Before the evening gets too far past — the recent Springsteen concert in D.C. was great. We had a big crew down on the floor — Adam, Erin, Greg, Joey, Jim, Mackenzie, Lori, and myself. We lost big in the lottery and ended up close to the end of the early-entrance line, but we were able to get nice pizza and beer (despite my clock-nervous skepticism) and end up at the midpoint on the floor, the perfect place to catch Mr. Bruce coming out to a riser to sing to the crowd. See my video above.

Other highlights included: hearing The Promise and American Skin for the first time, the new material winning over the fans on the floor, the "Apollo Medley" coasting to an easy victory (no wonder it's shown up on all the early-tour setlists), and Lori giving an unexpected what-for to a late-coming, space-stealing loser — and coming away victorious.

The Clarence tributes came often during the show, and combined with the economic focus of the songs, the Post review said the show was darker than any Springsteen shows in a while. True, but I thought the overall mood was mixed. This tour has a lot to get done, and the back-and-forth at the D.C. show was a little much. I think it will even out as the tour goes along. Tickets to the fall's Nationals Ballpark show go on sale late next week. Where will the many messages stand in the fall?

A few pictures, some far, some near…

The band is now some 17 people. Somehow they all fit.

Money and greed are a regular theme on the new album. Green lights!

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Because Fallon's Bruce week is over. Also, make that two things.

1. Topping their duet last year on Willow Smith's Whip My Hair, "Neil Young" and Springsteen cover LMFAO's Sexy and I Know It.

2. Springsteen + E Street Band + The Roots + Morello + Fallon + E Street Shuffle + end of the show + the entire audience on stage =

Previously this week:
-Springsteen and the band do the definitive live Wrecking Ball.
-John Legend and The Roots cover Springsteen well.

(Love Elvis Costello, but the less said about his visit the better.)

I picked up my tour tickets today, and I'm excited. The album should arrive from Amazon any day now. Mail, go faster.

If you've read this blog for a while, you know I'm a big fan of both John Legend and Bruce Springsteen. When the two collide, I have to post.

It's cool to see Legend covering Springsteen as part of Jimmy Fallon's Bruce week. The week has already given us the definitive-so-far take on Wrecking Ball. Now Legend and The Roots cover Dancing in the Dark.

Everyone covers Dancing in the Dark and Atlantic City. If you've never recorded a cover of either song, just wait for it. The latter encourages more creativity, and rock, folk and country types all like digging in. The former has more issues. It's hard to be creative with something that's so well known in a certain beat and mood. Just in my own (relatively limited) concert experience, I've found Mat Kearney does Dancing well. Eleanor Friedberger has trouble with it. Pete Yorn, I go back and forth.

While I have a pro-Legend bias, I haven't loved much of his work with The Roots. They do good work together, but their collaborations never feel nearly as strong and original as their work apart. This Springsteen cover, though, I like it. It's not overly ambitious on the front, to crib a drink or code term. But the rendition manages to bring a different feel to the back half of the sound and, in doing so, the song. The mood's a soulful elevator. After you step in, you find yourself enjoying the ride.

On the last day of our Philadelphia weekend, President's Day, we saw the Liberty Bell. There were a cross-section of America in line. Parents throughout the (relatively) new viewing hall were reading explanatory texts to their children. It was difficult to take a good picture of the bell because you always captured someone on the far side of the bell, also trying and failing to take a good picture. But it was great to be able to walk around the bell and, photos aside, feel close and connected to it.

We then went to the National Constitution Center. Lori had been nice to indulge me and buy tickets to the newly arrived Springsteen exhibit, on loan from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As uncomfortable as it was to hear a docent's painfully earnest explanation of Born in the USA to a tourist group, you could largely ignore the instances of modern-exhibit forced learning and sink into the artifacts. The Fender Esquire. The old, childhood guitars. The handwritten lyrics. The writing table. The photo albums. A wacky early-'90s shirt. A box of Bruce Juice. The exhibit was light on capturing scope and impact, but the Corvette was angled well.

Far, far weirder was the rest of the museum. Private museums always give me the creeps for some reason. The National Constitution Center, unfortunately, was all the way creepy. Exhibits were sparse, and life-size statues of the signers may haunt our dreams for years to come.

Benjamin Franklin's gonna get you.

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Wow. Springsteen and the band went on Fallon last night, played the title track off the new album and caught fire. This is the most at home the band has appeared with new material in a long time. I can't wait for the D.C. show. (I've found a taker for the New Jersey tickets.) This performance has me hoping we end up very close to the floor's front. This song didn't do much for me when it appeared near the end of the last tour, an '09 tribute to the old Giants Stadium. But reworked some sonically, Wrecking Ball may be among my favorites off the new album.

I also think the title and tone are a good fit. It's not the best song title I've heard this week. Winning that competition is Zoe Muth's If I Can't Trust You With a Quarter (How Can I Trust You With My Heart?). Thanks, No Depression, for that video introduction. But Wrecking Ball hits hard.

Tickets for many dates on the new Springsteen tour went on sale this week. I was determined to get into at least one show. Of East Coast big-city, reasonable-drive concerts, Washington went on sale near the end of the Ticketmaster release stretch — New Jersey early on Friday, New York a bit later Friday, and Washington and Boston on Saturday.

Friday, I went for the insurance. Tried for the first night in New Jersey, refreshed my browser at just the right moment, for once retyped the Captcha words without typos, and up came two floor seats. Success!

But to buy? Not to buy? Had I just gotten lucky in the maw, or was no one buying Bruce tickets? Would Washington be even easier the next day, making Jersey tickets unnecessary? I hemmed and hawed a few minutes as clocks ticked. Then I went for it. Of course people in Jersey were buying Springsteen (!) tickets. They were probably fighting each other in the streets for them. What was I thinking? I was fortunate.

The two times in my life I had turned my back on fortunate Springsteen seats, I had regretted it. Once was due to youthful hubris, my college friends and I in a moment of insanity throwing back middle-deck seats for the final concert of the Reunion Tour, thinking we could do better.

The second time, also long ago, was due to financial concerns. I ended up paying the same money for far worse seats to the same show. The lesson learned was never, ever throw back great Springsteen seats.

So, I bought the New Jersey tickets. Later Friday, I tried halfheartedly for the New York shows. Got to the browser a minute late, never had a shot. Saturday morning, I tried for floor tickets in Washington. Success again. I wasn't sure what I would do with the New Jersey ones. Could two Springsteen shows within a few days be a bad thing, though? No.

Looking at the news output today, luck was surely on my side. Scalper computers blew up New Jersey sales. The Wall Street Journal even did a story. "As seats went on sale at 10 a.m. Friday for Mr. Springsteen's performances at three venues in New York and New Jersey, traffic on the site shot up to a level 2.5 times higher than any point in the past year, Ticketmaster spokeswoman Jacqueline Peterson said." D.C. sold out within minutes, without trouble. To pay for my fortune this week, fate may never allow me to get Springsteen tickets again. We'll see.

I'm not as deep into collecting Springsteen bootlegs as I used to be.

I started midway through college and collected a couple hundred until easing off a few years ago. All of this was through downloading (which subverts bootleg profiteers, which the Bruce camp has tacitly backed), not buying (which helps the profiteers, earning the camp's annoyance and occasional legal chase). But the hobby got to a point where it was taking too much of my time. I quit vanity plates for the same reason.

The great sportswriter Giles Smith has a quote, which I posted on this blog once before, amid writer's block, caputured the Freudian nature:

What is it about small boys and completion? [Collecting cricket programs, if I recall Smith's story correctly] I could say I was displaying a precocious interest in the aesthetic of wholeness, but the truth is I was just being reposterously anal. Small boys are pushed that way by the makers of bubblegum cards, by the designers of petrol station promotions, by Stanley Gibbons [apparently it's a British stamp thing] and countless others who encourage us to "collect the set" and are never made to answer for the psychological implications of what they do.

All of this personal background is to explain to why I missed the news in December that Wolfgang's Vault, the great concert-archive site, has acquired the original tapes of one of Springsteen's killer 1978 Passaic shows and plans to restore, digitize and release the video in 2012. I hear the show isn't my favorite all-time bootleg (September 19, night one of the stand, booted as Passaic Night and as Piece de Resistance), but you have to imagine the subsequent night was damn good too.

But wait! You can do more than imagine. A beat-up, not-yet-restored copy of this video is online. It's damn good. Can't wait for Wolfgang.

I posted the other day that early "wild" word of Springsteen's new album either boded very well or very poorly. With the release of the album's first single last night, put up a point in the positive column.

We Take Care of Our Own has a strong beat, tight (Magic-style) vocals and all kinds of anger. Backstreets says the chorus makes the song "not only be Springsteen's most misinterpreted song since Born in the U.S.A., but misinterpreted in precisely the same way." Sounds exactly right to me. But as the review goes on to state, the ambiguity runs in various directions. While clearly fired up about the American condition, underneath there's a "So-what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it" layer.

As much as I like initial first track, what matters most to a Springsteen album's quality in the last decade are the next several tracks we hear. With this tight sound (I'm not quite willing to say Arcade Fire – again, far too reminiscent of Bruce's own '07 Magic, even keeping the strings), how the music diversifies over the rest of the album will be critical. Can the message hit enough different, right notes to sustain itself?

Friend and fellow Bruce fan Steve came across the article this morning. The good news? An "earwitness who's heard some of the music" tells The Hollywood Reporter: "It’s very rock 'n' roll. He feels it's the angriest album he's ever made." The potentially bad news? The sound "veers" to "unexpected textures — loops, electronic percussion … an amazing sweep of influences and rhythms, from hip-hop to Irish folk rhythms."

Everything could be fine, I know. There's a new producer in the house, and he might make sure the experiments fit (in a way the producer of the last couple albums didn't). But still I worry. And hope for the best.

Similarly, the pub puts the album among its most anticipated albums of 2012. But also on the list? Adam Lambert, Justin Bieber, Lana Del Rey.

A good amount has been written about how Patti Smith contributed to Springsteen's Because the Night and how he gave the song to her in return. Listen to hers and his, and you have almost enough material for an entire gender studies class. Add Michael Stipe's cover of Smith's version while performing with Bruce, and your curriculum is complete.

Less has been written of another Smith-Springsteen crossover work: the guitar riff for her Frederick and the intro to his live Darkness-tour Prove It All Night. Her version is about her husband. His is about who knows. Both are set at night. Both are primal in their lyric elements.

Both are confident but desperate. The songs say many of the same things, but if you weren't aware of the shared chords, you'd never situate them near each other on your shelves. He knows the riff but doesn't let it take over the core of what he wants to say. She invites the guitar in and incorporates it. Mars and Venus in badass manner.

Bruce Springsteen, Prove It All Night.

Patti Smith, Frederick.