It is hard to remember it now, but in the beginning of his career Springsteen was largely apolitical. During his first decade and a half as a professional musician, he made almost no political endorsements or even statements from the stage. In November of 1980, he told an audience at Arizona State University that the election of Ronald Reagan “frightened” him, but he didn’t specify just what he was afraid of. In September of 1984, Reagan’s reelection team, looking for local references to liven up a campaign stop in Hammonton, N.J., had Reagan name-check Springsteen in that day’s variation on the president’s standard stump speech. When informed of this, Springsteen tried to shrug off the association and distance himself from Reagan, but there were certain vague similarities. More than anything, Springsteen and Reagan both often saw life in the United States as the same essential conflict: a war between individuals with dreams and the larger institutions that sought to keep them down.

Being a pop star doesn’t have much in common with being a president, but it does have a great deal in common with being a presidential candidate. Both pop stars and presidential candidates can’t just sell their material. To be widely popular, they have to sell a vision that unifies that material. To tell the truth, in 1984 Springsteen and Reagan did have strikingly similar ideologies, even if they were politically far apart — and that was Springsteen’s dilemma. Even if it is necessary for pop stars to sell a national vision, policy and government have nothing to do with their jobs. Nevertheless, if Springsteen didn’t want his audience to get too comfortable with his ideological similarities to Reagan, he had to find some way to make their political differences more explicit.

From the fall of 1984 on, activism — particularly attention to local causes — became a regular part of Springsteen’s concerts. His public attachment to World Hunger Year, City Harvest and Amnesty International, among other broad-based organizations, became well-known, but he also made sure to invite local causes to set up booths at each of his venues. He began, not only to take much more open stands on the issues about which he cared, but to inform himself in more detail about those issues so that he could speak more knowledgeably to them.

In 1996, he performed at rallies to defeat California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. In 2004, he endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time, John Kerry, and headlined one of the pods of the Vote for Change tour, which sought to build awareness and support for Kerry’s candidacy in swing states. Four years later, Springsteen was an earlier and even more enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama. As he told a crowd at a voter registration rally in Philadelphia in October of 2008, “I’ve spent most of my creative life measuring the distance between [America’s promise and its reality] … I believe Sen. Obama has taken the measure of that distance in his own life and in his work, and I think he understands in his heart the cost of that distance, in blood and in suffering, in the lives of everyday Americans.“

Like many Americans, Springsteen has apparently spent time over the last four years measuring the distance between the promise of Mr. Obama’s candidacy and the reality of his presidency. At a press conference in Paris last month to promote the release of his new album “Wrecking Ball,” which will be in stores March 6, Springsteen gave a mixed to favorable review of President Obama’s first term, commending the president’s hard work on healthcare and his reduction of the war in Afghanistan but expressing frustration that neither effort went further. At the same press conference, Springsteen was more unalloyed in his praise of Occupy Wall Street, for their introduction of the very idea of income disparity to the national dialogue. Significantly, he told reporters that he probably wouldn’t take part in the presidential campaign this year, suggesting that it had been more essential to get up off the bench in 2004 and 2008.

As much as Springsteen may applaud Occupy Wall Street, much of “Wrecking Ball” predates it. At least two of its songs (“Wrecking Ball” and “We Take Care of Our Own”) were written in 2009, in the first shock of the current recession, and another (“Land of Hope and Dreams”) dates back 13 years to the days of Starr vs. Clinton. Here, as in his last several albums, Springsteen references the botched handling of Hurricane Katrina on multiple occasions, with at least two songs specifically calling back to that moment and others seemingly alluding to it. While some of the songs on “Wrecking Ball” do address income inequity, a far more abiding theme on the album is unemployment, specifically among those who do manual labor. The woeful narrator of “Jack of All Trades” spends six minutes listing all the jobs he would be willing to do, just to put bread on his family’s table, and not one of them is a desk job. The narrator of “Shackled and Drawn,” one of the album’s best songs, is far more assertive and direct. “Let a man work — is that so wrong?” he righteously yells. “Freedom, son,” he declares, “is a dirty shirt.”

Springsteen may be a lifelong individualist, he may be every bit as suspicious of institutions and bureaucracies as Ronald Reagan was, but he clearly doesn’t believe that success is wholly individual either. There isn’t a Social Darwinist bone in his body, and Ayn Rand may very well be his ideological antipode. In paying tribute to OWS at the Paris press conference, it was this sort of solipsistic individualism against which Springsteen most directly raged, accusing those who disproportionately profited from the boom years of “a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community.”

The history and community to which Springsteen most clearly appeals on “Wrecking Ball” and throughout his career is the workingman’s world of his youth, a world of factories and union halls, in which good-paying jobs, benefits and affordable housing were much more widely available to those who might not have an Ivy League education but were willing to get their shirts dirty. For decades now, since 1978’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” at the very latest, Springsteen has been lamenting the loss of that world, as globalization has seen the union-made jobs of Springsteen’s childhood vanish or flee overseas. In “My Hometown,” the closing song on 1984’s “Born in the USA,” Springsteen lamented the loss of a local textile mill, famously declaring that “these jobs are going, boys/And they ain’t coming back.” On “Wrecking Ball,” in the deliberately titled “Death to My Hometown,” the castoff workers aren’t just lamenting, they’re pitchfork-and-torches mad. Even the seemingly more resigned narrator of “Jack of All Trades” is looking for a gun in that song’s last verse, to use on those responsible for his underemployment, if he can even find them.

Springsteen knows, more than anyone perhaps, that neither this cause nor these characters are new. “Wrecking Ball’s” final song, “We Are Alive,” specifically links the struggles of 19th-century railroad strikers and 20th-century civil rights activists to 21st-century immigrants who die during border crossings. These are the citizens of Bruce Springsteen’s America, generation upon generation who have looked to their more affluent neighbors for a fair shake and not a handout. The music in which Springsteen sings of these characters is old, too. In fact, it is doubly old: The songs and their arrangements stem from Springsteen’s love of early 20th century folk, blues and gospel; and in Ron Aniello’s production, those songs and arrangements are frequently infused with audio samples drawn from the Smithsonian’s archive of Alan Lomax’s 1930s and 1940s field recordings. The sounds on “Wrecking Ball” (as on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s recent “Watch the Throne”) aren’t new, but the artists have tried to make them fresh for our ears, because we need to listen to them again. Indeed, the ideas on “Wrecking Ball” (as on Ani DiFranco’s recent “Which Side Are You On?”) aren’t all that new either, but we need to give them a fresh hearing too, because it is blind faith in progress that got us into this mess in the first place.

For a young woman or man around the age of thirty today, the world of Bruce Springsteen’s childhood is unimaginable. A federal government that funds college and cheap mortgages? Employers that routinely supply health benefits and pensions? To those unfamiliar with American history, that doesn’t sound like the world of the Greatest Generation; it sounds like a socialist fantasy. Obviously, the world has changed immensely during the last 62 years; neither America’s economy nor the world’s generates jobs and wealth in quite the same way as they did in 1949. But justice does demand that the “right to work” mean something more than the right for employers to underpay their employees — and it’s not Bruce Springsteen’s job to determine the details of how to make that happen. He’s measured the distance between our past and our present, between our promises and our reality, and he’s given us the benefit of his vision. It’s up to presidents and senators to make that distance shorter, to turn visions into policy and actually govern.

Springsteen’s not the first artist to take up the occupiers’ cause, nor is he the first to filter his outrage through the iconography of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl folkie who has become, 44 years after his death, the patron saint of the 99 percent. Tom Morello evoked Guthrie’s example when he strolled around Zuccotti Park singing “This Land Is Your Land,” which won MTV’s dubious award for Best #OWS Performance last year. More recently, Jackson Browne debuted a folksy number at Occupy Wall Street that played against his soft-rock strengths in favor of talking-to-the-masses piety. Guthrie has proved to be a potent symbol of grass-roots dissent, yet these songs make it appear as though the folk singer has been thrust upon OWS rather than embraced by its demonstrators. And it’s a limited view of the singer as well, one that doesn’t accommodate his sense of humor or his sense of wonder.

In a sense, it could be considered a failure of imagination: No one has been able to conceive of a new form of protest music specific to this moment in American history, so they revisit the old, obvious exemplar and hope it still fits. Springsteen certainly draws from this vision of Guthrie. The cover of “Wrecking Ball” shows him hoisting a guitar as a symbol of proletariat power, partially obscured by text in the Guthrie Bold Condensed font. “We Take Care of Our Own” is a tangle of barbed lyrics that confront economic and social issues in the broadest way imaginable: “Where are the eyes, the eyes with the will to see?” he asks, not quite rhetorically. “Where are the hearts that run over with mercy?” Later, he poses the burning question, “Where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?”

It’s all very straightforward and sincere, in language that’s simultaneously plainspoken and grandiose. Springsteen has long identified with the Okie folkie, covering “This Land Is Your Land” on the box set “Live 1975-85″ and recording a handful of spare acoustic albums addressing social concerns. On “Nebraska” (1982) and even on the fairly forgettable “Ghost of Tom Joad” (1995) and Devils & Dust (2005), Springsteen channeled his own worries through Everyman characters, such as the desperate gunman of “Johnny 99” and the hard-luck meth cooks of “Sinaloa Cowboys.” The people came first, it seemed, and the issues second. Springsteen may have stretched to rhyme “ravine” and “methamphetamine,” but those songs had the power of parables, delivering potent messages without sounding preachy or overtly political. “We Take Care of Our Own” does just the opposite. Rather than view this historical moment through the eyes of a character, Springsteen writes like he’s using bumper stickers like magnetic poetry. There’s nothing in the song to personalize the outrage, to give it relevance or impact or specificity.

Musically, “We Take Care of Our Own” doesn’t sound much like Guthrie at all. Rather than austere acoustic folk, the song nods to Springsteen of the past decade, with its florid strings and busybody production courtesy of Ron Aniello (Lifehouse, Jars of Clay). It sounds ostentatiously expensive, yet Springsteen’s vocals are lively and sympathetic, which makes him sound like the 99 percent instead of the 1 percent.

He’s writing what he thinks the country needs, which is not the same as what it actually needs. Yet, the best aspect of “We Take Care of Our Own” — the one component that makes you look forward to hearing the rest of the album — is that wonderful boardwalk bells-and-guitar theme that repeats throughout the songs, sounding heraldic and optimistic and perhaps even celebratory. It’s signature Springsteen, both a throwback to the immigrant culture that produced him and an ageless alternative to the blues-derived riffs that pervade so much rock ‘n’ roll. That theme turns “We Take Care of Our Own” into something like a singalong — inclusive rather than exclusive, a communal experience that supports the sentiment of the song’s title. That may be truer to the spirit of Guthrie than any of the song’s well-meaning lyrics.

I love that quote, but it might also make their collaboration sound like a civics lesson. It wasn’t. Describing the first time he met Springsteen in an interview, Clemons captured the chemistry fans witnessed more vividly: “I swear I will never forget that moment. I felt like I was supposed to be there. It was a magical moment. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love. And that’s still there.”

Clemons died of complications from a stroke, on top of complications of getting older and living life joyously and full-throttle. His friends gathered to remember him last week, and Bruce Springsteen posted his eulogy on his website today. Go read the whole thing, but I loved this part:

Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet. You were proud, you were strong, you were excited and laughing with what might happen, with what together, you might be able to do. You felt like no matter what the day or the night brought, nothing was going to touch you. Clarence could be fragile but he also emanated power and safety, and in some funny way we became each other’s protectors; I think perhaps I protected “C” from a world where it still wasn’t so easy to be big and black. Racism was ever present and over the years together, we saw it. Clarence’s celebrity and size did not make him immune. I think perhaps “C” protected me from a world where it wasn’t always so easy to be an insecure, weird and skinny white boy either. But, standing together we were badass, on any given night, on our turf, some of the baddest asses on the planet. We were united, we were strong, we were righteous, we were unmovable, we were funny, we were corny as hell and as serious as death itself. And we were coming to your town to shake you and to wake you up. Together, we told an older, richer story about the possibilities of friendship that transcended those I’d written in my songs and in my music. Clarence carried it in his heart. It was a story where the Scooter and the Big Man not only busted the city in half, but we kicked ass and remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship would not be such an anomaly.

And that … that’s what I’m gonna miss. The chance to renew that vow and double down on that story on a nightly basis, because that is something, that is the thing that we did together … the two of us. Clarence was big, and he made me feel, and think, and love, and dream big. How big was the Big Man? Too fucking big to die. And that’s just the facts. You can put it on his grave stone, you can tattoo it over your heart. Accept it … it’s the New World.

Clarence doesn’t leave the E Street Band when he dies. He leaves when we die.

The fan reaction was mixed, to be kind. The touring band – though it featured some talented players – felt less like a new direction than an attempt to recreate the E Street sound without the actual E Streeters. It seemed as if that band’s 20 years of history had come to an ignominious end.

But there was something in the air that night in the Meadowlands. E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt had come out to play on “Glory Days,” and the crowd was buzzing when a horn section kicked into the intro for the E Street classic “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” Then, in the last verse, when Springsteen sang the line “When the change was made uptown/And the Big Man joined the band,” the Big Man himself – saxophonist Clarence Clemons – came on stage, resplendent in a black suit and white hat, horn in hand, and blew a riff that brought the crowd to its feet. They filled the arena with a sustained roar that was like nothing I’d ever heard before. It drowned out the musicians on stage. The building shook.

Of all the times I’ve seen Clemons perform, that night is one of my most vivid memories. Not only for what a great show it was – and the amazing outpouring of love that met his appearance – but for what it signified. Less than two years later, Springsteen reformed the E Street Band to record new tracks for a greatest hits album. In 1998, he released a box set of unreleased songs, most featuring the E Streeters, and then launched a full-scale reunion tour the following year. The E Street Band was back, this time to stay.

What the future of the band will be now, with Clemons’ death yesterday at age 69, from complications of a stroke suffered June 12, is uncertain. But for me at least, the E Street Band that I knew and loved will never exist again.

I grew up in the beach town of Long Branch, N.J., about five minutes north of Asbury Park. I was familiar with some of Springsteen’s earlier bands, including the heavy metal/jam quartet Steel Mill, but wasn’t old enough to see them in their heyday. But when “Born to Run” came on the radio in the mid-’70s – and Springsteen simultaneously appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek – it was something special. Here was a local guy singing about places I knew, but putting them in a universal context. “The Palace” mentioned in “Born to Run” became something more than the crumbling amusement arcade I’d known for years. In Springsteen’s songs, the “Circuit” – a teenage cruising area along the beach in Asbury – assumed an almost mythic quality.

Clemons and his saxophone were an essential part of that transformation. The only E Street Band member to share an album cover with Springsteen, Clemons was a larger-than-life character who brought a soulful R&B vibe to the songs of a scruffy street poet. Without Clemons, there would be no “New York City Serenade,” no “Kitty’s Back” and certainly no “Jungleland.”

Over the last 32 years, I’ve seen more than 100 Springsteen performances, from impromptu appearances at tiny clubs to sold-out stadium shows. I’ve attended multiple nights on every tour since 1980, and Clemons loomed large at all of them. He was the rock of E Street, supporting Springsteen musically as he had physically on the cover of “Born to Run.” He was the band’s “Minister of Soul,” as Springsteen often referred to him, introduced on-stage at various times as “The Big Man,” “The Kahuna,” “The Duke of Paducah,” able to “leap tall refineries in a single bound.” His sax sound was a mixture of King Curtis, Junior Walker and Gene “Daddy G” Barge. It could be breathy and sweet (“Secret Garden”) or loud and raucous (“Sherry Darling”). An E Street show never really caught fire until Clemons stepped forward to blow his first solo of the night.

The oldest of the E Streeters, the Big Man had more than his share of health problems in recent years. He’d had hip and knee replacements and multiple back surgeries. On stage, he often sat for long stretches, rising only to play a solo, sometimes missing his cues. But in March 2009, I sat in the stands at Asbury Park’s Convention Hall, a 1920′s-era dance hall on the boardwalk, at a rehearsal show for the band’s “Working on a Dream” tour, which was about to kick off. They opened with “Badlands,” with Springsteen leaping onto a ramp that led out into the audience, and playing a ripping guitar solo. When Clemons joined him for the sax solo, they both looked 25 again, standing side by side, spotlighted in a sea of people, the crowd on both sides reaching up to touch them. Despite the celebratory nature of the moment, it also choked me up a little. I wondered how many chances there would be to see that sight again.

There were more nights, of course. The band toured for most of that year, but those final shows had the bittersweet tang of last days. In Baltimore, at the penultimate show of the tour, an emotional Clemons hugged Springsteen as if he didn’t want to let him go. On the final night, two days later, Springsteen played “Growin’ Up,” adding a long story about meeting Clemons for the first time in 1971, the aftermath of that encounter being a metaphor for the journey that followed.

That meeting is the stuff of legend. The way the Big Man tells it is not far off from the story Springsteen spun on stage. Clemons was playing with a cover band at the Wonder Bar on Ocean Avenue in Asbury Park, while Springsteen’s pre-E Street band was at the neighboring Student Prince on Kingsley Street (both buildings are still there. The Wonder Bar continues to operate as a night club, the Prince has been many things over the years, including a male go-go bar). One stormy night, during a break in his set, Clemons walked over to listen to Springsteen play, and asked to sit in. “That night we first stood together, I looked over at C and it looked like his head reached into the clouds,” Springsteen remembered years later. “I felt like a mere mortal scurrying upon the earth.” A rock and roll partnership had been born.

I now live one town south of Asbury Park, and I’ve made the walk between those two buildings many times, imagining what that night must have been like. Last December, nearly 40 years later, I stood in a bone-chilling wind, with 100 other Springsteen fans, leaning against a metal barricade outside Asbury’s gutted Casino carousel house, while Springsteen and band were inside filming a mini-concert to promote a box set release of their 1978 album “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” I never got in, and only caught occasional glimpses of the band through an open doorway, when some VIP entered or left. But when Clemons’ sax came floating out into the frigid boardwalk air, there was no mistaking who was inside.

When longtime E Street keyboardist Danny Federici died in 2008, after a three-year illness, there was no question the band would go on. Charlie Giordano, a veteran musician, had already been filling in for Federici on much of the tour. At a memorial service for Federici, Springsteen’s eulogy ended with a reference to the “heart breakin’, soul cryin’… and, yes, death defyin’ legendary E Street Band.”

In a statement yesterday about Clemons’ death, Springsteen again indicated the band will continue. “With Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music,” he wrote. “His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band.”

But is there an E Street Band without Clarence Clemons, without his presence, his commanding solos that are so much a part of Springsteen’s music? It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the epic sax solo at the heart of “Jungleland,” and it’s hard to picture the band on stage at all, without Clemons up there with them.

When he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, Springsteen singled out Clemons at the close of his speech. “You want to be like him but you can’t,” Springsteen said. “The night I met Clarence, he got up on stage (and) a sound came out of his horn that seemed to rattle the glasses behind the bar, and threatened to blow out the back wall. … But there was something else, something that happened when we stood side by side. Some energy, some unspoken story. … He always lifted me up. Way, way up. Together we told a story of the possibilities of friendship, a story older than the ones that I was writing, and a story I could never have told without him at my side. I want to thank you, Big Man, and I love you so much.”

The Big Man’s sound lives on, on record and in 30-plus years of fan-shared live shows now available on the internet. But the E Street Band will never be the same. Neither will Bruce Springsteen. And neither will I.

Wallace Stroby is a lifelong resident of the Jersey Shore, and author of the novels “Cold Shot to the Heart,” “Gone ‘Til November,” “The Heartbreak Lounge,” and “The Barbed-Wire Kiss.”

When rumors about the 60-year-old musician and a married 45-year-old housewife from Red Bank, N.J., were first reported more than a year ago, I was saddened. I am always saddened when I read about Bruce Behaving Badly, especially when the behavior seems likely to endanger his two-decade marriage to E Street Band member Patti Scialfa, a marriage in which I have an inappropriate emotional investment. I am that rare Bruce Springsteen fan who loves Patti Scalfia. I have written thousands of words about how much I love Patti Scialfa. In fact, if you have been to a Bruce Springsteen concert and have heard — over the chorus of grumbles and “boos” that traditionally greet Bruce’s introduction of his wife — a voice bellowing “Patti!” as loudly and supportively as possible, then you have heard me.

But the celebrity train wrecks of the past year have made the details of Springsteen’s alleged fling — revealed now in the divorce papers of New Jersey mortgage broker Arthur Kelly filed against his wife Ann, Bruce’s reported co-adulterer — seem like an episode of “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” especially if the episode were viewed immediately after a “Jersey Shore” marathon. It’s like dipping into the story of Edward Ferrars and Elinor Dashwood in “Sense & Sensibility,” after having just read “Poor Little Bitch Girl” by Jackie Collins. Instead of cringing and holding my hands over my ears to block out news of my idol’s personal transgressions, the details of Bruce’s alleged infidelity made me want to wrap my arms around him, his purported paramour, his talented wife, and the New York Post, bestowing on all of them a big wet kiss of thanks for not being gross and horrifying.

According to the Post, which based its story on the Kellys’ divorce proceedings, Springsteen first began checking out Ann Kelly at the swank gym they both attended. Reportedly, they lunched together so often that Kelly’s daughters, who frequently joined them, took to calling  Bruce “Bruce.” (If I have children, I can promise that they too will call Bruce “Bruce.” And I have never had an affair, or even lunch, with the guy.) Apparently, at the height of their supposed liaison, local whispering about Springsteen and Kelly got so disruptive that Ann’s father urged her to quit the gym. Hear that? Quit the gym. As opposed to quitting Ambien, random cocktail waitresses, call girls, the campaign for the American presidency, or couch sex at your office with a tattoo-covered woman who was not your wife and had a thing for the Third Reich.

As far as I can tell, there were no Nazi outfits or salutes involved in this story. No used tampons or violent text messages. No one’s wife had terminal cancer, no one got a mistress pregnant. No one had a business card reading “Truth Seeker” or one reading “Being is Free.” There was not even a “ping-pong impresario” involved in this story. Also, Springsteen’s scandal has not prompted veiled public apologies, hiatuses from the sport; no press conferences or girlfriends who have follow-up press conferences to your press conferences. Just some bitingly angry lyrics from Scialfa’s 2007 album “Play It As It Lays” (on “Play Around,” she sang, “You’ve got all the toys/That money can buy/But still you come to me like a little boy/So unsatisfied”) and a statement from the Springsteens reading, simply, “Bruce and Patti continue to have a terrific marriage and are very devoted to each other and their children.”

While Tiger Woods reportedly texted one of his lady friends, “Hold you down while I choke and Fuck that ass that i own Then im going to tell you to shut the Fuck up while I slap your face and pull your hair for making noise,” Bruce reportedly hung around Ann at the treadmill and told her that she had the “‘nicest ass’ in the gym.” Where Tiger reportedly scraped up enough change to offer one of his mistresses a chicken wrap sandwich from Subway, Bruce may have sent Ann unsigned Valentines and given her front-row seats to his rehearsal shows at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, as well as two lefty books in the hopes that they might prompt her to reconsider her conservative politics.

Which gets at one of the reasons this story sounds practically wholesome in comparison to the grunge that has floated to the surface in recent months. While, if true, Springsteen’s behavior was likely painful for his family, it seems on its face not to have been built on the degradation, objectification, hatred for or cruel treatment of wives or mistresses, but on appreciation for a specific, normal-looking 45-year-old woman who happened to be a dead ringer for his wife. When viewed in the light of celebrities who have sex with multiple, seemingly interchangeable women half their age, who hire staff to cover up for them, who have sex with interlopers in their spouse’s beds and choose as sexual partners fame-seeking publicity generators, the aged rock star who flirts awkwardly and tries to change the politics of the age-appropriate(ish) lady at his gym is practically chivalric.

I feel bad about feeling so good about Bruce’s alleged missteps. I really do. I don’t want to lionize the guy for lying to his wife, for possibly hurting his family. I don’t want to pretend that just because infidelity does not include car crashes or Nazi paraphernalia that it is not agonizing to the people it damages. But I’m not the only one feeling this wave of affection for the slightly corny nature of Bruce’s breach, for the straightforward purity of his alleged misdeeds.

Sheila Weller, author of “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation,” was so struck by the retro-chaste quality of the story that on Monday she posted a message on her Facebook wall about the “Updike-esque” tale of “two decent, respectable, age-appropriate, long-married, probably bored people in a leafy suburb [who] meet and try to be discreet. It’s 50s-60s quaint, next to every other celebrity affair we’ve heard about.” Weller told me later by phone that she’d “always thought Springsteen was a very decent guy – I think we all do – and it just seems so old-fashioned in comparison to all this other stuff! It seemed like a ‘Mad Men’-era affair. I mean, it’s never good to be unfaithful, but these things happen. If you’re going to do it, that’s the way to do it.” 

And Weller’s friend, the writer Jesse Kornbluth, held a contest on Monday on his site, Head Butler, offering a prize to the reader who offered the best guess as to which two political volumes Bruce gifted Ann. Weller guessed Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters.” My money is on “Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass” by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson,” a book I have heard Springsteen mention in concert. Hopefully, unlike the ceaseless stream of information about the vulgar proclivities of Springsteen’s faithless fellow celebrities, this particular detail will remain shrouded in mystery.