There are obvious spots where he pauses to acknowledge the losses; every show review describes them. (If you haven't read reviews and you want to discover these moments yourself, as I did at my first show, bookmark this piece and read it later.) In the elegiac "My City of Ruins" (from "The Rising," his epic album of grief to commemorate 9/11), he announces a roll call for his band members, introducing them one by one, and then asks, "Is anybody missing?" over and over, as the crowd screams an ever-louder "Yes!" What began early in the tour as a spoken riff about the loss, "If you're here, and we're here, than they're here" is now, in mid-tour, part of the song, and the crowd sings along. The first time I saw him, in Madison Square Garden, that ruined me. I had never heard the closing lyrics, "With these hands, with these hands," as a prayer before.

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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.

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Springsteen and Clemons weren't quite living that way, either. In his memoir Clemons wrote: "You had your black bands and you had your white bands, and if you mixed the two you found less places to play." Springsteen explained the power of the "Born to Run" cover this way: "When you open it up and see Clarence and me together, the album begins to work its magic. Who are these guys? Where did they come from? What is the joke they are sharing? A friendship and a narrative steeped in the complicated history of America begins to work and there is music already in the air."

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It was June 24, 1993, and Bruce Springsteen was ending his "Human Touch"/"Lucky Town" tour with two New York-area shows, one at the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., the venue he’d opened in 1981. But this homecoming was different. Four years earlier, Springsteen had fired the members of his longtime E Street Band in favor of working with other musicians. He recorded two albums with studio pros, then toured behind the records with a new band put together shortly before hitting the road.

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.

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Yet, there I was, shaking my head with relief and amusement as I flipped through "Swing Steen," the New York Post's ingeniously headlined tale of Springsteen's reported dalliance five years ago with a woman from his hometown. I grinned as I read the story, not just because of the ample Boss puns ("Springsteen's 'Human Touch' made her melt;" "[T]he Jersey girl got lost in a ‘Tunnel of Love'"), but because after a year of John Edwards, Tiger Woods and Jesse James, even after the none-of-our-business-but-nonetheless-dispiriting splits of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins and Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes, the Springsteen infidelity feels like a clean mineral rain washing away months of grimy revelations.

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This dark art of handling the talent and dealing with deification is the tie that binds this week's Double Bill, which would be today's release of "This Is It," and its doppelgänger, the 1970 documentary "Elvis: That's the Way It Is."  Obviously, it does not take any particular genius to point out connections between Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. Haunted relationship with parent, incomprehensible musical genius, pet chimps, oh yeah, Lisa Marie, to count off just four of the easiest ones.

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Nora Walsh-DeVries

I was supposed to be Tweeting from the Lincoln Memorial concert today, but it turns out Tweetin' ain't easy, in a crowd estimated at 400,000. I couldn't get on the Internet most of the time, could rarely text, e-mail or get a cell signal. It seemed strange to be so technologically thwarted on a day celebrating the victory of the world's most wired politician and campaign. But that meant ultimately I could stop trying to communicate and just enjoy it, and I did (once I tuned out the sight of sharpshooters lining the top of the Lincoln Memorial).

If you're looking for snark, go elsewhere. (OK, the bald eagle thing was kind of hokey.) I am officially over my Rick Warren tantrum (at least until I see him Tuesday); between Episcopal Bishop Eugene Robinson's moving blessing to open the concert, to the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus singing "My Country Tis of Thee" where Marian Anderson sang it almost 70 years ago (after the Daughters of the American Revolution kept her out of Constitution Hall because she was black), followed shortly thereafter by the Navy Men's Glee Club. Rick Warren, you can't take that away from me. When the openly gay Robinson called on God to "bless us with anger -- at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people," I knew we're not in Dick Cheney's America anymore.

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I'm not a fan of Eddie Vedder in the least. Guy bugs me. But I have to admit, "All the Way" is a nice song. It's a folky singalong in three-four time, recorded live. It sounds a little like a sea shanty.

And, most crucially for a song about sports, it does a nice job of avoiding the hackneyed. There is an obligatory "Yeah Ernie Banks said, 'Oh let's play two,'" but beyond that, Vedder, a Chicago native and lifelong Cubs fan, obviously put a little more than five minutes' work into this. "There's magic in the ivy and the old scoreboard," he sings, "The same one I stared at as a kid keeping score."

Not Shakespeare, but a deft way to sum up the appeal of Wrigley Field in 20 words. And besides, Shakespeare couldn't keep score worth a damn.

It's a tough assignment, writing a song about sports, about a team or an event or an athlete, without inducing cringes. Try it. It's hard to write verse about sports without dipping into rah-rah clichés or drippy nostalgia.

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Curling is rockstar, baby. It's rocketship. It's monkeylove, darling.

The Star reports that the Peacock has an exclusive option to air the 10-week series, the aim of which will be to form and train a team that will compete for the U.S. championship and a spot in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. The hook, the "Rockstar" part, is that the show's producers are trying to get Bruce Springsteen or Jon Bon Jovi involved, possibly as hosts.

"According to sources," Star columnist Chris Zelkovich writes, "the two rock stars are among a group of entertainment types who rent arena time on occasion to pick up brooms instead of guitars."

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I listened to it while reading the New York Times' Blackwater coverage, and it was an eerily fitting soundtrack. I've spent my morning ever since in a bizarre state of sublime outrage, and focus. We have to have hit bottom as a country, right? A private mercenary army defended by counsel Kenneth Starr is killing Iraqis in cold blood, and Republicans in Congress are embracing it, insisting "Blackwater is our team"? It's finally, belatedly clear to me that the Bush administration has found the best war strategy for everyone: outsourcing whole chunks of it. Republican cronies like Erik Prince make a profit, and the party doesn't have to bother with the messy business of instituting a draft, which would stop the war, and kill the GOP's future, in about a half-day, flat. We are finally going to wake up, aren't we?

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The kids asleep in the backseat
We're just countin' the miles you and me
We don't measure the blood we've drawn anymore
We just stack the bodies outside the door.

Who'll be the last to die for our mistake
The last to die for our mistake
Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break
Who'll be the last to die for our mistake?

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That's musicologist Alan Lomax, addressing the camera from his West Third Street digs in the old hootenanny film "Blues, Ballads, and Bluegrass." Lomax looks as self-satisfied as a missionary who has just gotten the natives to use a plow -- and with good reason. His scrupulous field recordings, along with the junk shop treasures reissued on LP by his quirkier associate, Harry Smith, have borne much of what's called "folk music" into the mid-20th century. And there in his living room, the folk revival circa 1961 is about to hold a jam session: bright young Villagers like Peter LaFarge and the New Lost City Ramblers, with gray-haired Southerners from actual villages -- including Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, just back from obscurity.

Had Lomax lived long enough (he died in 2002) he would have seen another major folk revival, one whose high-water mark -- so far -- has been 2006.

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Sure, McConaughey, the 2005 winner, is easy on the eyes, and his cleavage is every bit as remarkable as Anderson's. But he's the latest in a long line of vanilla eye-candy actors (Ben Affleck, Mark Harmon, Patrick Swayze, Harry Hamlin -- seriously, in 1987, Harry Hamlin) whose shiny good looks fuel a fantasy thought or two before we wonder how much product they put in their hair. (And really, quit selecting George Clooney already. He's the zenith of sex appeal -- picking him is cheating. Get some guts over there, girls, or else turn the poll over to the interns.)

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But even in the shadow of hip-hop's continued dominance, traditionally minded rock 'n' roll -- think cars and guitars -- is quietly thriving, thanks to the Killers and the Hold Steady, two acts that have carved out niches at opposite ends of the sales spectrum and with varying degrees of critical favor by reclaiming Springsteenian tropes from the scrap heap of classic rock radio.

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"Yeah," Springsteen responded, "they should let Ann Coulter do it instead."

Regular readers will know that we're all for giving Coulter the what-for -- but also that the wrath of the reasonable really ought to be directed at the hairdos who give her a stage on national TV and the Republicans who do nothing to distance themselves from her when she advocates, say, the assassination of a member of Congress.

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