I wonder if the guv is going to try to play this cool or go the dismissive “I’ve got bigger fish to fry” route he’s perfected over the last couple of days. Either way, it will be a front. This is a big deal for Christie!
But lest anyone think for a moment that Bruce had forgotten the past few days back home, Bruce eschewed his normal setlist pattern and immediately went into “We Take Care of Our Own” as the second song of the set. Three songs later, he started a particularly heartfelt introduction about his home state. “My City of Ruins” has been played at every show this tour to date, with Bruce often remarking about how the “song has become about so many things: ghosts, people, places, things that mark themselves upon us, become who we are.” Yet tonight, only two nights after a devastating hurricane, he was thinking about the original inspiration for the song.
“We wish you a happy Halloween, but we are a rock ‘n’ roll band form the Jersey Shore, and tonight we carry a lot of sadness in our hearts. This was originally a song about my adopted hometown struggling to get on its feet — it struggled for 25 years, a quarter century, while we watched for Asbury to come back. And we are very proud to say over the past decade, it has risen up and flourished in a way I wasn’t ever sure I’d see in my lifetime. And it will do so again!”
“We’re a band that you can’t separate from the Jersey shore — still basically a glorified bar band… at your service! So we’re gonna do this tonight from our hometown to your hometown. We’ll send this out to all the people working down there: the police officers, the firemen, and also to the Governor, who has done such a hard job this past week.”
If the Boss had actually referred to Christie by name, there would have been a non-zero chance that the governor retired from public life, content to live the rest of his days following the E Street Band from show to show.