I've been immune to Bruce Springsteen for more than 30 years. Tonight, that is over. I'd heard so much about the power of his live show, the legend of Clarence Clemons, the Soprano jaunt of Little Steven, yadda, yadda, yadda. Nothin. Nice guy, man of the people, power anthems that never really connected.

The harbinger for me was an appearance on Today a few months ago, where Springsteen and his E Street Band debuted an anti-war song with the most startling spoken intro that the veeps at GE must have blinked through like a sip of tart limeade. Living in the future, well, you should get the record. Tonight, I finally did.

For me the secret unfolded about an hour into the 2:45 show, when Living in the Future returned. Before then, I was doing the usual stuff, eating a hot dog, sipping beer, watching the blue collar crowd like some astronaut from wherever it is I think I'm coming from.

We'd been given earplugs by a knowledgeable friend that I'd tried then abandoned, then tried again. The effect was something like the lesson I'd learned at Shea Stadium all those years ago, to push my fingers into my ears just hard enough to filter the screams. There, almost like being underwater, a secret world where the sinews of the music were exposed: the backbeat, oh wait, the cymbals, the several guitars, all of it surprisingly clear in this muddy soundscape.

The earplugs bought me time to get over myself, a process I was unaware had begun. A process of learning that the things that separate us are like the high frequencies chopped down by the plugs, insistent in their clarity but ultimately muted by the fundamentals that we share below. We are born, we live, we die.

Growing up in New York, with a built-in view like the Steinberg New Yorker cover, I believed I could make it anywhere if I made it there. Down there a mile below were the fly-over states, what now we call the Red states, what a line from a Springsteen song called a beautiful place to be born. Whuh, what was that? I realized I'd taken the plugs out a while ago, as the E Street Band began to sink in.

These are prayers, I began to realize. Time to reap, time to sow. Another secret: you can't understand Max Weinberg's power until you feel it, midranges pumping the blood through the body of the music. On Late Night, it almost feels like one of those Emenee toy drum kits, all high end and foot with nothing in the middle. Tonight, it was the frame on which everything is built.

Behind us, a burly guy with a sign pleading for a favorite song bellowed like a slaughterhouse steer. I started to put the plugs back in, but Springsteen reached out into the crowd for another sign and began a slow ballad whose name escapes me. Now I was done with listening, tipping over into thinking of my children, the rush of sky past my father's profile as we drove home to the City down the Thruway, the thoughts of a child not knowing these moments were so filled with mythic proportion for my life, as they are for each of us.

Springsteen dove out into the sea of hands, demanding someone pass a small sign forward to him, then rushing grinning to the microphone to stand there as the cameras zoomed in: Bruce, you are my real father. Whuh, I felt stupid and joyous. Like I do now, an idiot who fell in love at some arena rock show. Little Steven started coming to the side near us, staring out into the crowd, looking for and finding us and pointing (it seemed) directly at us to say: Yes, you got it.

The other guitarist, Nils Lofgrin, leaned out over the other side of the stage, listening to the audience singing the choruses and playing them back to them, not leading but listening to and layering in with them. Now they were playing the songs of the faithful, those same ones I flew over like the Red states so many times. I began to test the air above my head with fingers outstretched, realizing no one would notice or care how foolish I might have felt.

Now it was over, and then the gracious encore, with a curious throwaway tune that I somehow knew was a setup for the last song, the American Land, a Gaelic thunderbolt with one line scrolling past on the monitors that said something about keeping out the immigrants who came here and built the land and died for it. And then I understood it, that Springteen and his incredible band know what they, and we, are about, that change is upon us now. That we are the common man, each of us in our own precious unique way, inescapably strapped to the mast of this enterprise called life.