Seth Mnookin

A lot more than the staging has changed. Whereas Stipe’s political activism once bordered on the self-righteous, he is now in danger of becoming a mockery of himself. In a canned bit where he joked that his political disdain for NAFTA doesn’t stop him from buying shoes made with cut-rate Mexican labor, the band accompanied him with vampy chords and swooning keyboard lines, sounding like the shtick has gotten old even for them. Later on, Stipe made an offhand reference to how much he hates Delta Airlines, an offhand reference that has been repeated at virtually every show this tour. When he said, “I’m so happy to be here at Jones Beach,” I actually worried that I was about to witness a “Hello, Cleveland!” moment.

Musically, R.E.M. seemed to be trying harder than ever to play the part of the Really Big Rock Band. Only three of the night’s 25 songs were off of the hard-driving “Monster” (1994), and yet most of the show featured the crunching, rounded edges of that album’s electric guitars. The band stripped the soft beauty and quiet urgency from the two songs “Suspicion” and “Daysleeper” off the album “Up,” replacing those qualities with skronky guitars and angular rhythms. For most of the time, the band seemed to be on autopilot, throwing off its hits in neatly wrapped, three-minute packages that tossed away whatever mystery and suspense the songs carry on vinyl. And for the first time I’ve ever seen, the band managed to rid “The One I Love” of all its biting irony, turning what had once been the most subversive love song to crack the Top 10 into an arena-rock anthem.

The seven-song encore fared a bit bitter. Stipe started out singing “Hope” — a reworking of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” — with a solo guitar. He was joined by Mike Mills and then by violinist Deni Bonet (who appears on Robyn Hitchcock’s brilliant “Storefront Hitchcock”) for “Why Not Smile” and “Nightswimming,” which offered up the evening’s only chilling moments. And Patti Smith joined the band for “E-Bow the Letter,” which wasn’t a great musical moment but was still fun to see.

I left Jones Beach torn. I still have a massive crush on Michael Stipe — his preening and prancing may be practiced but it remains appealing. But I also felt gypped. R.E.M., even as they cut No. 1 albums, always insisted they stood on the side of art and beauty and truth. And on Saturday, for the first time I had seen, it seemed like the band had crossed over to commerce and commercialism and expediency. It was a shift I wish I hadn’t seen.

Booker, a made-for-TV dreamboat of a candidate, was challenging Sharpe James, the comically entrenched four-term incumbent, a man who saw no shame in tooling around town in a Rolls, a man who thinks nothing of tarring his opponent — publicly — by calling him “faggot white boy” or accusing Booker (who, like James, is an African-American and a Democrat) of being owned by the Jews and the Ku Klux Klan.

Let’s back up. For those who have somehow missed the spate of news articles and network news profiles and “Today Show” interviews and NPR spotlights, here’s a quick rundown: Cory Booker is 33 years old. He went to Stanford and Yale Law, and is a Rhodes scholar. After law school, Booker opted to move to Newark and become an activist. He ran for city council and, against the odds, won. Over the past four years, he’s become a media cause cilhbre, staging stunts like pitching a tent and embarking on a hunger strike in a drug-infested housing project until the cops were shamed into cleaning up the area.

Sharpe James is 66. He’s held elective office in Newark for as long as Booker’s been alive. And while James’ tenure has encompassed some impressive changes — the city’s Performing Arts Center is as beautiful a concert hall as you’re likely to find in America — outside of downtown, Newark is still mired in a poverty and despair that feels foreign to residents of American cities that participated in the boom of the 1990s, particularly those looking down, with upturned noses, from just across the river in New York.

But in the end, all of Booker’s charm, and all the love bestowed upon him from luminaries on the left and the right — the George Wills and Arianna Huffingtons and Barbara Streisands — was not enough. Just after 9:30 p.m., one of the Brasilia’s big-screen sets showed James leading by a couple of thousand votes, already a huge margin in a race where less than 55,000 people voted. The largely white crowd in this mainly minority city tried to stay hopeful, but there were enough realists here to know that it looked grim.

By 9:50, when Booker’s closest campaign advisors began trickling into the parking lot next to the Brasilia, it was clear there would be no victory celebration. One woman, bleary-eyed and unsteady on her feet, warned friends not to hug her lest she break down crying. The men and women who had given up jobs on Wall Street, who had moved from California, who had taken time off from their Silicon Alley gigs to go door-to-door for Booker began getting good and trashed.

At 10:15, the sound system faded out of James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” and into a hoary old Survivor tune, “Eye of the Tiger.” Booker, looking beatific, surged to the front pushed by a group of grown men, many with tears staining their cheeks. As he reached the stage, a smile burned on his face.

“Tonight there are two victory parties going on in Newark,” Booker yelled to the crowd. His voice featured the same level of ardor and conviction it showed during his stump speeches. “When I finish this speech I am going to call Sharpe James and concede the election. I will pledge to work with Sharpe James over the next four years to fight for all the things we’ve been fighting for over the last six months.” In the end, with 99 percent of the city’s precincts reporting, Booker trailed by nearly 4,000 votes.

At this point, a man, swaying perilously near a pool of vomit, yelled, “We’ll be back!”

“We don’t even need to say we’ll be back because we’re never going anywhere,” Booker responded. “My friends, we said that during the campaign that we have challenges in the city of Newark. We have before us a battle still. We lost one skirmish tonight? But the fight starts right now for the potential for the great city of Newark. I have yet to begin to start to fight for our people, so I say batten down the hatches. Cory Booker is not going away.”

Booker, speaking as always without notes, was shouting himself hoarse, and the sound system was reverberating with feedback from his screams. Booker looked calm and focused, as did his parents, who made their way through the crowd thanking supporters. “This is just a beginning,” his mom said. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

Some of his supporters were not so sure. Cynthia Tronco, who moved to Newark in 1991, could barely speak. “I’m depressed to the point where I’m calling real estate agents to sell my home,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “My outlook for the future is poor. People here expect nothing and so when they get nothing they aren’t disappointed. People here have been pushed down for so long they almost feel like they don’t deserve any better.”

An hour later, on a train back to Manhattan, Karlla Welch, a 29-year-old geneticist, was less pessimistic. Welch lives in Queens; she had woken up at 5:15 that morning to spend the day volunteering in Newark. “I’m surprised he didn’t win,” Welch said at the beginning of an hour-plus trip home. “And obviously I’m disappointed. But it’s hardly the end of Cory Booker. He’ll continue to fight. And I’ll probably stay involved too. I really enjoyed being a part of a campaign that was so fundamentally significant. I really liked the energy.”

A couple of seats away, Jamie Rosen, a 31-year old Internet entrepreneur, agreed. “It was awesome seeing how politicized the city was,” he said. And indeed, voter turnout was unusually high for Newark Tuesday. “The signs, the SUVs with speakers. It’s hard not to look at that as a good thing.”

The Roadhouse is on Park Place between Church and West Broadway. The chain-link fence set up as a perimeter around what was the World Trade Center is tattooed with hand-lettered signs cheekily touting the bar: “Bin Laden Missed Us; Don’t You Too,” “Meet Ground Zero Workers And Buy ‘Em One,” “Wash The Dust Down.” In the three weeks since the Roadhouse reopened, it’s become a drop-in site for the electricians, metalworkers and emergency personnel who have been all but living in lower Manhattan for the last two months.

Late Monday morning, it was still unclear if New York had a new ground zero — if the American Airlines flight that turned a residential Queens neighborhood into this month’s vision of hell was the result of another terrorist attack or was just a bitterly cruel accident. But at the Roadhouse, where PB&J goes for $3 a pop and the all-beef hot dogs are 2 inches thick, the customers besides Bell — the New Yorkers — didn’t have a whole lot of interest in the details on screen. As noon rolled around, a group of burly, hard-hatted men strode in, said their hellos to Jessica and Virginia, and sat down for some beer and grease.

And so, two months and a day after Sept. 11, disaster is part of the New York landscape. In the tumult following the World Trade Center attacks, there were a lot of prognosticators claiming that the country’s psyche would change forever. Comedy, and especially irony, was defunct. And New Yorkers would decamp en masse if the city faced further attacks.

That all seems like so long ago now. Also Monday, Mayor Giuliani said the city was doing sweeps on the subway system to test for anthrax — just to be extra careful — and ridership was at normal levels throughout the day. In the morning, just after 9 a.m., another American Airlines flight became a fuel-gorged missile, and the city flinched but went on its way. Indeed, New York seems poised to adapt to the constant threat of terror in much the way that Jerusalem has reacted to Palestinian attacks or London to IRA bombings: with caution, sure, but also with a psychologically sound resolve to keep on keeping on.

“Our perception of what this place is like back home is so different,” Bell said. “It’s like, ‘Don’t go out at night. Don’t take the subway.’ But it’s not like that at all. It seems safer here than anywhere.” Jimmy, Frankie, Charlie and Richie — the quartet of emergency personnel who navigated through the morning’s Level 1 security precautions at ground zero to get to the Roadhouse — agreed.

“In a way, I’m glad this happened in New York,” said Charlie, an electrician, referring to the World Trade Center attacks. “I mean, we can bounce back. We’re used to going forward, to dealing with things and moving on. Can you imagine if it happened somewhere else? They’d never recover.”

As he was speaking, Jimmy was hunched over a set of interconnected iron rings; the trick was to untangle them so one of the rings was freed. He was on his second beer; the next one was on the house. “What’d you say, Charlie?” he asked, still bent over. “You know how to do this?”

Calhoun hovered near the men, refilling beers and slicing limes. She moved to New York from San Diego on Sept. 1. She’s a dancer and has been tending bar at the Roadhouse to help pay bills. “My parents are like, ‘Well, when are you coming home?’ But I’m not leaving. I mean, I’m not even scared being here.”

Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer came on TV. As I strained to read what Fleischer was saying, a young man walked in. He was wearing a wool Yankees cap pulled down over his brow and was toting an L.L. Bean backpack. He said his name was Oren (“no last name, please”) and was visiting from Israel. He said his family was fine: “It’s no problem there. It’s not bad.”

And then, without removing his eyes from the split screen of Fleischer and the burning rubble, he said, “I hope it was the terrorists.” For a moment I thought I had misunderstood him. “Then we go in and really get the fucking Arabs. Then we can go in and take care of it all.”

Steve Earle and Sheryl Crow cover the song here, and perhaps director Robert Greenwald thought that the new performance would inch the song away from cinematic clichi. If anyone can get away with singing lines like “Our souls’ve been psychedelicized,” and “I might get burned up by the sun,” set against knee-jerk snippets of dialogue (“I think we stand for the destruction of property”) it’s Earle, whose timeworn voice conveys a thick layer of grit with every syllable he utters. The same, alas, cannot be said for Sheryl Crow, whose ridiculous yelping and forced inflections are actually comical. Sadly, this is not a farce.

That’s the problem with a lot of the “Steal This Movie” soundtrack, which pairs contemporary musicians with aging classics from Dylan, Country Joe & the Fish and others. Those ’60s show horses don’t age well, and when they’re updated they tend to sound overly earnest and cloying. Bonnie Raitt is a hell of a musician, and a damn fine singer, but she sounds sorely out of her league trying to tweak Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Joan Osborne and Jackson Browne don’t fare much better on “My Back Pages” — “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Mary Chapin Carpenter is a hair better on her version of Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow,” but it’s never more than mildly interesting.

Not even the intact period pieces — Edwin Starr’s “War” and Eric Burdon and Billy Preston’s “Power to the People” — can hold this effort together. Two Country Joe & the Fish songs work better, if only because they haven’t been so played out; also, there’s a feral intensity in hearing Joe McDonald snarl, “Send you back to Texas/Make you work on your ranch,” about the then-president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

And then there’s Ani DiFranco, who actually pulls off what must have been expected of the entire soundtrack. DiFranco does two songs here, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and Phil Ochs’ “When I’m Gone.” (Ochs himself performs “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.”) Set over a single, shimmering guitar, DiFranco wraps her voice, at once mellifluous and caustic, around these two old folk standards. Unlike Raitt, unlike Osborne and Browne, DiFranco makes these songs sound fresh and exciting. She gives them new life, a sense of continuity and shared legacy between Abbie Hoffman’s heady ’60s and today. Dragging herself across “When I’m Gone,” it’s hard not to get choked up. And when she sings about a sign warning that a swimming hole is “Private Property,” she sounds angry and hopeful, bitter and wistful all at once.

Earle is also a literary figure: He has been through dope addictions, jail stints, radical politics and six marriages (but only five wives). His is the kind of redemption tale that self-righteous “I read the New Yorker but haven’t read a novel since college” types grasp with dedicated fervor. Earle’s real, man.

So it was no surprise when writers seemed to outnumber any other single occupation at Wednesday’s show on the western fringes of downtown Manhattan. Poets, novelists, essayists, journalists and editors: All manner of scribblers were in attendance, hoping for a taste of Earle’s transcendent grace. Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found. The Roxy, a cavernous club that doubles as a roller-skating rink and feels more like a Texas honky-tonk than a New York club, has some of the worst acoustics in the city. Vocals get lost and sound flat, reverb overwhelms and any attempts at subtlety are lost. On Wednesday, to the right of the stage, the bass was so loud people were clutching their chests in pain; to the left, the sound was so muddied that many folks stopped even trying to listen and just shot the shit at the bar.

Which isn’t to say Earle didn’t give it a shot. His four-piece band, the Dukes, supplies Earle with the kind of two-fisted, straight-ahead, power chording that Crazy Horse supported Neil Young with to such great effect 25 years ago. And Earle played for more than two hours, switching guitars after virtually every song. Most of his latest release, the typically splendid “Transcendental Blues,” got a turn, from the show-opening title track to the more gentle “The Boy Who Never Cried.” Toward the end of the show, Earle played the most arresting song on the album, “Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song),” an anti-death penalty song Earle wrote about an executed convicted murderer he had become friends with. “Give my radio to Johnson,” Earle sang, “Thibodeaux can have my fan/Send my Bible home to Mama/Call her every now and then.” Or at least I assume that’s what Earle sang, because that’s what he sings on the album; at the Roxy, the words were totally indecipherable, the music drowned out by cocktail chatter.

After “Over Yonder,” Earle segued into the ferocious “All of My Life,” run through with feedback and anger. The contrast caused some of the audience to look up in surprise at Earle, with his head down and glasses askew. It’s too bad the rest of the show couldn’t have captured this same intensity.

In the early 1970s, Austin wasn’t known for much besides the University of Texas and the state’s capitol building. Janis Joplin had hung around before moving to San Francisco, and there was a small music scene for country balladeers like Townes Van Zandt and the singer-songwriters of the Flatlanders, but the scene wasn’t recognized as much by outsiders. The airport wasn’t, as it is now, festooned with posters proclaiming it “The Live Music Capital of the World.” Movie stars didn’t live there, and neither did high-tech moguls. There were no hip rock ‘n’ roll festivals every spring.

The arc of Nelson’s career, and, one could argue, the legacy of Austin, changed 25 years ago. In 1975, after signing to Columbia, Nelson assembled a seven-piece band — two drummers, a pianist, a harmonica player, a pair of guitarists and a bass player — and set out to record an epic tale of a wandering preacher: The Red Headed Stranger from Blue Rock, Montana. Compared to the overblown orchestral country records that were popular at the time, it was an odd little album, just over 34 minutes long, full of two-minute instrumental rags (“Down Yonder”) and minute-long interludes. The songs were here and there: “Red Headed Stranger” is an old Edith Lindeman-Carl Stutz number that Nelson used to sing to his children to woo them to sleep, and Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” was previously recorded by both Elvis Presley and Gene Autry.

When Columbia chief Bruce Lundvall got the album, he figured, as he says in this reissue’s liner notes, “It may not be an important commercial record by Willie, but it’ll be a valuable catalog album. And everyone thought it was nice.” “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” ended up making a dent on the pop charts, and the record sold 2 million copies within a couple of years of being released; today, that number is over 3 million.

Willie Nelson was finally a star. And in the past 25 years, Austin has become somewhat of a star as well. For bucking against the biggies, and making a spare, personal album in a time of slick excess, Nelson is now a wizened uncle of Austin outlaws and musicians spurned by Nashville — musicians like Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. And Austin claims it is home to as many aspiring bands per capita as any city in the country. It remains one of the few American cities where locals pride themselves on the music scene, where the newspapers cover music like other papers cover sports and where dinner and a live band is a perfectly normal Saturday night date for adults.

“Red Headed Stranger” begins with six cascading chords, played on bass, acoustic guitar and piano. Then the musicians cut out for Nelson’s first line: “It was the time of the preacher/When the story began.” The entire album works like this. Songs seem to have no beginnings or ends — they just waft out of the air. Later, as Nelson is singing “Can I Sleep in Your Arms,” all the instruments cut out except a barely perceptible piano. As Nelson begins singing again he’s joined by a single picked note on guitar, then a pair of notes, then a bass line, then the whole band. It’s as if more than one instrument would clog the majesty of the moment.

Roughly, the album tells the story of an itinerant preacher whose lady left him; the album follows him as he wanders across the Old West and finally finds redemption in a new love. Billy Callery’s “Hands on the Wheel” marks the exact moment: “And with no place to hide/I look in your eyes/And I found myself in you/And I feel like I’m going home.”

This Columbia reissue, part of the second batch of Columbia/Legacy’s “American Milestones” series (other new titles include albums by Johnny Cash, the Carter Family, George Jones and Johnny Horton) includes four bonus tracks, if you count a 35-second riff on Bach’s “Minuet in G” as one. Hank Williams’ “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)” is slightly jauntier than most of the album, and it’s nice to hear. But it’s the quick shuffle of “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” with its refrain — “So I held her in my arms/And told her of her many charms” — that is the best addition. With Mickey Raphael’s otherworldly harmonica moaning like the wind blowing through a screen door and Bobbie Nelson’s brisk piano, “Bonaparte’s Retreat” is an example of how Nelson can take a song and really own it — a skill he would ride to the top of the country charts with “Stardust” later in the decade.

In the last 10 years, Nelson has returned to the flowing beauty of “Red Headed Stranger” with near-perfect albums like 1998′s “Teatro.” Now 67, Nelson still lives in Austin, and still throws an annual Fourth of July barbecue, a fitting fete to celebrate a small musical revolution that ended up creating a little colony down South.