A 29-year-old relays his slow Bruce Springsteen evolution

My first Bruce Springsteen album was Greatest Hits, released in 1995.

This, I maintain, cannot be held against me. I was 15, with no older siblings to guide my musical compass, and I needed some sort of Springsteen starter set. In the days before iTunes, what option did I have?

Greatest Hits had Streets of Philadelphia, which is the first Springsteen single from the '90s that I actually remember being played on the radio. It had Murder Incorporated, a new track that, to my callow teenage ears, kind of rocked. And it had his two most famous songs, Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. If you had to pick a new national anthem from all the music released over the past 40 years, those two songs would definitely be on the short list.

Like a lot of young music fans, I went through the requisite rites of rock 'n' roll passage — a Beatles phase, a Dylan phase, a Zeppelin phase, a Velvet Underground phase. All were made possible by a greatest-hits album or mix CD, and all came and went with no lasting effects.

But my Bruce phase . . . different story.

I blame Track 2. Thunder Road.

My musical tastes have always leaned toward the modern — Radiohead, Death Cab for Cutie, Third Eye Blind — but to this day, Thunder Road remains one of my top five all-time desert-island songs. I used to sit at our piano with a portable CD player and clumsily attempt to plink out the opening notes. Just that one line — "You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're alright" — is imbued with more real, honest love than most songwriters can scrounge up in a lifetime.

And so, with Thunder Road as my lodestar, I gradually began discovering more singles that didn't make Greatest Hits — songs like Rosalita (Come Out Tonight), 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy). Each song opened the door a little wider on Young Bruce, Scruffy Bruce, Stone Pony Bruce. Bruce before he was BRUUUUUUUCE.

Then, in 2002, came The Rising.

I love The Rising for the same reasons Americans love watching Tiger Woods win a major: We want to see greatness affirmed in our lifetime. The Rising is the most meaningful work of art to have emerged from the aftermath of 9/11, a soulful meditation on uplift and grief that still manages to rock as hard as any of Bruce's early work.

I may not have been musically conscious for The River or Nebraska. But I was there for The Rising. I got to experience a Bruce that mattered.

That's ultimately what did it for me. With The Rising, Springsteen went from being a classic-rock icon, a best-of guy, to a contemporary artist with a culturally relevant sound and message — which is exactly what he's always been, only I'd been too caught up in his Greatest Hits to notice.

Today I am 29, the same age as Springsteen when he released Darkness on the Edge of Town. My parents are about Bruce's age, yet I feel as though I'm just coming into my own as a fan. The day tickets went on sale for Saturday's concert at the Ford Amphitheatre, I bought two.

It will be the second time this year I've seen Springsteen. The first was in February, when he played Raymond James Stadium at halftime of Super Bowl XLIII. I was there to write about celebrities at the game, and the NFL invited me to join the mass of crazies on the grass during Springsteen's four-song set. The fidelity on the field wasn't so great, but it was a hell of a spectacle, an honest-to-goodness pinch-myself moment.

Not long thereafter, I came across a dusty record player at a yard sale for $5. Now every time I visit Bananas Music in St. Petersburg, I scan the bargain stacks for old $1 Springsteen LPs. (A dollar, people! That's less than the cost of The Wrestler on iTunes!) Only now, through the miracle of Nixon-era technology, am I devouring deeper cuts from Springsteen's past, like Jungleland, Jackson Cage, Out in the Street and No Surrender.

Make no mistake: These are not Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Hits. They are bulky, messy, rambling epics that have no place on classic rock radio, much less a best-of collection. But they shimmer with electricity, and they cannot be imitated. They're why fans fell for the guy in 1975, and why I so admire him nearly 35 years later.

In other words: They ain't beauties, but hey, they're alright.