Quite the opposite, in fact. Some would argue that I’m a hoarder, though I haven’t quite reached the stage where I might be featured on an exploitative television show. This makes me, in many ways, a bad Tramp. I’ve got decades’ worth of magazine articles, but do you think I can find them? My Springsteen books are scattered through a multitude of rooms in two separate buildings (three if you include the books still at my mom’s place in Agassiz). My bootleg CDRs are mostly in unmarked sleeves in a box, labeled with a title and disc number if I’m lucky; no song listing, no dates, no other identifying information. I tend to lose things. This was brought home to me—acutely— while writing this book. It wasn’t just that it was a struggle to pull all the materials together. No, I even had trouble seeing things right in front of me. Take “Thundercrack,” for example. One of the main reasons I was so thrilled when the Tracks box set came out in 1998 was that it contained—finally!—an official release of “Thundercrack.”
