the lights went down, the music came up, and where we were sitting the sound was extraordinary, traveling and wafting the length of the arena funneled directly up to our seats.  It was also extraordinarily loud.  Modern arena concerts are strange: if your seats are distant from the stage, it’s as if you came to listen to a loud soundtrack and watch a big screen television, while the actual famous celebrities whom you came to see fade into insignificance on the stage.  I found myself mostly watching the projection screen all night, feeling a little embarrassed: I left the meadow to watch a big television and have my ears blown?

Springsteen, even as he approaches sixty, was as earnest and hardworking as ever.  And as he went through the songs, I suddenly realized why I had come: I wanted to see whether this influential icon would make it clear to his audience where he stood politically, and to try and sense if he was being heard.  Several songs in, he took his acoustic guitar for a solo turn and told the audience that he had written this new song “in the excitement of knowing that the last eight years of bad management were about to end.”  Maybe a third of the Houston audience cheered, the rest remained politely silent.  I assume when he uses this line in New York City he gets a much bigger cheer.  Toward the end of the night, he introduced another song by disparaging torture, rendition, and wiretapping, and he ended the night with a homebrewed Irish jig about immigrants - past, present, and future - coming to “This American Land.”  For this number, the lights came up and I could see the full expanse of my co-listeners.  I scanned the crowed carefully.  All – and I mean all – appeared to be white faces, many middle aged.  The one black face that I could detect in the enormous room belonged to Clarence Clemmons, Springsteen’s iconic big daddy sax man.

And then I realized that back in 1980, at the time of that first Springsteen concert, I left Springsteen at the same time that his large fan base of white, working class rockers came to him.  They made him rich beyond all imaginings, but it seemed to me that it came at a cost, as he spent the next decades trying to hold on to these fans, as any entertainer wants to do, while trying to explain to them what was happening to them economically and politically, as he sang about the Vietnam War, factory closings, marriages straining under financial pressure, and the elusive American Dream.  In the past week, Barack Obama has been pilloried for using admittedly poorly chosen words to focus well-meant attention on how working class Americans have based their votes on issues other than economic issues, and how that has resulted in the election of callous, market-obsessed Republicans and economic catastrophe for people living in places like New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

Bruce Springsteen is loved here in Texas, but he is revered in those other places, a native son of the working class mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states.  And while the drama, or perhaps the stultifying grind, of the Pennsylvania primary goes on, I couldn’t help but wonder who Bruce Springsteen will pull the lever for in November.  He gave a hint of it when he alluded briefly to a “new wind blowing” while introducing a song.  Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie – they are among our great modern folk singers, fusing the musical vernacular with the concerns and travails of everyday people.  No musician has focused as consistently and passionately on the subject of the American white working class as Bruce Springsteen.  The people of that strata are his subject, his muse, and his audience.  Sitting last row center at the Toyota Center, I heard The Boss loud and clear.  And I dearly hoped that the rest of his audience there that night, or anywhere else in this country or in the world, was finally hearing him too.

I’m Leo Gold.  This is The New Capital Show.