Boss Brigade Comes Out in Force for Concert Tickets

With visions of ringside seats dancing in his head, 14-year-old Taylor Brown rushed early Saturday morning to the local Ticketmaster outlet to buy tickets for an upcoming World Wrestling Federation match.

But when he reached the store, his sneakers screeched like car brakes and his jaw dropped.

“What’s with all the old people?” he asked when confronted by a throng of thirty- and fortysomethings lined up on the sidewalk outside Wherehouse Music on La Cienega Boulevard.

Well, Taylor, to borrow an old rock lyric: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are back together and coming to town for what is being touted as the hottest concert tour of the year. Across Southern California on Saturday, tens of thousands of his fans jammed record stores, phone lines and modems in a quest for the coveted ducats and a piece of the rock ‘n’ roll dream.

As tickets for each of the shows were offered, fans scooped them up in minutes. By midday the four-concert series at the new 17,000-seat Staples Center were sold out.

“Bruce is back with the E Street Band. What more can you say? I don’t know what could be bigger than this, maybe a Beatles reunion,” said 43-year-old Michael Loizzo, who huddled with his wife and 20-month-old son outside Wherehouse Music at the Beverly Connection plaza.

The rocker’s shows are legendary marathons that mix an evangelical spirit with bar band revelry and anthem-style imagery. This tour, the first Springsteen has done with the E Streeters in a decade, has already sold more than 1.3 million tickets in Europe and the United States. In Los Angeles it will be the debut event at the Staples Center.

“We felt we needed an opening night act that would fit with what our vision of the Staples Center is--and that’s Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” said Bobby Goldwater, general manager of the arena. “There was no second choice. He’s the perfect act.”

The rock outfit will play Oct. 17, 18, 21 and 23, with the last three shows alternating nights with games by the Los Angeles Kings on Oct. 20, 22 and 24.

The mad scramble by fans played out in record stores and homes throughout the region and beyond, where the hopeful furiously banged away on telephone buttons and computer keyboards. The lucky ones ended up with seats, but the majority came up empty-handed and frustrated.

Tickets for the shows would have gone even faster except for special restrictions put in place to deter scalpers and ticket brokers, said Terry Barnes, president of Ticketmaster.

His firm had 800 Internet ports, 600 phone operators and 200 store outlets in place Saturday to handle the crush of ticket buyers, Barnes said.

“But it’s like shopping at Christmas,” he said. “Nobody has a system that’s built to handle this. And we still blew through four shows in less than two hours.”

Some Internet users with high-speed connections reported near-instant success getting tickets when sales began at 10 a.m., but other computer customers with normal connections said they were greeted by frustrating messages of “Too Many Transactions” and “This Show Not Available.”

For telephone callers, getting through was tantamount to winning the lottery. Determined fans hoping to avoid busy signals on Los Angeles Ticketmaster lines inundated the firm’s phones in cities well beyond Southern California.

A directory assistance operator, when asked Saturday morning for the ticket merchant’s phone number in Arizona, asked, “What’s going on in Phoenix? People have been calling me from around the country all day to get that number.”

Going to record stores, fans also had to rely on the luck of the draw. Would you get a fast-typing, system-savvy clerk? Would the people in front of you have exact change or slow down the process with a credit card buy? Tempers ran short at many sites.

At Tower Records in Long Beach the credit card computer broke down, sending people running out to a nearby supermarket ATM for cash. Other sites also reported credit card snafus.

“People weren’t happy,” said Tower sales manager Diana Quintero.

Still, she estimated that her store completed close to 100 transactions before the fourth show sold out. “And then we had all these people lingering around, hoping for another show to be added,” she said. “I was like, ‘Get out of my store. This is crazy.’ ”

Some fans waiting in store lines swapped tales about past Springsteen shows and reflected on the camaraderie of the old days before home computers and Internet ports, when fans would camp out overnight to secure a spot at the front of the line.

This time around, as with all major shows in recent years, randomly numbered wristbands were handed out at sales outlets to determine the queue order, a maneuver that effectively ended the tradition of sleeping in folding chairs on the sidewalk.

“You would sit up all night, it was a party scene and you’d swap stories,” said Debra Bard, 46, who showed up Saturday about 7:30 a.m. and was first in line at the Wherehouse at the Beverly Connection. “This time we got to do that for an hour and a half, and that’s fine with me. I don’t miss the overnight stuff. I like my bathroom.”

Lori Stuckers, 33, of Manhattan Beach tried all three tactics--phone, modem and store lines. She started her day at a record store, but her wristband number put 30 people ahead of her, so she bolted home.

“I had a cell phone in my left hand and my right hand going back and forth between a regular phone and the mouse pad,” she said. “I got through on the cell phone and they put me on hold and the battery died! Finally I got two tickets online, though. So it was worth it.”