Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Work can't keep DJ away from real Boss

By Neal Rubin / The Detroit News

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Mike Stone saw Bruce Springsteen at the Fox Theatre Monday and says the show was terrific. Exactly how terrific, it's hard to quantify.

All Springsteen performances are "great in their own way," he explains, much like kids. The difference is that most of us stop having kids before we assemble more than 90 of them.

Stone, the co-host of "Stoney & Wojo" on WDFN-AM (1130), hasn't rung up the exact total lately, but he's closing in on 100 Springsteen concerts. If that seems excessive, well, he does have some regrets. For instance, he's sorry he didn't start jetting to out-of-town dates sooner.

"I didn't have the resources," he says. Now he does, along with a contract provision that I assume is unique to planet Earth:

If Bruce Springsteen is performing within 750 miles of Detroit, Stone can take the day off from his afternoon sports talk show to go.

"I've used it," he says of the clause. "I haven't abused it."

Well, there was the tour called "The Rising" in 2002-03. He caught the opening show in a New Jersey arena, and frankly, "I was kind of disappointed." But the tour evolved and he heard it was improving and the set list changed, and ...

Okay, he saw it in Detroit. And Cleveland. He took his parents in Philadelphia. Saw it again in Albany, Atlantic City, Milwaukee and Toronto. Moved on to the stadium shows at Comerica Park, in Washington, D.C., and in New Jersey (twice).

But again, that was unique. There's only been one time, for instance, that he left his wife on vacation in Las Vegas to fly to Los Angeles for a show. On their anniversary. It was her present to him, and he couldn't have felt more loved if she'd given him a kidney.

"If this is the worst of his obsessions," explains Cyndi Stone, the loving mother of their 5-year-old twin girls, "it's OK. That's my thinking."

My thinking is that everybody is a geek about something, in the kindest sense of "geek." Sometimes it doesn't show, like if one shelf in your basement holds commemorative demitasse spoons from every U.S. National Park. If your geek-hood involves being absent from a high-profile job, and your loving colleagues make fun of you on the air while you're gone, perhaps the obsession becomes more visible.

On the quiet side of geekdom, for instance, Rona Danziger owns so many watches her husband calls her a "chronophile." Same thing, right?

"Right," says Danziger, the program director at WDFN, except that "I don't have to miss work for my obsession. When he didn't have kids, forget it. You couldn't keep him from a Bruce concert."

My thinking, again, is that if you're going to see a musician 90-plus times, Springsteen is a sensible choice. He can raise his fist in a packed stadium and have 60,000 people react as though there was a lighted sign behind him that said "Go berserk." Or he can stand alone with a guitar and have 4,000 devotees lean forward as though he were about to tell them a secret.

"If you like the music to begin with and you go, there's a connection," says Stone, 46. From a less ethereal standpoint, "you get your money's worth."

At the Fox, Springsteen played for 2 1/2 hours. Catch one of his full-band rock shows and it's as though you were on stage yourself: "You're spent."

Stone and Springsteen both come from the East Coast, though Stone grew up upper middle class in Philadelphia and Springsteen is blue-collar Jersey. It could be that's part of the attraction. Stone saw him for the first time on New Year's Eve 1975 in Upper Darby, Pa., and they've been bonded ever since, even if one of them doesn't know it and they've never exactly met.

At that 1975 show, Springsteen signed Stone's T-shirt. They've shaken hands when Stone had a front-row seat, and once he asked Springsteen a question at a press conference.

"In my job, I've met all my greatest athletic heroes," Stone says. Now he'd love five minutes with the Boss, and who knows? Maybe they'll come face to face on this "Devils & Dust" tour.

Stone says he won't be traveling. The girls are 5, and it's just not that easy to get away. Besides, he gets more of a jolt from the rock shows than the solo performances.

"With the Pistons in the playoffs, I can't commit myself to anything," he says. But in case someone has an extra ticket for May 11 in Chicago, I'm pretty sure he can get off work.

Neal Rubin appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at (313) 222-1874, nrubin@detnews.com, or 615 W. Lafayette, Detroit, MI 48226.