The Soundtrack of His Life
As Springsteen tours again, former WCBS-AM traffic reporter looks at his four decade relationship with 'The Boss'
Tom Kaminski vividly remembers the first time he saw Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band live — July 8, 1981, the fifth of six shows that opened the new Meadowlands Arena near his hometown of Lodi, N.J.
“It was ‘The River’ tour. The tickets were all by lottery,” says Kaminski, who had just graduated from high school. “You basically had to write a check, send it in with a self-addressed stamped envelope, and hope for the best. In return you would either get your original check back, or you would get tickets. Luckily, I got two tickets.”
Paying the “very hefty” price of $8.50, Kaminski found himself in the upper deck of the Meadowlands with a girl he was seeing at the time.
“The place doesn’t even look finished. The scoreboards weren’t finished. The stage was very bare,” Kaminski says. “And he comes out, throws the Telecaster on, and counts down, you know, ‘1, 2, 3, 4,’ and they launch into ‘Badlands,’ and that was it.
“Everything changed at that point. My jaw hit the floor. I walked in as a fan and walked out as a disciple.”
Forty-three years and dozens of shows later, Kaminski’s point of view hasn’t changed: Springsteen is still The Boss, an anchor for much of the soundtrack to his life. On Friday night, Kaminski took his new wife Kate and stepson Wyatt to Camden Yards in Baltimore to see Springsteen on his 2024 tour. It was his 47th show, Kate’s sixth, and Wyatt’s first.
The show served, as it has done at many points for Kaminski, as a salve following a tumultuous summer. For 36 years, he was the traffic reporter for New York City’s WCBS 880 AM, working the morning and evening shifts from a helicopter 1,500 feet above the city. At the end of August, the station — a source of local news in the nation’s largest media market — signed off and was replaced with ESPN sports talk programming.
Kaminski, who was in the sky on 9/11 and was among the first to broadcast that a plane had struck the World Trade Center, was without a job for the first time in decades. Adding insult to injury, his 15-year-old dog — a connection to his beloved late wife Lyn — also died over the summer.
“It’s been a rollercoaster of a year,” he says. “That’s for sure.”
All About the Music
In many respects, Kaminski is someone you would dub a “superfan” — a highly sought after demographic for artists and record companies because of their loyalty and willingness to spend. For legacy acts like Springsteen and The Rolling Stones, superfans and the money they bring with them are a lucrative reason to continue performing long after receiving their AARP cards. (It’s not ironic that the recent Stones tour, in fact, was sponsored by the retirement association.)
But unlike fans who have seen Springsteen hundreds of times, Kaminski falls into the category of “middling obsessive.”
“I don’t have 150 or 200 shows under my belt. I couldn’t afford it,” he says. “I’ve never seen him at the Stone Pony or the Headliner or any of those places where he would jump up on stage. I never got lucky enough to be there for that. But I keep going because every single show is different, and every show has a moment. It’s one of my favorite places to be.”
Kaminski grew up in the 1970s in Lodi, N.J., the town where “The Sopranos” was filmed. The transmitter for WABC Radio, a top-40 station serving the greater New York City area, was about a mile from his childhood home.
“I had 50,000 watts I could see from my bedroom window,” says Kaminski, who has taught radio production as an adjunct professor at Montclair State University since 2015 and has been a rotating host on a weekly radio show (“Back to the Future”) at the school since 2012.
He grew up with music always playing, his parents listening to jazz records. “From my earliest memory, there was Frank Sinatra playing in the house. My mother was a huge Frank Sinatra fan,” Kaminski says. “My father loved Stan Kenton, Ray Charles, and Louis Prima. So, I was always surrounded by it.”
Cutting his teeth on classic rock, Kaminski was a teenage drummer in White Lightning, a garage band that played covers of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones at school events and backyard parties, throwing in an occasional Sex Pistols and Ramones song for good measure. A “core memory” is of playing “every damn Beatles song that we knew” at a show two nights after John Lennon was gunned down on Dec. 9, 1980.
“All of us were destroyed. After all of these years, we still talk about that,” he says. “That’s a memory you can’t erase.”
The band broke up — “We all got older. We all got jobs. We all went to school” — but reformed for his wife Lyn’s 50th birthday in 2015. They played gigs until COVID and then “everything fell apart” with Lyn’s illness and death in early 2021.
Thunder Road
The first time Tom and I met was in February 2023 at a friend’s annual Super Bowl party in Virginia. Years earlier, Kate and I had met at the same party — an annual Chili Bowl hosted by mutual friends Eric and Mary Kleppinger — and connected over our mutual careers in nonprofit journalism and communications.
Kate knew Tom and I would bond over music, and she mentioned his love of Springsteen while we stood in Eric’s kitchen. “He’s seen him dozens of times,” she said, noting that she enjoyed Springsteen’s music but wasn’t on the same level of fandom. “In fact, he just got back from Dallas last night.”
Two days before, Tom had gone to Springsteen’s concert in Texas by himself. We talked briefly about the show— words like “awesome,” and “cathartic” were exchanged — and he mentioned how COVID was wreaking havoc on the E Street Band. At that point, having just met, I had no idea how much the trip to Dallas had meant to him.
Springsteen’s 2023 tour was the band’s first in seven years. Dallas was the first show Tom attended without Lyn.
“When Lyn passed away, I had gone to 36 shows at that point. She had gone to 27 and at least 20 of those were with me,” he says. “It was our thing. When we could do it, when we could pull it off, when we could afford it, we would go to a Bruce show. It was just what we did.”
Tom had the day off from WCBS when the tour arrived in Dallas, so he decided to go solo. He wanted to watch Springsteen play “Thunder Road” — his and Lyn’s song that he played as she passed away — live in an arena by himself.
“Kate and I were engaged at that point, and I said, ‘I need to do this. I need to do this by myself’,” he says. “Kate didn’t understand at first, but she realized what it meant to me. I needed to hear that song again. I didn’t know how I was going to react, but I needed that to go forward.”
Looking Forward
Tom and Kate first met in 1987, when he was working for Shadow Traffic in Union, N.J., and she was a student intern then attending American University in Washington, D.C. The two had instant chemistry, but a long-distance relationship was not in the cards, and they decided to remain friends. Both married other people and each had a son.
When they rekindled the romance following Lyn’s death, again it was long-distance. But this time it was in the cards and the two married this past January.
“We make each other happy. And we get each other through stuff. I could not have gone through these past couple of months without her,” Kaminski says. “We realize we’re very lucky to have found each other at this point in our lives, and we don’t take it for granted, that’s for sure.”
He’s not sure what his next professional move is, content but restless to continue working. He has the class, the radio show, and still plays gigs with a new band, Dead Aire, in and around Cranford where he lives. The group recently opened for The Smithereens, longtime friends and a New Jersey institution that Kaminski has seen more often than even Springsteen, at the famous Stone Pony. “That was a dream,” he says.
He planned to see Springsteen last month in Philadelphia and hoped J.T., his son with Lyn, would accompany him. But J.T., who had been to eight shows with his parents prior to Lyn’s death, declined.
“He said, ‘There’s just too many memories of mom,’ and I respect that. I’d love to have him with me for one more show, but I totally understand why he doesn’t want to.”
At Friday’s show with Kate and Wyatt, Kaminski was content to again experience one of those moments “where I sit there and go, ‘There’s no other place on this earth I would rather be right now.’” He glanced to the sky when Springsteen played “Thunder Road,” but says the moment he’ll never forget was during a lovely mid-concert performance of “Last Man Standing” that segued into an equally stunning “Backstreets.”
Springsteen’s 2-hour and 45-minute show in Baltimore, a 29-song set with two encores, was a marathon that he would repeat on Sunday night with a homecoming concert at the Sea.Hear.Now Festival in Ashbury Park, N.J. And despite Springsteen saying repeatedly that he has no plans to go gently into that dark night of retirement, Kaminski believes this tour has had “an air of finality to it from the beginning.”
“He’s said, ‘This ain’t no farewell tour,’ and ‘We ain’t going nowhere,’ but I can’t help but have an overriding sense of, ‘Look close, kids, because this is not going to happen again’,” Kaminski says. “That’s the reason I go, because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to see something like this again.
“It’s like going to see God in God’s house,” he says. “It just doesn’t get any better than that.”
Photographed for Americana Highways, where this story also appeared. For more photos, click on the link below:
The show is one of three concerts I photographed and wrote about over a six-day period. To see more from those shows, click on one of the links below:
Glenn Cook does excellent photojournalism and verbal storytelling too! It really bums me out as a lifelong (except for when I wasn't) New Yorker that WCBS/880 AM, a prototype radio news station with iconic call letters, had to become another sports outlet. We really didn't need that. And those traffic reporters had essential work if you ever commuted by car. But I'm glad he's still got Springsteen.
Beautiful story! There is so much here that I relate to. Cheers to Tom. Thanks, Glenn!