{"id":22442,"date":"2026-07-13T14:39:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T18:39:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/?p=22442"},"modified":"2026-07-13T14:39:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T18:39:24","slug":"bruce-at-full-volume","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/bruce-at-full-volume\/","title":{"rendered":"Bruce at Full Volume"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the things I looked forward to most about going off to college in 1992 was something I had been missing since my older brother left for the University of Scranton six years earlier: late-night conversations with someone lying awake in the bed across a darkened room. Often, our chats focused on the music of Bruce Springsteen, with a heavy emphasis on the two cassettes we were listening to most in the early \u201980s: \u201cBorn to Run\u201d and \u201cNebraska.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I spent my entire first year at Monmouth with no roommate. It might sound like a dream scenario for someone who was\u2014and still is\u2014a bit of a loner, but it wasn\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The morning after my first night on campus, I woke up in my room in Elmwood Hall and saw that the bed across from mine was empty. I assumed my roommate had crashed elsewhere, but when that bed stayed empty night after night, I realized he wasn\u2019t coming back. No one else ever moved in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the next eight months, I had no one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I did have, though, was one of the best stereos on the first floor of Elmwood. Silver with metallic red accents, the stereo held six CDs. I filled each slot with a Bruce album, including the two that had been released together toward the tail end of my senior year of high school: \u201cHuman Touch\u201d and \u201cLucky Town.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I might have had no one to talk to every night, but I did have the only person I really wanted to listen to: Bruce. And I made sure that everyone else on my floor could also hear what he had to say. I\u2019d sit back in my bed reading the album\u2019s liner notes as I blasted whatever album I happened to be into that week, sometimes with my door pulled closed, sometimes with it wide open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To my surprise, I never got much of a reaction from the other Elmwood occupants. For the first few weeks I lived there, I waited for someone, anyone, to enter and say, \u201cHey man, I\u2019m a big Bruce fan too. Turn that up!\u201d But as Bruce says on track 11 of \u201cTunnel of Love,\u201d \u201cWhen you\u2019re alone, you\u2019re alone.\u201d And I was alone\u2014not only in my room, but also as a huge Springsteen fan at Monmouth in the early- to mid-\u201990s. The place that is now the worldwide headquarters for all things Bruce was a much different place 30 years ago. It was, to me at that time, a town full of losers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many, part of the reason I attended Monmouth was its location. But what separated me from many of the other students who enrolled there was that its proximity to the beach was merely a bonus. I wanted to be in the middle of Bruce country, and I had assumed I wouldn\u2019t be the only one there for the same reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pushing play on my CD player and turning the volume up until \u201cBadlands\u201d echoed down the hallway, I waited for someone to walk into my room playing the air drums. I even made the now embarrassing assumption that blasting \u201cMan\u2019s Job\u201d would draw young women into my room, like seagulls flocking to the washed-up carcass of a crab on Seven Presidents Oceanfront Park. Boy, was I wrong about that. In fact, I had to recruit people to entertain my love of Bruce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Nov. 11, 1992, a friend joined me on a walk across campus to the Student Center to watch \u201cBruce Springsteen in Concert\/Plugged,\u201d an electric version of the popular \u201cUnplugged\u201d acoustic series MTV aired back then. I expected to have to fight for a seat close to the television that hung from the wall near what is now a Dunkin. Instead, my friend and I had our choice of seats and could turn the TV up as loud as we wanted to. There was no one around to disturb. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Julian
Julian Garcia \u201996 and his daughter, Abigail \u201925, attend the Sea.Hear.Now festival in 2024, where Bruce Springsteen joined the lineup. Photo courtesy of Abigail Garcia<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Two years later, as a junior with my own three-hour show on WMCX, Monmouth\u2019s student-run radio station, I knew I had at least two listeners. One was the friend who had watched that show with me. The other was a senior who had the nerve to tell me, on more than one occasion, that I was \u201closing listeners\u201d by taking 15 minutes out of my three-hour show to play three Bruce songs in a row, something I did regularly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe that guy had a small point when you think about the songs that were popular on college campuses at the time: \u201cGangsta\u2019s Paradise\u201d by Coolio, \u201cWaterfalls\u201d by TLC, \u201cYou Oughta Know\u201d by Alanis Morissette. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we went to bars and clubs in Long Branch and Asbury Park, the most popular song was House of Pain\u2019s \u201cJump Around,\u201d a rowdy hip-hop\/dance track with a 25-second intro that partygoers responded to the way a stadium full of Bruce fans react to the opening notes of \u201cRosalita.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the music of the day seemed silly and meaningless to me. But that\u2019s what most college kids wanted\u2014not deep, heartfelt songs, even if the guy writing them used to play right here on campus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, there I was pushing Bruce\u2019s stuff upon an audience that didn\u2019t really exist on campus. With 1,000 watts of power behind me, I kept doing what I wanted to from the third floor of the Student Center, my silly senior friend be damned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like that imaginary audience, another thing that did not exist at the time was the internet, at least in the form we know it today. Had it, I might have known about the little house about a block from the beach on West End Court in Long Branch where Bruce wrote a good portion of his \u201cBorn to Run\u201d album. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On mild fall and spring nights, when no one wanted to listen to Bruce with me, I would strap a Walkman to my hip and jog from campus to the beach, finishing my run on the boardwalk directly across from a set of apartment buildings that are now Monmouth residence halls. My route took me right past 2nd Ave., a street that intersects West End Court, and would have, had I veered off instead of staying straight toward the ocean, taken me directly past rock \u2019n\u2019 roll history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I had no idea the \u201cBorn to Run\u201d house existed. Of course, someone from campus could have educated me, but unfortunately for this Bruce fan, I showed up about 30 years too soon\u2014long before the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music opened its doors and Monmouth offered courses such as Bruce Springsteen\u2019s America: Land of Hope and Dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After surviving my first year without a roommate, and spending some very loud but lonely nights in my room, I eventually did end up sharing living space with others, first in a suite in Cedar Hall and then on the far side of campus in the Great Lawn apartments. I lugged my stereo and growing collection of Bruce CDs to each stop, always expecting the music\u2014and my interest in the man who created it\u2014to be received the way I thought it would be when I first arrived on campus in 1992. It never was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At least not for me.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Abigail
Abigail Garcia poses with Bruce Springsteen following the 2024 American Music Honors ceremony on campus. Photo courtesy of Abby Garcia<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

But this story took a dramatic turn in 2020, when my daughter, Abigail \u201925, enrolled at Monmouth and got to live out the Bruce dream that had eluded me. A two-time president of Blue Hawk Records, the student-run record label on campus, Abby spent several springs and summers interning at the Stone Pony, the Asbury Park rock \u2019n\u2019 roll bar Bruce helped make famous. She was a student employee at the Springsteen Center, where she spent time surrounded by artifacts that, had I had access to when I was in college, would have made my head explode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in moments that would have been unimaginable for the Elmwood Hall freshman who spent many lonely nights finding companionship in Bruce\u2019s music, my daughter eventually got the chance to spend some time with the actual man\u2014multiple times, right there on campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most personal encounter followed an American Music Honors event inside Pollak Theatre. In a selfie Abby took, she and Bruce lean into each other, smiling, as Bruce looks into the camera while aiming his right index finger in her direction, as he\u2019s known to do while posing with fans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I smiled when that photo popped up on my phone a few minutes after it was taken. And then, I thought back to all those nights I spent in my dorm room at Monmouth and in the WMCX studio\u2014a Bruce fan on campus with no one to share my love of his music with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, 30 years later, that campus is where fans from all over the world will gather to do just that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an old college friend of mine once said, \u201cIt\u2019s been a long time coming\u2014but now it\u2019s here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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