| In the summer of 1973, a fourteen-year-old from New Jersey boarded a bus and headed for midtown Manhattan, where he and some friends attended a concert by the band Chicago. As the young teen-ager watched Madison Square Garden fill up, much of the crowd ignored the opening act: a singer who became so dismayed by the reception that, after the show, he informed his manager that he would never play a large venue again. Roughly forty years later, the erstwhile teen-ager and the musician crossed paths once again, this time as the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Bruce Springsteen. In the decades since the Madison Square Garden show, Springsteen had decided that he was willing to perform in big spaces, after all, and he no longer needed to worry about apathy from crowds. In a 2012 Profile for the magazine, Remnick traced Springsteen’s path before and after the unhappy concert, from the musician’s famously working-class roots, in New Jersey, to his ascent as a cultural and political icon. In the course of Remnick’s reporting, Springsteen released a No. 1 album and embarked on an international tour, happily trailed by the journalist from rehearsals, on a former army base, to the singer’s three-hundred-and-eighty-acre farm, and eventually to a stadium concert in Europe (a different stadium than the one where, in 1985, the stomping of Springsteen’s fans proved so forceful that the facility’s foundation was damaged). Remnick also speaks with a New Jersey golf caddie and early castoff from Springsteen’s E Street Band, and charts the impact of “the most famous review in the history of rock criticism,” which launched both Springsteen and its author, Jon Landau, on a shared path. Springsteen turns seventy-five tomorrow and appears, at least in terms of his performance schedule, to have given himself the day off. But he’s far from retired. Following a concert this past week on the Jersey Shore, he’s heading to Montreal in October, where he’ll kick off the next leg of his current tour. | 
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