You’re walking up the stairs of the University Center to the main doors on a windy day as Bruce Springsteen’s song “Dancing in the Dark” blares, traveling through your red ears, clearly cold from the cold breeze.
As you walk by, you hear Springsteen passionately sing, “You can’t start a fire/You can’t start a fire without a spark,” —a nostalgic song from his 1984 album, “Born in the U.S.A.”
You wonder why the song sounds familiar, noting that it must be an old, famous song, maybe one that your parents or grandparents remember playing on their record players back in the day. As you walk inside the University Center, the music fades out from behind you, but little did you know, Bruce Springsteen performed at your own university 50 years prior.
50 years ago, the Student Programming Board (SPB), now Student Activity Board (SAB), announced a concert featuring Bruce Springsteen scheduled for Dec. 11 in Seton Hall’s very own Walsh Gymnasium.
SPB President and student Tim Price paid $17,000 to get Springsteen to come and perform, with an additional $3,000 to cover lighting, security, advertising, promotion, hospitality and printing the tickets, according to an article published in the Dec. 9, 1975, edition of The Setonian.
In that same edition of The Setonian, staff writer Thomas Columbo ranked Springsteen’s album, “Born to Run,” as one of the top ten albums released in 1975.
“‘Born to Run’ is the best album of the year; anyone who thinks otherwise should have their hearing checked,” Columbo wrote.
Two days prior to the concert, alumni Mark Mercadante, a business major in the class of 1979, was walking out of class when a classmate stopped him. She told him to go to the ticket office, outside the student center, the following day, to secure a ticket for Springsteen’s concert. She told him not to tell other students.
Mercadante, a then-freshman in his first semester at SHU, called his then-girlfriend, who was still in high school.
“I said, ‘Hey, you want to come? Come see Bruce Springsteen at Seton Hall with me?’” Mercadante said. “She said, ‘Wow, really? Yeah.’”
Mercadante, who showed up in line the next day, decided to buy four tickets to attend with his friends. Although there was a line of 25-30 students, as Mercadante claims, he was able to “jump on” the tickets.
Mark Mercadante is my father, and this is a story I’ve heard for many years, well before I was a student at SHU. When I joined The Setonian two years ago, I always knew I’d want to tell this story, as I always listened in awe. Now was the perfect time to tell it, given the 50th anniversary of Springsteen’s concert.
With this story reverberating in my mind, I turned back to the night that shaped it—a night that still echoes through my father’s memories and SHU’s history.
The concert, set to start at 8:30 p.m., featured Springsteen alongside his band, the E Street Band.
Mercadante sat in the front row. A few rows back sat Prosper Bellizia, a then-senior accounting major.
The day of the concert, Bellizia remembers helping students set up the chairs in Walsh Gymnasium. A year prior, he walked into one of Springsteen’s SHU concerts in the student center, but didn’t stay long. Now was his chance to see Springsteen’s show fully and to get a free ticket.
“I didn't do any heavy lifting, believe me, it was just setting up chairs,” Bellizia recalled.
After setting up chairs, he saw a man with Springsteen’s Fender Esquire, when he wondered, ‘What’s he doing with it?’”
“He's restringing it, and he's cutting off the old strings, and he's putting on the new strings,” Bellizia said. “So he has the old wires you cut off.”
Bellizia, realizing the man would throw away the old strings, asked what he was going to do with them.
“I said, ‘Can I have them?’ He goes, ‘Yeah,’” Bellizia said. “And he put them all back in there in an envelope, and he gave it to me.”
Within the next hour, Springsteen began his third performance at SHU during final exam week.
“Christmas was coming, school was gonna go on break,” Mercadante recalled. “It was, like, really an electric night. It was really fun.”
Reflecting on the concert, both Mercadante and Bellizia recall Springsteen starting the show with “Thunder Road.”
“I will never forget the opening because it started…on the piano, acoustic,” Bellizia said. “So mesmerizing.”
“If you look at the words of ‘Thunder Road,’ it's about a guy dating this girl,” Mercadante said. “He had meaningful songs that painted a picture, that told the story.”
“He was more the common man. He was a Jersey guy,” Mercadante added.
Mercadante pointed out “Born to Run,” specifically standing out to him because “it was a real rocker.”
Since the concert was bordering Christmastime, Springsteen played “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”
“You guys know what time of year this is,” Springsteen yelled into the crowd. “Have you guys been good this year?”
The crowd roared back, “Yeah!”
“That’s good because Santa Claus likes that,” Springsteen told the crowd.
This song was memorable for both Mercadante and Bellizia.
“He had a Christmas hat on, this goofy woolen hat, I think it was green. It was like a big floppy hat,” Bellizia said.
Mercadante, however, remembers Springsteen wearing a Santa hat. Either way, both Mercadante and Bellizia remember Springsteen leaning into the audience.
“Part of his stick—he falls in the audience, and some girl grabs the hat, and he gets back on stage,” Bellizia said. “He goes, ‘Where's my hat? Where's my hat?’ And everybody in the audience goes, ‘Give him the hat back! ‘Give him the hat back!’”
As the crowd kept yelling at the girl, she finally gave Springsteen his hat back so he could continue performing.
Mercadante said Springsteen performed with such high energy, which made the concert electric. Students were singing and dancing along as Springsteen performed.
“He loves to play off the audience,” Mercadante said. “[He] runs around the stage, but he runs around the stage with that guitar in his hand. He doesn't play too many leads like but he's a chord guy.”
Mercadante and Bellizia both noted that Springsteen’s concert at SHU was one of their favorite memories from being a college student. Mercadante said it’s his favorite concert he’s ever been to.
“It opened me up to a different sound that I was listening to,” Mercadante said. “But you know, when [if you] asked me, what was the best concert you ever saw, a live performance, I'd say it was that.”
Next time you wander past the University Center and a Springsteen song lightly echoes into the air, you might just feel the rumble of the night he shook this very campus—long before your time.
Dominique Mercadante is the Editor-in-Chief of The Setonian. She can be reached at dominique.mercadante@student.shu.edu.
