Today is my birthday, and I mention it only to get all the guestbook lovin' I deserve. Go, click it. As Bill would say: Bastards.

As I said, the Springsteen show was as expected -- three hours of hard-working, hard-rocking musical entertainment. We had a discussion at work a little while ago about how Bruce doesn't stray far from the studio tracks when performing his songs live. There will be extended instrumentals, but in general, you're going to be able to sing along as if it were being played on your stereo ... only it's louder and live and better. And when the band does put a new arrangement on an old song, that new arrangement gets played over and over, at every venue.

But the tradeoff is that Bruce is still one of the best live acts touring, and he knows his fans. He knows the majority want to hear "Badlands" and "Born To Run" every night, and he knows that untold thousands (I'm guessing) fans at any give show have seen him before, probably on the same tour. So he mixes it up and I doubt that, except for some of the ridiculously diehard fans who have seen him hundreds of times, no one sees the same set twice. As I displayed yesterday, I've seen six full concerts (plus one benefit of which he was a part) and heard a total of 75 different tunes. That's an average of 12 songs per show with no repeats. Some acts only perform 12 songs in a show, and the next night they'll play 10 of the 12 again.

As with any band, the die-hard fans know what to expect and when they're getting a treat. Backstreets.com serves as a guide. Saturday night, Bruce gave us a couple of rarities by opening with "Janey Don't You Lose Heart," which quickly went from being just another song among the dozens on the four-disc Tracks box set to something special for me. Hearing it live changed it, and I thought it was damn good. I also had no idea how rare it was to hear "Pretty Flamingo," but then again, I wasn't one of several people I saw walking around in tour shirts from the mid-80s Born In The USA tour.

Four years ago, just before my first Springsteen show during the 15-night stand at Continental Airlines Arena that kicked off his first tour with the E Street Band in years, I was aching to see the band live. I was too young to have caught the Born In The USA tour, and then he kind of disappeared. He put out an album without the band (Tunnel of Love), got divorced, remarried, moved to California, had kids, put out Lucky Town and Human Touch together -- also without the band -- and put out a sort-of Vol. 2 to Nebraska with the solo acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad. When he toured to promote Joad, he did that solo too, playing acoustic shows in small theaters. I tried to get into a show in western Michigan, close to Notre Dame, but couldn't score tickets or a press pass (that would've been the biggest score of my college newspaper days). So by 1999 it had been four years since he'd put out anything and two or three since he'd toured. Even his once-regular unannounced (or sometimes leaked) appearances at local Jersey Shore clubs when other bands played had petered out.

Then came talk of getting the band back together, then the rehearsals at Convention Hall on the Asbury Park boardwalk, which were followed by a couple of rehearsal shows -- the toughest ticket in a town that can't get people to the beach in the middle of summer but had them lining up in the cold March wind for a concert in a drafty theater.

For me, that first show was a milestone, a realization of a long-time dream. I had been dying to see him perform and I had been a pretty avid fan. The concert made me a rabid one, though I do my best to downplay it because of all the stereotypes. Gary and I talked about it and it is a shame to look out on a fully lit arena during "Born To Run" (the house lights always come up for that song) and see 20,000 white arms thrust into the air during the "Woahs!" On Saturday, it was 60,000 under the lights at Giants Stadium. Bruce's fans are certainly white middle- and working-class, perhaps to the point of being New Jersey's equivalent of what one might call white trash were this all based in a poorer southern state. But that first show was something else, and I was hooked. Now, I'm happy to say, I've reached the point where I no longer experience my stomach turning flips just at the mention of tickets going on sale. I don't stress about being able to score tickets when shows are announced. While it would've been great to see him play PNC Park in Pittsburgh (it was on a weeknight) or Fenway Park this weekend in Boston (sold out really fast, not that we tried), I'm happy with having only seen Saturday's show. If he announces a couple of benefit shows in December down in Asbury Park, I may try to get in, but if it doesn't happen I won't kick myself. If he tours again next summer, I may consider going if the dates line up right, but I won't plan any vacations around it. I'll certainly see him again, so long as he keeps playing, but you can be sure I won't be wearing my 1999 tour shirts six or eight years from now.

I won't be That Guy.

Friday night's Counting Crows/John Mayer bill at the Arts Center was pretty good. I'd expressed my opinion on the Counting Crows' live shows to Casey before, and afterward she asked me what I thought of this one, if I thought it was better. I wasn't sure, but on further reflection, I think it was. Adam Duritz -- still with the dreadlocks; I mean, come on -- came out with a few -- 25? -- extra pounds looking tired. He explained that after the previous night's show, the band went back up to New York (about 45 minutes away) to sleep at home but had to wake up at 4:30 to appear on Good Morning America's Friday concert series. So he admitted to being dead tired. He also said they'd be doing a mostly acoustic show, since they did the night before and it went well. I groaned, because that's when they're not at their best, in my opinion. Where Bruce will stick to the songs as he wrote them, Counting Crows -- in the two shows I've seen -- will completely strip down their catalog and perform their songs with virtually no similarities to the tracks on the CD. That's OK in some instances, but I don't think I like it when it's done for every song. For one, it exposes Adam's below-average (in my untrained ear) singing voice and slows down the songs to the point where they're unrecognizable. As a result, Adam often slips into spoken-word cadences that ruin it for me. During the opening "Rain King" (one of my favorites as an up-tempo song, but just another acoustic re-arrangement on Friday), the song morphed into a slow cover of Bruce's "Thunder Road" without a change in music. After singing/speaking "Thunder Road," Adam finished up "Rain King." They did the same thing with a cover of Van Morrison's "Sweet Thing" (not a bad cover, actually) imbedded in one of their other songs, with Adam at the piano.

The band went electric again for their more recent songs (my theory is, as it was the first time I saw them after Recovering The Satellites came out, is that they haven't had enough time to rearrange the new songs). The shame of it was that the young crowd (mostly there to see John Mayer, we suspected) gave the loudest response (and sing-along) to the cover of "Big Yellow Taxi." But "Hard Candy" and "American Girls" were just as good, but it's "Taxi" that's getting all the airplay now.

The audience was decidedly high school-aged -- to see John Mayer. When he introduced a new song called "Come Back To Bed" (probably should've waited for the third album, John, considering how well you're known for "Your Body Is A Wonderland"), some fat cow who had infringed upon our personal lawn space by sitting behind us and stretching her legs -- along with her friend -- onto the back edge of our blanket said, "I never left." I wanted to turn around with a glare that said, "John's dog wouldn't lay you." But that was just my personal space talking. I'm sure she's a very pleasant fat cow, when you get to know her.

Because of its location, the Arts Center is a great summer venue for bands to reach their middle-to-upper-class white fans who aren't allowed to drive Daddy's BMW (or their own) to a show at the Meadowlands or New York City. So there were high school and college kids crawling all over the lawn, squealing from John's first appearance to his last "Thank you." I made a comment that when I was there age, I was in high school, had just gotten my license, and was listening to the Counting Crows' first album. Now here they are sitting through the Crows as the first act, followed by a guy who, come next Thursday, will have made it two years on the strength of his debut album -- though, to be fair, he has a new single out that I kinda like.

Oh, and for comparison: Counting Crows came on stage around 8:45 Friday night, and John Mayer left a little after 11, maybe 11:15. Bruce appeared just before 8:30 on Saturday and finished the last note of "Dancing In The Dark" at 11:10.

I believe if you took Adam Duritz' age and added it to John Mayer's, they'd come out maybe a year short -- or a year ahead, but not much more than that -- of 54, which Springsteen will be on the 23rd.

I'm just sayin'.