And watching and listening to Springsteen, I tried to unlock for myself the secret of how, closing in quickly on 50, he can still be so astonishingly vital. The secret may be that although rock 'n' roll is supposedly at its best when it's riffing on the pleasures and heartaches of youth, Springsteen edged away from that very early in his career. Even at a time when he could still qualify as a youth himself -- could still justify those universally affecting songs about longing for the unattainable girl or turning somersaults when she agrees to a date -- Springsteen didn't shy away from writing about sunken hopes and dead-end jobs and marriages, about how the exuberance of youth can close in on you, collapse on you, before you even know it.

There's a theme that threads through his whole career: he sings numerous variations on the idea of "the price you've gotta pay." He didn't make up the sentiment, of course. It's there in the Appalachian ballads, cautionary tales that crept across an ocean to feed our collective imagination and, more important, to soothe our own hearts. Springsteen isn't a complete downer all the time -- there are songs whose sense of freedom seem like a parachute ("Out in the Street," particularly the blissful ensemble version the band performed live the other night), just as there are ballads that make you want to hang your head (almost anything off the bleak and beautiful "Nebraska"). But even more often, Springsteen works all kinds of contradictions into a single song. In "Thunder Road," the line "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night" is the throwaway one; the one that follows it -- "You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright" -- is the one that carries all its magnificent, rueful weight.

That Springsteen is able to convey any kind of subtlety to an arena-size crowd is a wonder, and it must be the source of his inexplicable magic. I know of no other performer capable of shrinking a huge arena -- the most impersonal space imaginable -- down to nothing. "Two hearts can get the job done," goes the line from one of his songs, sung to the audience like a reassurance. To see a metaphor for an intensely private kind of intimacy played out so beautifully and so effortlessly between one great singer and several thousand people is nothing short of miraculous. It's just a matter of collapsing the space in between two hearts: his and mine, or his and yours. Springsteen has never forgotten how.

And perhaps most important of all, his voice is still a force to be reckoned with: he showed no signs of tiring after three solid hours of singing, playing, and jumping around (once even flopping down on top of Bittan's grand piano). He sang the line "Badlands, you gotta live it every day," as if he actually had lived it -- making you realize that the line, written by a young man, means something else again coming from a near-50-year-old, one whose voice seems to have become richer with age. He closed his reading of "The River" with a sound that struck me as nothing short of unearthly: a soft but high-pitched kind of keening, like the echo of a dusty nighttime wind, just loud enough to resonate through the arena but low enough so that you had to strain to listen close, just to make sure you weren't imagining it.

No matter where you stand on his skill as a singer or songwriter, there's just no denying that Springsteen is one of the great entertainers of our age. He broke up "Light of Day" with some rambling traveling-preacher patter: "I'm here to let you know, if your soul has bad credit, it's good here tonight." (He also said, "I'm here to liberate ya, to resexualate ya" -- the kind of snake oil I for one would gladly line up to buy.)

For any number of people between the ages of 35 and 45 (and plenty of others in the surrounding margins, too), "Born to Run" is an anthem of sorts. The title alone is all about freedom, and even today, it's the kind of thing you almost don't mind hearing as it blasts from a passing convertible. But even though it's a song about freedom, it isn't one that's totally free. The singer seems caught in a tangle of metaphors ("At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines"); it's the way he works himself out, like Houdini scrambling out of his shackles, that gives the song its momentum as well as its ominous ring.

But to hear the song played by that band, no longer broken up into scattered, antic clusters around the stage but lined up in a solid row like the Wild Bunch riding into town, was like no other moment I can recall, at any live show, ever. The lights had been turned up bright: there was no looking away from them, and also no escaping from the sight of fellow audience members. That band had us in their clutches, with nowhere to run, and I'm convinced my legs wouldn't have moved if I'd commanded them to. Springsteen and the E-Streeters were asserting their majesty in the same way that a young band flaunts its youth. And they won me back, this time, I think, forever.

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