On “Today,” Matt Lauer delicately suggested that some people might take a cynical view of “The Rising” as a commercialization of the national catastrophe. But imagine for a moment that you’re Bruce Springsteen reading “Portraits of Grief” and you keep coming across your own name. Your music was one victim’s passion, your songs were played at another victim’s memorial service. Imagine being so much a part of these people’s lives that you’re included in their obituaries. How do you respond to that? Isn’t it more cynical not to respond?

Springsteen makes rock ‘n’ roll with a folkie’s conscience and a soul singer’s need to testify. He began his career writing cinematic songs about the fierce dreams of blue-collar kids like himself, hungry for something beyond the pinched ambitions and dead-end lives of their parents. Over the years he has remained true to those kids, and himself, by continuing the story into middle age: The characters in his songs made bad choices and lucked out, drifted and found their way, ran from adult responsibility and finally embraced it.

One hundred and fifty-eight residents of Monmouth County, N.J., where Springsteen lives, died in the Sept. 11 attacks; this was the largest concentration of victims in the state. Overall, the casualties of the attacks, in terms of age, social class and geography, were disproportionately Springsteen’s people — aging boomers who used to be wild and innocent and now got up every morning and went to work each day. People with wives and husbands and kids and mortgages and to-do lists and dreams and maybe an old guitar and boxes of vinyl albums in the attic. Any of them could have been any of us.

There are no anthems on “The Rising,” no politics to be misconstrued, no Toby Keith jingoism. These are songs on a human scale; it’s a work of great empathy about the attacks’ effects on individual lives, and about love and security previously taken for granted. But it’s also, more often than you might expect, a spirit-soaring, hip-shaking, roll-up-the-rug-and-dance record that reinforces (though in a very different context) what Springsteen sang almost 25 years ago on “Badlands” — “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

During the E Street Band reunion tour three years ago, Springsteen began closing shows with the gorgeous “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a new song that swayed and bumped like a big old engine rumbling through the night. Springsteen and his longtime band mates, arrayed in a line across the edge of the stage, were a vision of lasting friendship as they sang of a forgiving train that carried “saints and sinners, losers and winners, whores and gamblers, lost souls” to a future where “dreams will not be thwarted” and “faith will be rewarded.” Without “Land of Hope and Dreams,” or the E Street Band reunion, I’m not sure that Springsteen’s response to Sept. 11 would have been so thoughtful and sure-footed.

“The Rising” continues the chugging vision of “Land of Hope and Dreams”; the train is rock ‘n’ roll, and rock ‘n’ roll holds within it the essential American ideas: community, reconciliation, redemption, the assurance that you are not alone. “The Rising” needed to be an E Street Band record — when the world is falling apart, you turn to familiar faces and voices. These songs performed solo by Springsteen in his “Ghost of Tom Joad” mode would have been too depressing to bear. Instead, much of “The Rising” is loud and joyous. In spirit, it reminds me of the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” that emphatic declaration of loyalty and compassion made during a different war, a long time ago.

Atlanta-based Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine) is the first outside producer Springsteen has ever used. And O’Brien gives “The Rising” an enormous sound that captures both the E Street Band’s power and its subtlety. Although the guitars (played by Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren) and Max Weinberg’s drums are pushed forward, you can still hear each complex layer of the band in the deep, clean mix.

O’Brien’s task was to make Springsteen sound “modern.” But, sometimes, as on the overproduced “The Fuse” (a song that juxtaposes images of death and dread with the life force of sex), the sound is so modern — tape-looped drumbeat and all — it becomes generic. (Anybody who thinks a modern Boss is a swell idea is invited to dust off the disco mix of “Dancing in the Dark.”) “The Rising” is not a perfect record — it’s a little schizo, in fact. The beach-ball bounce of “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” seems out of place (although I’m not sorry it’s here as a mood elevator), and “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin)” sounds less like Springsteen than it does John Mellencamp. What’s up with that?

Most of the time, though, Springsteen and O’Brien get it right: “The Rising” is emotionally open and haunted by recurring images of fire and dust, faith and strength, the sky and the void, love and loss. It has the soul of a country-gospel record; the lyrics bear witness to pain and trials, but the music — buoyed by cello, mandolin, dobro, slide guitar, church organ and, especially, Soozie Tyrell’s violin — uplifts.

On the opening track, “Lonesome Day,” for instance, Springsteen makes ominous allusions to vipers in the grass and a dark sun on the rise, but the song is a vivacious rocker with a soaring cello and violin hook; listening to Patti Scialfa and Tyrell swing through their gospel shouts of “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right” on the chorus, you almost believe it will be. Springsteen also makes an adventurous attempt at Middle Eastern folk music with “Worlds Apart,” which gracefully blends Pakistani qawwali singers, buzzing guitars, Scialfa’s sirenic ululations and a surprisingly light, almost ethereal, vocal from Springsteen.

Some of Springsteen’s lyrics, like “Lonesome Day” and even the aching “You’re Missing,” are vague enough to address loss and tragedy in general. Others are wrenchingly specific to the Sept. 11 attacks (although Springsteen never refers to the World Trade Center, New York City, terrorism or Sept. 11). On the steel-guitar driven blues “Into the Fire,” Springsteen sings in the persona of a firefighter’s widow: “I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher/ Somewhere up the stairs, into the fire.” And on the cathartic title track, the narrator is a dead firefighter or rescue worker whose soul transcends the carnage to receive a heavenly reward — a “dream of life” that comes to him “like a catfish dancin’ on the end of my line.” In both songs, the heroes are nameless, which prevents “The Rising” from duplicating the creepy eyewitness literalism of Neil Young’s Flight 93 tribute, “Let’s Roll.”

Springsteen doesn’t shy away from the messier emotions and impulses called up by Sept. 11. On “Empty Sky” (a title that could refer to the broken Manhattan skyline or the planeless skies in the week after the attacks), the narrator mourns his loved one and sings, “I want a kiss from your lips/ I want an eye for an eye.” On the lovely “Nothing Man,” which recalls “My Hometown” in its hushed organ and rockabye lilt, a shell-shocked rescue worker can’t fit back into everyday life. And on the ghostly blues “Paradise,” a man considers suicide in order to be reunited with his dead wife, a terror victim.

But on “Paradise,” the grieving spouse experiences a vision of paradise as a lie, a void, and he chooses to live. That urge, that dream of life, drives the album’s best songs, “The Rising,” “Mary’s Place” and the closing track, the stirring gospel hymn “My City of Ruins.” “The Rising” and “My City of Ruins” (which was actually written before Sept. 11, about the decay of Asbury Park, N.J.) are built around similar images of resurrection, ascension and hands clasped in unity. And those images — “Rise up, come on, rise up,” commands the choir on “My City of Ruins” — are a powerful contrast to the vision of the twin towers falling down, a refusal to let hate, chaos and death prevail.

The song that has so far stirred up the most disagreement among critics is “Mary’s Place,” which has been dismissed as a nostalgic throwback to E Street barn-burners like “Rosalita.” For me, it’s the heart of the record. On “Mary’s Place,” a woman mourns her partner, who died in the attacks (“From that black hole on the horizon/ I hear your voice calling me”); she tries to will his spirit back to her through the music they used to listen to together. “Seven days, seven candles in my window/ lighting your way/ Your favorite record’s on the turntable/ I drop the needle and pray,” Springsteen sings.

Yes, “Mary’s Place” is an old-fashioned, honking E Street party that brings back memories of “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.” But that’s the point — this is a song about a couple whose relationship goes so far back, their favorite album is on vinyl. Ordering the band to “turn it up,” Springsteen sends his narrator — and us, too — back to a place of comfort and innocence, where the music liberates and heals and the Big Man blows all night.

Of course, Springsteen isn’t suggesting that rock ‘n’ roll can put everything back the way it was. There’s an undercurrent of irretrievable loss on “Mary’s Place” — the woman takes to the dance floor with her arms around a memory — that cleanses the song of nostalgia. And in the song immediately following “Mary’s Place,” “You’re Missing,” the narrator recites a litany of all that’s not right, while a sighing cello and a trudging rhythm measure out the hard work of surviving: “Coffee cups on the counter, jackets on the chair/ Papers on the doorstep, but you’re not there/ Everything is everything/ But you’re missing.”

Those small details of emptiness sound lived-in, and maybe they are: The Time article revealed that Springsteen telephoned the survivors of some of those Boss-fanatic victims he read about in “Portraits of Grief.” One firefighter’s widow told Time, “After I got off the phone with him, the world just felt a little smaller. I got through Joe’s memorial and a good month and a half on that phone call.” You can regard Springsteen’s (unpublicized, until Time uncovered it) gesture as opportunistic if you want to. But I think those phone calls, and the way “The Rising” tends to our needs of the moment — putting us in the company of old friends, giving voice to our sorrow and gratefulness — feel just about right. This is Springsteen being a good neighbor in the community of rock ‘n’ roll. We reached out, and he was there.

To watch “Dark Shadows” today (the Sci Fi Channel airs back-to-back episodes weekdays at 10 a.m.) is to feast on camp-a-licious flubbed lines, awkward silences, wandering boom mikes, misfiring props and special effects along the lines of dime-store vampire teeth and rubber bats on a string. But never mind that — “Dark Shadows” addicts were (and still are) a forgiving bunch. What matters is that the show’s crazed inventiveness compelled you to suspend disbelief, even as you giggled like mad.

The dense, spooky story lines of “Dark Shadows” time-traveled from the then-present (the 1960s and early ’70s) to, among other periods, 1692, 1795, 1897 and 1949, with the heroic cast playing several incarnations of their characters. (Both twists were regular features of later sci-fi/fantasy series like “Angel” and “Xena: Warrior Princess.”) The swift metamorphosis of “Dark Shadows” from TV cult to genuine pop cultural phenomenon was a premonition of the niche-marketed TV landscape to come, when off-network, off-hours and offbeat shows could still become household names. And “Dark Shadows” was TV’s first supernatural daytime soap — remember that the next time Tabitha and Timmy do their dark magic on “Passions.”

Most of all, “Dark Shadows” broke the stereotype of the evil vampire, by making Barnabas Collins a spiritual descendant of the Brontë sisters’ mysterious, savage antiheroes. The 175-year-old Barnabas was originally supposed to be the bad guy. But classically trained Canadian actor Jonathan Frid played him as a sad, cursed being who yearned to be human again. Frid often looked mournfully lost in thought — in truth, he was struggling to read the cue cards without his glasses — and his sensitive mien elicited fans’ sympathy for the devil. The writers obliged the burgeoning Barnabas cult with a back story recasting Barnabas as a victim of a vengeful witch, making him a lonely soul carrying a torch for his long-lost love.

Frid’s Master Thespian delivery and silent-movie horror get-up — outré black cape, wolf’s-head walking stick, hair plastered in spidery bangs over his brow, eyes rimmed in black eyeliner — made him look like a male Norma Desmond waiting for his close-up. Nonetheless, Barnabas-mania took hold. Soon, Frid’s fanged visage adorned lunchboxes, bubble-gum cards and, most improbably, given that Frid wasn’t exactly in the bloom of youth, the swoony pages of teenage-girl tastemakers 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat. (The modern equivalent would be “Harry Potter” co-star Alan Rickman, in full Severus Snape Goth get-up, splashed on the cover of YM.)

“Dark Shadows” creator Dan Curtis has always insisted that the show came to him in a dream, with an image of a girl on a train reading a letter and a voice-over explaining that she was journeying to a seaside town to work as a governess. The show’s head writer, Art Wallace, begged to differ; according to Wallace, the premise for “Dark Shadows” arose from a script he wrote for the TV anthology series “Studio One.” In a compromise, the show’s credits read “Series Created by Dan Curtis, Story Created and Developed by Art Wallace.”

“Dark Shadows” premiered on ABC on June 27, 1966. Billed as a “Gothic soap opera,” the show opened with a narration by actress Alexandra Moltke as the governess: “My name is Victoria Winters. I am going on a journey that will bring me to a strange dark house on the edge of the sea at Widow’s Hill … ” (Fun fact: Moltke resurfaced several years later amid scandal as Alexandra Isles, a New York documentary filmmaker alleged to have been Claus von Bülow’s mistress.)

For the first few months of its run, “Dark Shadows” stuck to melodrama and mystery. Victoria Winters — who had no memory of her past — felt oddly at home in gloomy Collinwood mansion, the centuries-old estate of widow Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Hollywood veteran Joan Bennett), her rebellious teenage daughter Carolyn (Nancy Barrett, the daytime TV It Girl of her day) and assorted relatives, children and servants. Initially, the ratings were so lackluster that the show was in danger of cancellation. Viewers started to perk up when Wallace and his writers introduced ghosts into the story line, but it wasn’t until April 1967, when the show made a last-ditch attempt to woo viewers by delving deeper into the supernatural, that Barnabas Collins first appeared.

Barnabas was released from his centuries of sleep by grave-robbing caretaker Willie Loomis (John Karlen, who later played Tyne Daly’s pajama-clad husband on “Cagney & Lacey”), who discovered his coffin in a hidden room of the Collins mausoleum. Barnabas showed up at Collinwood claiming to be a long-lost relative and prevailed upon Elizabeth to let him move into another house on the property. At night, Barnabas sneaked out to snack on nubile townies, one of whom, waitress Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott), bore an uncanny resemblance to his long-ago love Josette du Pres. The softer side of Barnabas emerged in a flashback to 1795, in which Barnabas was cursed into vampiredom by Josette’s maid, Angelique (Lara Parker), who loved Barnabas. Josette met a tragic end, setting Barnabas’ desire for vengeance in motion.

The 1795 flashback was the show’s first foray into time travel, with the story line precipitated by Victoria Winters’ disappearance during a present-day séance. She woke up in the 18th century and was accused of witchcraft by repressed biddy Abigail Collins (Clarice Blackburn) and the ambitious Rev. Trask (played with chilling charisma by Humphrey Bogart look-alike Jerry Lacy). Later story lines got more impressively weird, with characters caught up in “parallel time,” a sort of Bizarro Planet concept of alternate universes.

Throughout all of these time periods, one constant remained: Barnabas was willing to try anything, from exorcism to a Frankenstein plan of grafting his head onto a nonvampire’s body, in order to be human again. Aiding him in this quest was his secret ally, Dr. Julia Hoffman, a specialist in blood disorders. Played by the elegant Grayson Hall, the solitary Julia was dignified and brainy. She had the chin-forward resolve of Katharine Hepburn. She also had a bad case of the hots for Barnabas.

The dawn of the Barnabas era coincided with a time slot change; the show was pushed back a half-hour to 3:30 p.m. (between “General Hospital” and “The Dating Game”). But as this souped-up new “Dark Shadows” caught on with schoolkids, ABC was deluged with letters pleading for the show to return to 4 o’clock. ABC granted the request in July 1968 — not a moment too soon, because hunky David Selby (later of “Falcon Crest”) had joined the cast as Quentin Collins, the Heathcliffian werewolf, propelling “Dark Shadows” into full-fledged teen fandom. In 1969, an eight-month-long 1897 flashback featuring Quentin brought the show its highest ratings ever; a recurring piece of music from those episodes, “Quentin’s Theme,” made Billboard’s Top 20 singles chart and was nominated for a Grammy.

But, as any Backstreet Boy will tell you, the love of teenage girls is a capricious thing, and by 1971 “Dark Shadows” was in a ratings slide. ABC pulled the plug on the show on April 2, 1971, after 1,225 episodes and two feature films (the second, “Night of Dark Shadows,” was released after the show went off the air). Hardcore fans continued holding conventions and badgering TV stations to air the show in rerun; finally, in 1975, “Dark Shadows” went into syndication (minus the early non-Barnabas episodes). It even aired on PBS stations during the ’80s, before the Sci Fi Channel acquired the entire archive of episodes.

Exhaustive collections of episodes have long been available on videocassette, and MPI Home Video recently released the first “Dark Shadows” DVD set, 40 episodes on four discs, beginning with the first appearance of Barnabas. A pointless 1991 NBC prime-time remake starring Ben Cross as Barnabas lasted only 12 episodes, and rightfully so — “Dark Shadows” just wasn’t the same with a big budget and state-of-the-art production values.

And that’s because its limitations made “Dark Shadows” the intimate spook show it was. The flat look of the videotape, especially in the early black-and-white episodes, contributed to the foreboding mood. The lack of realistic exterior scenes and the soap opera necessity of setting most of the action indoors (usually with a raging storm outside) gave the show a heart-thumping sense of claustrophobia and entrapment, of horror burrowing into confined spaces. “Dark Shadows” may not have been a masterpiece of sleek special effects, but it was a masterpiece of haunted house lore, a campfire story that tricked us into imagining gore that wasn’t there. “Dark Shadows” scared the living daylights out of us, in the lengthening shadows of the afternoon.

Sports

World Series:
Yankees at Diamondbacks (7:30 Sat., Sun., Fox)

Football:
Jaguars at Ravens, Jets at Panthers or Bengals at Lions (1 p.m. Sun., CBS)
Saints at Rams, Vikings at Buccaneers or 49ers at Bears (1 p.m. Sun., Fox)
Patriots at Broncos, Raiders at Eagles, Bills at Chargers or Dolphins at Seahawks (4 p.m. Sun., CBS)
Giants at Redskins or Cardinals at Cowboys (4 p.m. Sun., Fox)

Talk

Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Star Jones, Don Imus
David Letterman (CBS) Nicole Kidman, Iggy Pop (rerun)
Politically Incorrect (ABC) Anne Robinson, A.J. Benza
Conan O’Brien (NBC) Kelsey Grammer (rerun)
Craig Kilborn (CBS) Will Ferrell, Ben Harper (rerun)

All times Eastern unless noted.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

If you liked this feature, please take a minute to click here to read a note from the Arts & Entertainment staff about Salon Premium.

Sports

Hockey:
Rangers at Blues (7:30 p.m., ESPN2)
Canucks at Avalanche (10 p.m., ESPN2

Talk

Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Tia Carrere, Matthew Lillard
David Letterman (CBS) Farrah Fawcett, Tina Fey, Garbage (rerun)
Jay Leno (NBC) Michael Douglas, Jessica Alba (rerun)
Politically Incorrect (ABC) Alec Baldwin, Malcolm McDowell
Conan O’Brien (NBC) Rosie O’Donnell, Breckin Meyer (rerun)
Craig Kilborn (CBS) David Boreanaz, Dave Grohl (rerun)

All times Eastern unless noted.