Lucky Town

"HUMAN TOUCH" "LUCKY TOWN" Bruce Springsteen. Columbia. It ain't easy being The Boss. As the people's prophet of rock, Bruce Springsteen is expected to reflect carefully on the listeners' situation, to moralize on the world's wrongs and lead us out of the wilderness. Springsteen fans also expect him to produce the kind of musical anthems that will withstand hundreds of radio repetitions and will always electrify a concert and rally the multitudes to sing and stomp along.

Fans who have waited 4 1/2 years for a new release from Bruce Springsteen are thrilled and relieved that Columbia Records has announced it will release two albums from the rock legend in early spring. "There is a great sense of relief," said Erik Flannigan, senior editor of Seattle-based "Backstreets" magazine, a 12-year-old quarterly publication devoted to Springsteen's career and named for one of his songs. "It's been . . . over four years. It's been frustrating. " Since the rumors started flying last week that the long-awaited Springsteen albums would be released sometime after March 31, the magazine has received about a thousand inquiries, Flannigan said Friday.

In a unique effort to prove the full mettle of his new band, Bruce Springsteen will preview his forthcoming world tour with a live radio concert Friday night at 10 on WMMR (93.3/FM), and then tickets to his American shows - including Philadelphia dates - will go on sale the following morning. To pump the publicity machine even harder, Springsteen will also show up three times on TV this weekend - twice on MTV and once on Fox. Springsteen's Philly shows will be Aug. 28 and 29 at the Spectrum, with no added dates possible "at this time," said a source at Electric Factory Concerts.

It's getting a little tough to believe Bruce Springsteen when he sings that "these are better days. " At least when it comes to his career. His simultaneously released albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, took nose dives on the Billboard 200 albums chart this week after just four weeks in the stores. And competition from hipper rockers (Nirvana, Beastie Boys) reached fever pitch. So countering "Bruce backlash" called for a first-rate spin doctor. Or just some good publicity.

His days as the Big Gorgonzola of rock 'n' roll are over. But if Bruce Springsteen isn't The Boss anymore, then who is? Here are some possible successors: John Mellencamp. This somewhat affected hayseed rocker also is an actor, a director and an artist who was in painterly exile for three years. Sure he's Heartland, wears jeans and praises the glory days of rock 'n' roll, but The Boss cannot be auteur. Garth Brooks. The Boss? More like The Ranch Hand. Chart-topping discs alone do not make The Boss.

Four years ago he said goodbye to the stage. He dissolved his marriage, married again, fathered two children, and retreated to the recording studio. Now the Boss is back. Bruce Springsteen returned to the U.S. concert stage Thursday with a 2 1/2-hour rock- and-roll celebration at the Meadowlands' Brendan Byrne Arena, the first of 11 sold-out shows at the arena. Backed by a new five-member band and five singers (including Bobby King), Springsteen devoted most of his show to material from his two recent albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, which haven't exactly soared up the charts.

When Bruce Springsteen was riding the media tsunami that made him one of the biggest pop icons of the past decade, his every shimmy was in headlines. But that was back in the mid-1980s, when "Born in the U.S.A. " was selling as if its lyrics contained the secret of life, the long-awaited translation to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the cure for halitosis. Yet Springsteen's simultaneous release of "Lucky Town" and "Human Touch," two discs that barely made a dent on the Top 10 of the album charts, has been commercially disappointing by Boss standards.

Describing a rock-and-roll performance as "professional" is usually the faintest of praise. In an idiom that values emotion above all, to be professional is to be distant, uninvolved, cold. Unless you're Bruce Springsteen. On his current marathon tour, which brought him to the Spectrum on Aug. 28 and 29 and again on Monday and Tuesday, Springsteen has consistently demonstrated the positive aspects of professionalism. Though he performed material many consider inferior to his best work, this veteran has stayed true to his code.

Bruce Springsteen couldn't have picked a better time to release The Ghost of Tom Joad, the mostly solo collection of half-sung mutterings and sociopolitical allegories that arrives in stores Tuesday. His characters - the forgotten and the displaced, the migrant laborers and the laid-off factory workers - are the people most at risk in the current budget standoff. They were victims long before last week's shutdown of nonessential federal government operations. They're refugees of foreign wars, and veterans whose health was ruined while defending their country.

It's time to stop thinking glibly about Bruce Springsteen as a fading superstar and start contemplating him as a maturing artist. True artists take a long-haul view of their work, life and public acceptance. While grateful for recognition when it comes, monetary success is never their prime intent; the work is its own reward, and in good conscience they can serve only one master - their personal muse - by pressing their creativity ever forward. Bob Dylan is the perfect case in point and doubtless the primary role model for Springsteen, who will play two sold-out shows at the Spectrum Friday and Saturday.

I'm sitting with the savages in Section 205. The woman behind me keeps knocking me in the head as she tries to plant her foot on my shoulder and clamber onto the back of my seat for a better view. There goes her beer, down my wife's suede coat. "Yoooo-woooo!" the two Springsteen fans to my left shriek, and it would drown out the gorgeous trumpet, bass, and piano rendition of "Meeting Across the River. " Except that back here, 14 rows off the Spectrum floor, I'm barely hearing it anyway.

Test your knowledge of Springsteen trivia with this quiz. 1. On his first album, from where did Springsteen offer greetings? 2. In his pre-E Street outfit, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, what board game did Springsteen and his band mates play onstage during shows? 3. At what Bryn Mawr coffeehouse did Springsteen frequently perform in the early 1970s? 4. What executive signed Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan and Springsteen to Columbia Records? 5. Who played drums on the song "Born to Run"?

It's the moment Eugene Dunn - not to mention the entire town of Atlantic City, and what seems like every Bruce fan south of Exit 100 - has waited for. Dunn, crazed for decades with the idea of seeing his idol on the Boardwalk, should be getting ready to put his makeup on and fix his hair up pretty, as the song says. Because tomorrow night, Bruce Springsteen, Jersey Shore guy, is finally set to play Atlantic City, the heart of what Philly people consider their Jersey Shore - the city that inspired a song but could never get the Boss to book a concert.

Bruce Springsteen must have grabbed a nap after his early-morning performance on NBC's Today on Tuesday. Nine hours later, Bruce and the E Street Band were rested and rockin' at the Asbury Park Convention Hall, where they performed a sweaty two-hour, 40-minute dress rehearsal for their tour, which begins next Thursday in East Rutherford, N.J. In return for purchasing items from three Asbury Park merchants, fans qualified to buy $20 tickets to...

The development company Ocean Front Acquisitions is trying to find a buyer for one of Asbury Park's oldest and most notable landmarks, the dilapidated Palace Amusements complex, which was romanticized in several of Bruce Springsteen's songs, including the epic "Born to Run. " If a buyer is not found within six months (asking price $2.5 million), the developer says, it will be forced to demolish this historic building. Who needs to step up to the plate and save the day for the past and future identity of Asbury Park?

There it was, the script for one of the cherished highlights of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band's live shows, right on the back of a T-shirt: "Re-educated, re-animated, re-dedicated, re-invigorated . . . with the magic, the mystery and the ministry of rock and roll. " Seeing this proclamation Thursday night, at the opening of the Springsteen/E Street reunion tour on his home field, in the swamps of Jersey known as the Meadowlands, it was hard to avoid a twinge of dread.

A sample lyric from "Happy," one of 55 previously unreleased selections on Bruce Springsteen: Tracks: Lost and running beneath a million dead stars. Tonight let's shed our skins and slip these bars. Are these the words of the boyish Bruce, the Jersey Shore rocker who set off decades ago on a hellfire mission to find out "if love is real"? Are they from the more mature Bruce, who chronicled ordinary people bumping up against their own limitations? Or is this the musing of the middle-aged father, whose recent works have been somber allegories and earthy reflections on love and loss?

Bruce Springsteen couldn't have picked a better time to release The Ghost of Tom Joad, the mostly solo collection of half-sung mutterings and sociopolitical allegories that arrives in stores Tuesday. His characters - the forgotten and the displaced, the migrant laborers and the laid-off factory workers - are the people most at risk in the current budget standoff. They were victims long before last week's shutdown of nonessential federal government operations. They're refugees of foreign wars, and veterans whose health was ruined while defending their country.

Madonna. Prince. Michael Jackson. Bruce Springsteen. In the '80s, they defined pop music. In the '90s, they could form their own dysfunctional-career support group. All still sell records. All still claim wide industry respect. But with mounting evidence that the public is moving away from their brand of wide- angle mega-stardom, they're starting to look like the last of a breed. Somebody call 911: We got icons in trouble. According to the trades, this is a good moment for established artists: River of Dreams, from stalwart Billy Joel, is one of the hottest records in the country.

Describing a rock-and-roll performance as "professional" is usually the faintest of praise. In an idiom that values emotion above all, to be professional is to be distant, uninvolved, cold. Unless you're Bruce Springsteen. On his current marathon tour, which brought him to the Spectrum on Aug. 28 and 29 and again on Monday and Tuesday, Springsteen has consistently demonstrated the positive aspects of professionalism. Though he performed material many consider inferior to his best work, this veteran has stayed true to his code.