The Boss comes through with new songs, old form

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have a 30-plus-year concert reputation to live up to: exhausting and exhilarating marathons that mix enough musical inspiration and working-class perspiration to restore one's faith in the redemptive powers of rock and roll.

On Friday night at the Wachovia Center, Springsteen took the stage dressed in black to the introductory instrumental strains of "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze," and shouted out a question to the sold-out crowd of middle-age moms and dads (and their sons and daughters): "Is there anybody alive out there?"

The show that followed - beginning with the hard-driving, straight-to-the-solar-plexus "Radio Nowhere," the first single from the 58-year-old Jersey guy's new album, Magic - certainly lived up to his vaunted rep, even if the 2 hours and 15 minutes were a little short by Springsteenian standards.

The road to redemption on this night, though, was a rocky one.

That was partly because Philadelphia is only the second stop on this tour, so momentum didn't always flow effortlessly, and all the transitions in the 23-song set, which came to a close with the reeling Irish-immigrant saga "American Land," weren't seamless.

But it was largely because Springsteen doesn't go in for easily won, fairy-tale endings. And beneath its rollicking veneer, Magic is a dark journey through a house of mirrors of mistrust and deceit.

The Boss filled Friday night's set with songs whose protagonists feel the ground shake beneath their feet, like Tunnel of Love's "Brilliant Disguise," whose hero asks for "mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of." Or the guy who can't understand how people find the faith to keep on keepin' on in "Reason to Believe," a song from the bleak Nebraska that was transformed into a rowdy roadhouse blues.

The E Streeters' first appearance in town with Springsteen since 2003 - a second show was scheduled last night - was filled with rousing rockers. Many, from "Promised Land" to "Waitin' on a Sunny Day," made use of Clarence Clemons' wailing saxophone, almost always a signal of communal strength in a Springsteen song.

The three lead guitarists all got their licks in: Nils Lofgren, the most gifted of the bunch; Steve Van Zandt, Silvio Dante in a black babushka and snakeskin boots; and Springsteen, who played a five-alarm lead on "Candy's Room."

But on a tour that's about getting back to rock-and-roll fundamentals, Soozie Tyrell's violin is as vital an instrument as the guitar. Her sorrowful fiddle keyed the new album's title track, which "isn't about magic, it's about tricks," Springsteen said, as well as the gorgeously wrought war story "Devil's Arcade" and warmly melodic streetscape "Girls in Their Summer Clothes."

Springsteen did most of his talking early on, before Magic's deceptively jaunty "Livin' in the Future."

He said Philadelphia was full of things "we love about America: Philly cheesesteaks . . . the Bill of Rights . . . baseball. I predict they will rise, though I can't guarantee it!"

Then he grew more serious, saying the song was about "things happening these last six years that we never thought would happen in America: illegal wiretapping, no right to habeas corpus, the rolling back of civil liberties."

The blue-state crowd greeted him with some cheers, and some boos.

The intertwining of the personal and the political was more powerfully expressed musically in a four-song stretch that brought the show to an emotional crescendo. The title track to Springsteen's post-9/11 album, The Rising, which seeks spiritual answers to the horrors of the twin towers falling, was followed by "Last to Die," which traces the death toll in Iraq to a belligerent response to Sept. 11.

Then came "A Long Walk Home," a hymn that slowly built the strength to believe that faith can be restored. And that was followed by "Badlands," the rousing warhorse, which sounded as fresh as the day it was born and found the redemption Springsteen was looking for, every inch of it earned.