Some Jackass Bought Bruce Springsteen’s Car for $450k

Fan fervor for The Boss may continue forever.

Few artists define Americana as suitably as Bruce Springsteen. Though raised two hours south of New York City, there is simply nothing urban about the man. He even has a slight, indecipherable drawl non-endemic to the majority of Jersey folk living and breathing today.

It’s suitable that Springsteen’s first car would have been a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible. You might recognize the Chevy Bel Air from the movie “Back to the Future.” Nearly every denizen of 1955 Hill Valley, California drove one.

The car’s sharp wings gave Americans the sense that driving and flying were one and the same—that our sky-is-the-limit tenacity would never lead us down a one-way street of avarice and excess that 50 years later tore a hole in the fabric of the universe, to paraphrase Matt Taibbi.

The Bel Air convertible was the perfect vehicle when picking up chicks, watching drive-through movies, and cruising through segregated neighborhoods. In the sixties, you could just roll the top down and heckle those free-thinking women committed to the suffrage movement. What a bunch of bitches.

Springsteen’s car was auctioned off on March 26 and it was not done so for charity. I don’t know what this very wealthy man hoped to gain from buying Bruce Springsteen’s car for $468,000, but he certainly spent it.

One of the reasons I am so repulsed by Bruce Springsteen—I am the only white male music fan I’ve ever met that hates The Boss—is due to how much baby boomers, in their infinite greed and charming ability to ruin the lives of their children, worship this man. It’s beyond me why they’d pay $500 a ticket to listen to this guy, who I’ll admit is not a bad composer of songs, sing about how tough life is. Life is not tough for Bruce Springsteen.

When I worked at Yankee Stadium 10 years ago, I once overheard a guy in his mid-forties say, “Bruce Springsteen is the soundtrack of my life.” God help this man and his Secret Garden.

To me, Springsteen is more like Brian Wilson or Biggie. Everything seems a little more imagined than lived. That’s why he can write songs for movies like “Streets of Philadelphia” and “The Wrestler.” The fact that he’s been a multimillionaire across four decades yet remains the poster boy for working-class heroes is ridiculous. The fact someone would pay half a million dollars for his first car is just plain silly.