Great game, respect all around to two smart and talented teams, great touchdown to end it and a great halftime show on the way there. The set had to have been Bruce's first top-notch short set in years, far better than any television shot in years. Tenth Avenue was an inspired choice to open; the opening guitar line didn't fare well in the broadcast, but it couldn't have gone wrong in the stadium. Hope the cameraman is okay, but the surprised look on Bruce's face was awesome. I've seen the slide probably 10 times live, and the dude slides a long, long way. Born to Run was Born to Run. I turned to friend Emily and said I'd been trying to play the show down to myself but I'd kill to be there right then. Working on a Dream fared much better than the album cut or any previous live performance, and I've been happy with how the song's been growing on me. Hated the song at first, then couldn't get it out of my head, now happy to hear it more electrified and choir-pumped. Glory Days was way above the norm, especially in the phrasing (and I called the football lyrics last week). Thanks to Jon for a good party and good luck to all who face his marshmallow gun.

The downside: I've already blocked out an hour on my work Outlook calendar tomorrow for Bruce's D.C. date hitting Ticketmaster. Tonight's show didn't make that work any easier. Only one D.C. date plus this?

The only thing missing: Balboa Versus the Earth Slayer.

The five-star take on Working on a Dream is further proof Rolling Stone is the ultimate mainstream homer for Bruce — read Kot and even the admittedly Bruce-despising DeRo for more honesty — but the cover is further proof Rolling Stone will never make a good Springsteen cover.

A gallery collects the mistakes, in order: the heroin Darkness cover, the sweaty charity team, the Nebraska ice-skating, the overeager bandana salesman, the tank top a decade regrets, the almost-good street shot but not really, the late-nite chat line, the NBC Thursday night '80s line-up, the inevitable collision of sweat and tank tops, the Leibovitz photo that doesn't count, the shot that would've been great had the LT/HT production gone differently but as history stands is misrepresentative, the orange farmer, the goofball gypsy, and now the pick-up artist.

It's too bad because many of the stories behind the covers have been good. A MUSE piece is solid RS politics. The River story has McDonald's and a Flannery O'Connor movie. The Born in the USA interview has him reading O'Connor and making a first stab at talking politics. The Tunnel look captures the glitz and subsumed necessary self-destruction.

The "Voice of a Decade" 1990 essay is essentially a Marsh summary, but the end is great. "Which is to say, despite the currents of history, Springsteen kept faith with a difficult quest. In the midst of a confusing and complex decade, he wrote more honestly, more intelligently and more compassionately about America than any other writer of the decade. And after he did so, he set about the business of tending to his own life. An act like that is neither a retreat nor a failure. Instead, it is a way of refusing to be broken by the dissolution of the world around you. It is a way of saying that, sooner or later, you have to bring your dreams of a better world into your own home and your own heart, and you have to see if you can live up to them. All in all, that isn't such a bad way to finish off one decade. Or to begin another."

As we move along to the present day, the stories become interviews, and the interviews move from largely personal to largely political. The results aren't much different from the interviews you see elsewhere. So at this point, the best article is the first one. Marsh follows the band around L.A. in '78 as they eat turkey sandwiches, walk through bottle rocket crossfire, molest their own billboard, play Roxy shows that star on the Live box, and do the best shaggy-dog storytelling of their lives.

"When my folks moved out to California," Bruce begins in response to a question about whether he really knows "a pretty little place in Southern California/Down San Diego way" as he claims in Rosalita, "my mom decided — see my father and I would fight all the time — and she decided that we should go to Tijuana [he laughs his hoarse laugh, reserved for the truly absurd]. So we got in the car and drove down there, arguing all the way. First I drove and he yelled at me, and then he drove and I yelled at him.

"Anyway, we finally go there, and of course, my old man is the softest-hearted guy in the world. Within fifteen minutes, some guy has sold him some watch that must've run for all of an hour and a half before it stopped. And then some guy comes up and says, 'Hey would you guys like to have your picture taken on a zebra?'

"Well, we looked at each other — who could believe this, right? Zebras are in Africa. And so we said, 'Well if you've got a zebra, we definitely want to have our picture taken.' So we give him ten bucks and he takes us around this corner, and he's got… he's got a damn donkey with stripes painted on its side. And he pulls out these two hats — one says Pancho, one says Cisco — I swear — and he sits us on the donkey and takes our picture. My mother's still got that picture. But that is all I knew about Southern California at the time I wrote Rosalita."

Springsteen and E Street, of course (bootleg info/mp3).

And it's awesome. We knew Bruce loved Halloween, with the opener coffins and one-offs of Haunted House, but he's topped himself this year. A new song and a video for the holiday? With the bullet mic on full distort and the weirdest production he's done on anything taped or live in decades? (We have to stop counting back at the two known performances of Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, featuring on-stage Monopoly.) So, what the hell? Is this an album preview or the creative desperation of a man who can't put out his holiday decorations? Or maybe he's trying to get his mind off the elections. "That damn crazy Internet, I love it. Patti, get the camera, I'm gonna spookify the barn."

Watch or download A Night with the Jersey Devil.

This viewer is a fan of How I Met Your Mother. He talks the show up to friends, TiVos when necessary, and sprinkles the catchphrases into everyday thought and conversation. But since the first episode of the first season, he has hated the show's tendency to have the characters all laugh at each other's jokes. Someone makes a joke, and everyone laughs and smiles along … every time. The show's manic energy flees in what has to be a director's idea of sewing a scene together.

(Only exception: Season two, nothing to lose and awesome for it.)

The laughter, the corny reminders of the mother meeting, the script out of every four with overly convoluted narrative devices (even for this show, yes), the seams appear too often. In this week's episode, my worlds collide and even Springsteen suffers the sewing.

From the soundtrack last night:

You know she thrills me with all her charms
When I'm wrapped up in my baby's arms
My little girl gives me everything
When I'm walking down the street with you
Sing sha la la la la la la
Sha la la la la la la la la
Sha la la la la la la la
Sha la la la la la

Sure, the song is Bruce's cover of Jersey Girl. But if you're playing along at home, that's three lines from the second verse, one line from the first verse that breaks the rhyming and the second half of the second chorus. Someone's working very hard to create the perfect moment.

Am I biased? Absolutely. I like the bootleg where the only thing on it is a song interlude edited out of that same box set. Just the interlude and nothing else. That's weird. But so's laughing at your own jokes.

A dream between 5 and 8 a.m. today — when I woke up to fix a typo I'd made at work yesterday and when I woke up for good – that managed to combine most of this blog's summer yet somehow not Mike Mussina:

I was in some kind of small class, playing Pole Position on a full arcade game, with the machine spitting out quarters as I kept winning races, but no one in the room noticed and I seemed to be keeping up with what the teacher was saying. Somehow I end up at an afterparty or concert where Springsteen and half the band were playing through some kind of work connection. Bruce played a few opening chords from Incident to warm up, but I didn't notice any other songs. Little Steven was banging on the drums. Bruce introduced a couple extra members of the band, two brunettes on the left side of the stage, joking about the first one's chest (she laughed) and introducing the second girl by her ancestral country, causing a blonde member of the crowd with the same roots to get confused and jump up on stage, thinking Bruce was introducing her. He politely ignored her as she stood directly in front of him until we pulled her away. As Bruce came off stage, he summoned me to the side of the club and said, "When I introduce Neuharth, you yell, 'Free Hank Hill!'" I said, "Because that was the crazy presidential candidate Neuharth always liked?" Yep, Bruce replied, I said sure, and he walked backstage. But as I stood around, there appeared to be no next party or second part of the concert.  I wondered if something was going to happen the next day because Neuharth was getting up there in years and was probably a morning person now. Then I woke up.

Man, with my hair up in the air like this, I should be debuting The River at No Nukes. What? Man, that's a weird thing to think. Stay focused! Deciding what to wear to a bowling alley with a dress code is hard.

Bonnie Raitt: "Too bad the guy's name wasn't Melvin or something." Video from the debut at the MUSE concerts a year before the album.

If you're on stage in an 18,000-seat arena, I imagine it's hard to know where to look. The noise, the lights, the sea of faces staring back.

So, what Danny seemed to do — more so than the rest of the E Street Band, to my mind — was look down front. He could make eye contact with you down there, and you could let him know you were cheering for him. He'd nod and smile, and you had a sense of that's why he played like he did every night.

He wasn't the bandleader and wasn't one of the stars of the band. But he was the guy who helped put them all together and, for years, took the music to the Boardwalk and to more sorrowful places. Whether anyone would hear as much in a wall of sound was probably a nightly open question. But the music — the search to complete that sound and its perception — demanded attempt.

On the Web, the Danny Federici Melanoma Fund has begun collecting donations. The memorial video, Danny's last performance with the band and Springsteen's eulogy for him are also now live on the official site. The last performance is a good one, with Springsteen using the original words from Sandy instead of ones used most of the last few decades. In the original, it's a waitress who's lost her desire for you. In the usual version, it's the angels who've done so. Both make you think it's time to move on, not in a bad way.

With the eulogy, Bruce doesn't let us down on the speechifyin.

There was the time Danny quit the band during a rough period at Max's Kansas City, explaining to me that he was leaving to fix televisions. I asked him to think about that and come back later.

Or Danny, in the band rental car, bouncing off several parked cars after a night of entertainment, smashing out the windshield with his head but saved from severe injury by the huge hard cowboy hat he bought in Texas on our last Western swing.

Or Danny, leaving a large marijuana plant on the front seat of his car in a tow away zone. The car was promptly towed. He said, "Bruce, I'm going to go down and report that it was stolen." I said, "I'm not sure that's a good idea."

Down he went and straight into the slammer without passing go.

Or Danny, the only member of the E Street Band to be physically thrown out of the Stone Pony. Considering all the money we made them, that wasn't easy to do.

Or Danny receiving and surviving a "cautionary assault" from an enraged but restrained "Big Man" Clarence Clemons while they were living together and Danny finally drove the "Big Man" over the big top.

Or Danny assisting me in removing my foot from his stereo speaker after being the only band member ever to drive me into a violent rage.

At work, readers left some great memories in the comments, and a Life editor was kind enough to let me choose the songs to sample. Jeff had e-mailed me about the death earlier in the day and given me some time to think about choices. I felt lucky to have seen the full band in its last week together in November.

I don't think the band will ever be the same again, now that it's mortal. The possibility is out there, but so, so much seems to be required. The "Is Bruce Springsteen obsessed with redemption?" line comes to mind, and the question seems applicable to everyone on stage. The recent tours have fit that mode. Bruce's eulogy for Danny ends with a twist on the theme, and a eulogy is no comment on the future. Somewhere out there, the waitress and the angels are skeptical but provocative.

Rumor has it the Springsteen camp will finally release a full Darkness show this year, for the tour's 30th anniversary. Until then, we survive on tapes.

For purely personal reasons, one of my favorite Springsteen bootlegs is the Darkness show at McGaw Hall. The sound is awful, but it's Northwestern on Springsteen's best tour ever. Bruce even references the dirt floor the arena had then. That's enough for me. Thanks to a RMAS person who sent me her photos from the show, I've got as far as to make my own artwork for the show. Homemade quality but kind of fun.

But I never give the show enough credit for its performance. The sound makes the tape a difficult listen. When Springsteen debuts the "I Get Mad" part of She's the One, the cool factor loses to the sound factor, to a whole other night. A few weeks later, the part plays crazy smooth and great on the Winterland tapes.

It's interesting then to see the Northwestern show running near the top of the list of longest Prove It All Night introductions on that tour. One of the leaders in the online Bruce community has done the analysis and put the list together. Arcane? You bet. But the ranking is a telling one. Let's look at the logic….

1. Springsteen's greatest tour ever is the Darkness tour.
2. The Darkness tour may have Springsteen's best guitar playing ever.
3. His best guitar playing on the tour comes in Prove It All Night.
4. The song that tour has intro, "mid-tro" and "out-tro" parts.
5. The intro is split into a multi-instrument lead-in and a guitar solo.
6. As Bruce's playing leans tight, the solo's form holds over its length.
7. The solo's length extends the intro's ramp-up to the song proper.

So, a longer intro may indicate a greater show. But put some emphasis on the "may." The tour's two most recommended bootlegs arrive 29 spots apart, with the first night at Winterland at No. 4 and the second night in Passaic at No. 33. The song gets longer as the tour goes on.

But, getting back to "a longer intro may indicate a greater show," you should also put some emphasis on the "indicate." An indication of greatness in music is enough to take another listen. Springsteen's never released a live '78 version of the song, despite coming close a couple times, so the tapes are important. The tapes are all you've got. So, you pull the bootleg out of its plastic sleeve. Pretending the hiss and static aren't there, you like what you hear. You find more than ever you wish you were there that night.

Thanks to the list-maker for his generosity on this project and many others and for making the No. 1 performance on the list available (in this thread). Here's the Evanston performance — tied for No. 2, and maybe tied for No. 1 if the Norman show indeed had a guitar issue (as speculated in the thread). Arcane? You bet. But here we are.

A catch-up post … Had a good time at the second night of Springsteen's stay in Washington this fall. Didn't make it to the second row like in Toronto, but had good seats and company. The show highlight was the standing ovation for the guys from Walter Reed, and the musical highlight was hearing Jackson Cage, one of my favorite Springsteen songs, for the first time.

In telling Jess as much on the way out, she said I could add the song to my collection, an interesting little phrase that got me thinking about what's in there from my 12 shows so far….

Songs heard five or more times: Badlands (10), Born to Run (10), Born in the USA (8), The Promised Land (8), Lonesome Day (7), The Rising (7), Thunder Road (7), Land of Hope and Dreams (6), Dancing in the Dark (5), If I Should Fall Behind (5), Mary's Place (5), She's the One (5).

Songs heard three or four times: Backstreets (4), Bobby Jean (4), Empty Sky (4), Into the Fire (4), My City of Ruins (4), No Surrender (4), Out in the Street (4), Prove It All Night (4), Waitin' on a Sunny Day (4), Working on the Highway (4), You're Missing (4), Darlington County (3), Countin' on a Miracle (3), Ghost of Tom Joad (3), Glory Days (3), Light of Day (3), Murder Inc. (3), Reason to Believe (3), Ramrod (3), Tenth Avenue Freeze-out (3), Ties That Bind (3), Two Hearts (3), Worlds Apart (3), You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch) (3), Youngstown (3).

Songs I've only heard twice but would really like to hear again: Cadillac Ranch, Candy's Room, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Hungry Heart, Incident on 57th Street, Night, The River, Trapped.

Songs I've only heard once and would love to hear again: Adam Raised a Cain, Because the Night, Brilliant Disguise, Don't Look Back, Jackson Cage, Long Time Coming, Open All Night, Something in the Night, Thundercrack, Tougher than the Rest, Where the Bands Are.

Officially released songs I've somehow sadly never heard in concert but, thanks to the magic of bootlegging, would knock over old ladies to hear: Bring on the Night, Crush on You, Downbound Train, E Street Shuffle, Fever, From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come), The Hitter, Iceman, I'm on Fire, It's Hard to be a Saint in the City, I Wanna Marry You, Kitty's Back, Meeting Across the River (the only Born to Run song I'm missing), My Love Will Not Let You Down, New York City Serenade, None But the Brave, Price You Pay, The Promise, Real World, Roulette, Seaside Bar Song, Sherry Darling, Soul Driver, Spare Parts, State Trooper, Stolen Car, Streets of Fire (the only Darkness song I'm missing), Take 'em as They Come, Tunnel of Love, Valentine's Day, When the Lights Go Out.

Songs never officially released but, thanks again to the magic of bootlegging, I'm still hoping turn in concert sometime, somewhere, and maybe I'll be lucky enough to be in the building that night: Baby I, Cindy, Delivery Man, I'm Turning Into Elvis, The Klansman, Lonely Night in the Park, On the Prowl, Pilgrim in the Temple of Love, Protection, Taxi Cab, Unsatisfied Heart, The Way, The Wind and the Rain.

I have a lot of work to do.