I thought I'd learned how to beat jet lag a dozen years ago from bicoastal movie producer Scott Rudin, who, between being interviewed and making contradictory bargaining phone calls ("We have to pay him that, he's Vincent D'Onofrio!" … "Who the fuck is Vincent D'Onofrio?") touted his method: take the 4 p.m. out of L.A., arrive in New York at midnight and go right to sleep.

Of course, such rigor is a lot easier when you're self-employed and flying first-class. In the past year, working in Burbank at entry-level TV money with two kids back in Manhattan and mounting debt, I frequently flew in JetBlue steerage and, to avoid missing even more work, took enough red-eyes to make me a Visine poster boy.

But the worst thing I lost in the red-eye commute-and in working in showbiz, where you have to read the trades, scripts, memos, spend hours online researching, and watch a lot of TV and movies-was my ability to read novels to completion. This was particularly frustrating, as I'd recently bounced back from years of new-parent illiteracy, the phase when all you're reading is The Runaway Bunny or What to Expect When You're Singing Baby Beluga on Two Hours' Sleep and you fake your way through dinner-party conversations about what you believe are obscure current events which you later learn have been on the front page of The Times for weeks.

When the TV season ended, there was supposed to be a month off, and I was looking forward to 30 straight days without getting on an airplane. Two days into it, my job unexpectedly ended, and I had to fly back several times to job-hunt; for a variety of reasons, I'm not leaving L.A. just yet, but I have at least been able to schedule a more humane bicoastal passage.

And freed from having to catch up on sleep or homework, instead of feeling compelled to check in on what "everyone" was reading (like The Lovely Bones and The Corrections ) or what I had never read in college (Faulkner), I returned to Philip Roth, whom I hadn't read past Portnoy's Complaint . Dauntingly, each one was better than the last- The Counterlife , The Human Stain , Sabbath's Theater (or, as a friend called it, Men Behaving Badly ). These were keepers, books I would want to return to for inspiration. I started buying used Roth hardcovers via the Internet, which were as cheap as new paperbacks. On a recent JetBlue jaunt, I settled into my seat, turned off the DirecTV screen taunting me a foot away from my face (how many times can you really watch True Lies on A&E?) and got cracking on Operation Shylock: A Confession .

I was thoroughly enjoying myself until I hit page 55, when I was jarred by a penciled note in the margin. I leafed ahead and discovered to my horror that a previous owner had underlined, annotated, asterisked, circled and exclamation-pointed with abandon. Not every page, but enough to be incredibly distracting.

My first response was annoyance at the bookseller, who hadn't noted (nor, likely, even noticed) this literary graffiti. I took out a pencil and began erasing furiously. But as I started reading only for notes, the reporter in me started to get curious. Who was this person?

The careful handwriting looked feminine; the fact that every Yiddish word had been underlined with a question mark in the margin led me to believe she was not Jewish. (She didn't get Roth's admittedly cringeworthy pun, "There's no business like Shoah business.")

She stopped to marvel several times that she was reading the book in August 1993, the very week when the decision was handed down in the trial Roth had used throughout Shylock , that of Ivan Demjanjuk, the U.S. citizen accused of being the Nazi concentration-camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

I too might have marveled at such a coincidence, but would I have taken the time to scribble such musings to myself in the margins? This was more than just a college student dog-earing passages for a possible pop quiz. What motivated her to stop reading and pick up her pencil? Who did she think would be reading this?

This question lingered as I paged through her notes. Though she had highlighted many compelling passages, her notes often expressed frustration with Roth's style: "PROLIX," cried one, "de trop" another. And, most memorably: "Please, Mr. Roth-one sentence!"

How weird: to be so pissed at a book's wordiness as to lodge a written complaint, yet so formal as to address the author as "Mr." Did she think some day Roth himself might come across her copy?

It was a bizarre twist on an idea Roth loves to play with-the novelist as a character, the implication of the reader in the story. This random stranger had become inextricably enmeshed in my experience of the book. Though I removed several of her question marks and quibbles, I soon set aside my eraser; some of her highlightings were indeed passages I would like to return to.

But wait. Before I returned to Roth's words, something else struck me. After she'd devoted so much time to annotating her copy, marveling at her personal relationship with it, how had it ended up in my hands? Had she gotten to the end and flung it across the room? Deaccessioned it when she moved? Had she married an anti-Semite who demanded she dump all her Roth books? Or just become a devotee of Updike? Had she broken up with someone who had tried to turn her on to Roth (in vain?), or gotten so broke she needed to sell it? Or had she died, and her grieving husband/partner/sister/parents couldn't bear to keep the copy around with all these reminders of her (studiousness/obtuseness/penmanship/etc.)?

Reading Operation Shylock had became a wholly schizoid experience: finding out what happened to Roth the character/author (and his dopplegänger, another Philip Roth who was running around pretending to be him and stirring up Zionists), while also trying to learn what had happened to the previous owner. Did she like how it ended? Did the accumulated Yiddish prove too alienating?

Halfway through the book, my plane landed in Long Beach. I got my bags, picked up a rental car and got home, only to find that somewhere along the way I had lost the book. I called JetBlue and the car rental desk, to no avail.

I was devastated. At first I couldn't bear to read any Roth, so I read something else ( Three Junes , highly recommended). Finally I ordered another copy. I'm sure I'll finish it, but I will never know how the "other" story ended-the one of this woman's relationship to the book, to Roth, to Jewish colloquialisms. And where is she now, a decade later?

I realize now that whenever I say I'm reading a book that's so good I don't want it to end, that isn't really true. You want closure-even if it isn't the ending you hoped for when you started.

My first reaction was anxiety-and not because of my aversion to smoke or limited gambling skills. Although I'd known each player for anywhere from two to 35 years, I was apprehensive about my ability to fit in with the men's club of cigarettes, braggadocio and one-upsmanship, a world that can still puzzle me despite a lifetime of seeing a man in the mirror every morning.

I've always been one of those men who feels pretty comfortable doing "unmanly" things-putting my daughters' hair in pigtails, shopping for jewelry, going along on school field trips, cleaning the refrigerator. This sometimes earns me a quizzical glance or a nervous joke from other men, but most of the time it makes me feel good about myself-and modern. But not in scenarios like poker games.

As a kid, when I went to sleep-away camp, I chose one that was low-testosterone; the campers were mostly suburban Jews like me, not typically among the world's foremost athletes. But even in this environment, I still felt a little out of sync. While most of my peers were gung-ho about soccer and tennis, my happiest days were spent holed up in the theater, the darkroom and the radio station. I was the only kid in my camp's history to opt out of the end-of-summer color war as a conscientious objector. In high school, my only appearances on an athletic field were marching at half time, playing a saxophone.

I have maintained some traditionally male enthusiasms, including a fascination with baseball and music trivia, and an overambitious Mr. Fix-It streak. But the day I discovered in high-school gym class that my legs could lift the entire weight stack on the Nautilus machine-more than several guys on the football team-I was just embarrassed. That didn't feel like me.

In college, I had my one fling with machismo: I joined the freshman crew. For months, I ran up and down flights of stairs, wrestled oar machines and rowed up and down the river in grunting military unison. Despite hours in the trenches with my fellow oarsmen, I felt no connection to them, no team spirit. They seemed to have no personalities whatsoever, just grim determination. After crossing the finish line of our first race, I quit. I soon joined the newspaper and the radio station, took classes in photography and film, and moved off-campus so I could cook my own meals.

Along the way, beginning around eighth grade, I found myself gravitating toward the company of women. Some of it was everyday flirting, but it ran deeper than that. I just preferred their company: their easygoing intimacy, their empathy, their nurturing. Sure, I have close male friends, and, one-on-one, guys are capable of personal revelation, but such moments are usually brief and rare. Women tend to cut to the emotional chase a lot faster, whether out of some chromosomal tendency or sheer efficiency (especially when they become mothers).

Over the years, I've gamely gone through the motions of classic guy rituals-bachelor parties at strip clubs, group outings to steam baths, touch-football games, sporting events-but I've often felt self-conscious. Then when my wife returned to work after our first daughter was born, I morphed into a stay-at-home father and freelance writer, simultaneously trying to stay out of the sitter's way and be available to the kids. Later, I became one of only two fathers in a giant mommy-and-me singing group and met a new crop of impressive, interesting women. Occasionally I felt weird pushing the stroller through Fairway. As Loudon Wainwright III sings in "Me and All the Other Mothers": "We're sipping on our coffee containers / and chit-chatting, telling little white lies / Labor horror stories and painless abortions / I wasn't feeling like one of the guys …. "

I wondered if the poker game might be a turning point, a male-bonding breakthrough. Guys talking freely about their lives and their wives, with the understanding that it would all be off the record. I imagined frank talk about books we were reading, difficulties with our families, funny things we'd figured out in recent therapy sessions, career tensions, wistful longings-basically, the kinds of discussions I'd grown accustomed to having with women, some of whom were married to these same men.

Instead, the three hours of our game were taken up with one subject: poker. This was a serious crowd. Two guys brought their own chips; two abstained from drinking to keep their senses sharp. There was showmanship about obscure variations (Omaha, Cincinnati, Steinbrenner), macho chip-tossing, teasing about rule-bending and-occasionally between games-a passing reference to something in the news.

I watched the others having a great time and became convinced there was something wrong with me. This was what they all craved: time away from the women, the pure showy adroitness of brains, booze, bluffs and billfolds. After an hour of trying to keep up, I felt itchy. I would have killed for one "tale of sexual performance," tall or otherwise. I realized I'd rather be sitting at a bar talking to the wives. Did this make me less of a man? Or just a crummy poker player? I kept wandering away from the table.

In a night that left various players up $200 and down $80, I went home only $7 poorer, so I thought I had acquitted myself admirably. But a few weeks later I ran into one of the other players, and he told me that my restlessness had thrown off his game. Well, I replied, poker's really not my thing; I would rather have been out at a bar with all of you talking. He stared at me, baffled.

Soon after, I found out another game had been scheduled, and because of my evident lack of interest, they'd filled my spot with a hard-core poker-playing lawyer-a guy's guy-who won big.

That night, I went out for a drink with two women and had a great time. I didn't worry for a moment whether I was being discussed back at the game. They're guys; they only talked about poker. Right?

Now 48, Mr. Richman has a Dorian Gray-like stage persona-boyish, ebullient, passionate. (He did sport a rumpled suit with his T-shirt, instead of his trademark jeans; maybe they were in the wash). Accompanied by drummer Tommy Larkins (who stood behind a tom-tom, snare and cymbals-it would be a stretch to call it a drum kit), Mr. Richman gyrated spiritedly, like an earnest teenager trying out for a funky cheerleading squad.

When the crowd clapped along, he encouraged them: "If you're not going to dance, at least clap. It warms up the atmosphere."

According to conventional wisdom, Mr. Richman threw away a promising punk career-having recorded the classic "Modern Lovers" album at age 21, in 1972-and withdrew into a strange childlike world, trading in searing garage-rock about obsessions and psychoses to mindless piffle about the Ice Cream Man.

But in fact, Mr. Richman had precociously perceived that, in the long run, it was punk music that would seem like greasy kid stuff, and that his homespun homilies would prove more enduring. (He stated as much on a monologue delivered on the 1991 live album "Having a Party With Jonathan Richman," disparaging his earlier snottiness.)

Of course, he still admires the Velvet Underground; in his musical paean to them, performed on March 4, he commends their "sound as stark as black-and-white stripes." And for every tossed-off ditty extolling parties or the corner store, Mr. Richman is still capable of going deep and dark. Performing songs like "Affection" and "Let Her Go Into the Darkness," he tossed off perceptive, mature philosophy disguised by deceptively singsongy riffs.

After years of rejecting his roots, Mr. Richman now dips into his punk catalogue in his live act. (On March 4, he played "Girlfriend.") The songs seem neither like artifacts nor towering achievements that dwarf his later work, just part of the same heartfelt oeuvre

Mr. Richman doesn't grant many interviews or get personal on stage, but fans know his marriage broke up several years ago, and that jolt seems to have reinvigorated his songwriting. He's penning lyrics from present-day uncertainty; his last album was called I'm So Confused . And "You Must Ask the Heart," whose conceit is that it's being sung by the listener's brain, counsels: "Don't ask me about love, 'cause I'm just the wrong guy. I don't know how love happens, and I don't know why."

New numbers introduced on March 4 included "Couples Must Argue," "My Heart Needed Repair When I Met Her," and "I'm Not Obsessed With Her" ("It's strange, if you know me," he sang. "Is something wrong?"). On the lighter side, he also uncorked a brilliant two-minute rocking summation of the attitude of his hometown, Boston: "It's great/ it's cold/ it's hostile/ you asshole!"

Sometimes Mr. Richman's songs backtrack from their initial promise; instead of following a great idea through to its conclusion, he'll just repeat verses, or sing them again in Spanish. But-as with "Couples Must Argue"-the ideas are so great, you cut him some slack.

There was a bootlegger taping show, which seemed odd. Jonathan's appeal is so much about being in his presence, watching him. Despite noble attempts to bring him to a wider audience-by Conan O'Brien, the Farrelly brothers, even Mr. Richman himself, who has re-recorded neglected classics from deleted albums-he remains too quirky for mass consumption.

Like those of the Grateful Dead or Bruce Springsteen, his infrequent records don't do him justice; he needs to be seen to be believed in.

David Geffen throws up twice in The Operator . He barfs after reading George Trow's 1978 New Yorker profile of Ahmet Ertegun, in which the Atlantic Records mogul witheringly described Mr. Geffen's "eager greed." And he does it again after a disastrous 1986 test screening of the $30 million dud he produced, Little Shop of Horrors . (He is described getting "sick to his stomach with anxiety" prior to the press conference announcing the formation of Dreamworks SKG, but it's unclear if that involved actual vomiting.) Clearly, this is a man deeply affected by what other people think of him.

And, according to New York magazine, Mr. Geffen again "became physically ill" when he read the manuscript for The Operator , his demi-authorized biography written by Tom King, who covers the entertainment industry for The Wall Street Journal .

It's easy to see why. Yes, the book tells the story Mr. Geffen must have envisioned when he agreed to participate: how, like Charles Foster Kane, he rose from nothingness to media moguldom. (Mr. Geffen now advises President Clinton.)

But the bulk of The Operator exposes the other ways Mr. Geffen resembles Kane-how along the way he has betrayed, badgered, lied to and cut off most of his family, friends and colleagues, and now, at age 57, worth $2 billion, he forlornly rattles around the massive Jack Warner mansion (which he bought for $47.5 million and spent eight years renovating), with no companion or heirs.

It's been widely reported that Mr. Geffen originally cooperated with the book partly because of Mr. King's classy employer, and partly because Mr. King is openly gay. Mr. Geffen himself, after much hemming and hawing, finally came out in a speech at a 1992 AIDS fund-raiser in his honor.

After about a year, Mr. Geffen stopped speaking to Mr. King, shocked, shocked that there might be some negatives in the book. When the author sent him an advance copy of the manuscript, Mr. Geffen called it "fiction" but didn't single out any falsehoods.

But David Geffen has trafficked in fictions all his life. The Operator could have easily been called The Liar . The William Morris agent-turned-rock manager-turned-record label executive-turned-movie executive has lived a life of self-denial and manipulation, always trying to control the story and make the buck. (As one record executive once screamed at Mr. Geffen, "You'd jump into a pool of pus to come up with a nickel between your teeth!")

He'd advise clients to lie to get what they wanted; he'd spread lies about people with whom he was feuding; he'd lie about providing a haven for artists against the big corporations, when all he really wanted to do was sell out to them as fast as possible. He even lied to himself about his sexuality, coming perilously close to marrying Cher and then Marlo Thomas.

David Geffen grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the son of a mother who made custom brassieres and a father who didn't do much of anything. The day of his bar mitzvah, he grabbed every gift envelope and raced to the bathroom to tear them open and count his loot. Later, he lied about having a college education, stole a Social Security check from his mother and headed to Hollywood, where he had a bit part in an early William Shatner movie, was an usher at CBS (getting fired when he took a swing at an audience member the day John F. Kennedy died), and finally landed in the fabled William Morris mailroom in June 1964.

From then on, he schmoozed or screamed his way into the right places. He went into the music business not out of any love for it-he mostly liked show tunes, and idolized Louis B. Mayer-but because it promised the quickest advancement to a young person.

He was drawn to singer-songwriters less for their artistic purity than for the fact that they owned their own material and thus could generate more profits. And many acts he signed, Mr. King points out, were hunky poster boys like Jackson Browne and the Eagles. (It was also Mr. Geffen who later recommended Tom Cruise for Risky Business and Mark Wahlberg for Calvin Klein's underwear campaign.) It was not Mr. Geffen, but his colleague Elliot Roberts, who first discovered Joni Mitchell; later in his career, Mr. Geffen professed no affinity for the music of acts like Guns 'n' Roses, Nirvana and Edie Brickell, who would go on to earn him millions.

Like Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls , Tom King's book falls into the trap of getting so caught up in the petty squabbles, foibles and box-office tallies that it sometimes loses sight of the art being made and the larger world around it. Despite the subtitle's mention of "The New Hollywood," the book is strangely lacking in context about changes in both the movie business and the record industry (which have been well documented in books Mr. King cites in his notes, Fred Goodman's The Mansion on the Hill and Fredric Dannen's Hit Men ).

Mr. Geffen came to Hollywood during an amazing period that the book only hints at, when people were sharing shrinks, hot tubs, lovers and drugs. Over the years, Mr. Geffen was an impressionable adherent of first Est, then Lifespring, then Marianne Williamson-the last to such an extent that he was even considering having her bear his progeny. Instead of imbuing this information with any perspective, Mr. King delivers it completely flatly as if he's listing another group Mr. Geffen signed. (According to Mr. Geffen, two weekends of Est convinced him to live a moral life; maybe he should have gone back for a third weekend.)

For all his spirituality, he was always a brazen starfucker. He pursued Bob Dylan relentlessly; having bagged him, he failed to realize that the album Mr. Dylan tossed off in three days for him, Planet Waves , was arguably the worst of his career. Mr. Geffen just wanted to be able to say he had Dylan. (Bob Dylan and the Band played at Mr. Geffen's 31st-birthday party.)

Money always seems to be the goal. In 1992, meeting investor Warren Buffett at an economic summit hosted by President Clinton, Mr. Geffen said he felt the same thrill shaking Mr. Buffett's hand as he had seeing Mr. Dylan perform in the 60's. On her deathbed, his immigrant mother finally asked him, "How much money do you have?" Hundreds of millions, her son told her, and she laughed joyously. Mr. King even points out that while Mr. Geffen has donated millions of dollars to AIDS causes, instead of doing so quietly, he has always "insisted on, or agreed to, having his name celebrated openly."

Mr. King never really analyzes how much of Mr. Geffen's success is, like anything in Hollywood, dumb luck. He invested a million dollars in Broadway's Cats , and has made a third of the profits ever since. But he also put out the worst records in the careers of Elton John and Neil Young (who have since rebounded). While he focused his energy on Little Shop of Horrors , for instance, another Geffen movie he barely paid attention to, Beetlejuice , was the one that hit.

Mr. King's prose can get clunky: "Inside, Cher was beginning to be plagued by gnawing thoughts that marrying David Geffen would be a mistake. In fact, she had been having an affair with the bass player from the Average White Band. When Geffen discovered that Cher was cheating on him, he was destroyed, and he became scared and paranoid."

And the book is disappointingly prudish concerning Mr. Geffen's love life. For most of the book, Mr. Geffen's attempts to be heterosexual get a disproportionate amount of attention; late in the game, we glean that he had been quite promiscuous, but there's no sense of how that fit into his life when it was happening. The longer-term boyfriends are always younger, social and business unequals. (Of course, these days, to achieve parity he'd have to date the Sultan of Brunei.)

After Mr. Geffen made $550 million selling Geffen Records to MCA, he grew restless and bored. During the O.J. Simpson trial, he sat around the house watching it with widowed former agent Sue Mengers. For Mr. Geffen, unlike his partners -Jeffrey Katzenberg, who has something to prove to the Walt Disney Company, and Steven Spielberg, who wants to keep his artist's vision unfettered-Dreamworks seems less of a passion than a retirement hobby, like golf. He has said it presents an opportunity "to do good work"-a goal he seems to have sighted pretty late in the game.

Amazingly, many of the fellow moguls Mr. Geffen alienates pretty thoroughly in these pages-Mike Ovitz, Mo Ostin, Sandy Gallin-are back in his circle. Maybe they're just aware that, as Warren Beatty once put it, "a mobilized David Geffen is something that you want working for you, not against you." Or maybe they hate to see a grown man puke.

That's the nonmusical question posed by the creepiest track of Tom Waits' latest record, Mule Variations –a spoken-word piece about neighborly paranoia backed by spare percussion and sound effects.

"Now what's that sound from under the door?" Mr. Waits wonders. "He's pounding nails into a hardwood floor … and I swear to God I heard someone moaning low …"

Strolling along Broadway this past weekend, you might have been similarly unsettled by the clanking, twanging sounds emanating from the Beacon Theater, where Mr. Waits played four sold-out shows. And if you happened to walk in during the cacophonous "Eyeball Kid," about a freak-show performer who is no more than an eyeball, you would have seen this: Mr. Waits, wearing a rumpled, dusty suit and a hat covered with mirror shards, whacking a huge suspended iron circle with a heavy hammer, releasing both musical notes and beauteous rings of stage dust. Then he grasped his hat and rotated slowly in a spotlight, sending mirror-ball zigzags all over the theater's baroque interior.

It was just one of countless moments in the show when Mr. Waits took something incredibly simple and produced something ingenious and mesmerizing. It's a crime that he hasn't toured in a dozen years; he was born to be on stage. He combines a haunting melodiousness with a B.A.M.-savvy visual presentation and vaudevillian comic timing–and, most uniquely in this jaded age, genuine sentiment. Who else could get away with singing an original number called "Jesus Gonna Be Here Soon" without it seeming like an affectation?

The audience belonged to Mr. Waits from the moment he walked in, croaking into a megaphone, spewing glitter from his jacket pocket, then taking the stage to dance like a Frankenstein puppet possessed by the ghosts of Louis Armstrong and Buster Keaton. For the rest of the night, he alternated between a loose-limbed hobo version of Dean Martin wrestling with the microphone and a grizzled piano balladeer, dipping into an amalgam of American styles from the entire century.

His band–guitarist Smokey Hormel, bassist Larry Taylor, drummer Andrew Borger and keyboard player Danny McGough–followed every turn down every alley. He drew on songs from not only the handful of albums he'd released during his absence, but also his early bohemian work (like "Invitation to the Blues" and "The Heart of Saturday Night") and his middle-period trilogy of Swordfishtrombones , Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years , on which he first explored offbeat instrumentation and less prettified singing.

His set list apparently varied greatly from night to night–as did his sly ways of saying No to every song title called out as a request. "'Volare'? That's in the program," he said at one point. "'Summer Wind'? That's in the program. Didn't you get your program?"

Mr. Waits' longest verbal aside was about his son asking him for $90 to buy a bottle of cologne. He recounted that when he pretended he didn't hear right–"You want to fly to Cologne?"–his son "looked at me like I was doing card tricks for a dog." That's the kind of succinct, loopily brilliant imagery that peppers every Tom Waits song. Mr. Waits went on to say that back when he was a kid, "we used to make our own cologne"–and described a hilarious recipe that included Oil of Olay and Tabasco sauce, two ingredients that also describe Mr. Waits' sound.

It's a sign of Mr. Waits' power that he was able to enlist a sophisto New York crowd–which on Saturday night, it should be noted, included Elvis Costello, Jon Bongiovi, Liam Neeson, Steve Buscemi, Stanley Tucci, Lorraine Bracco, Aidan Quinn and Carol Kane–to sing along with the wholly uncynical "Innocent When You Dream."

Indeed, for all his attempts to mask his romanticism with a scabrous vocal delivery, dry wit and dissonant arrangements, Mr. Waits remains at heart a seeker of beauty. "I'll Shoot the Moon" sounded like a cover of a Rudy Vallee song, and "The Briar and the Rose" like a church hymn, but both are from his 1993 collaboration with William Burroughs and Robert Wilson, The Black Rider .

His songs are also timeless in the forward-looking sense: "In the Colosseum," an ominous march from 1992's Bone Machine , includes the line "As the senators decapitate/ the presidential whore" years before anyone had heard of Monica Lewinsky.

Saturday's encores included his "Jersey Girl" (making Mr. Bongiovi and his drummer Tico Torres visibly happy) and, from Mule Variations , the beautiful, sweet "Take It With Me," which showed that, at 50, Mr. Waits is still at the top of his songwriting powers. "In a land there's a town, and in that town there's a house, and in that house there's a woman, and in that woman there's a heart that I love–I'm gonna take it with me when I go." It's a song everyone should have played at their funeral.

As parenting and Web surfing have overtaken my life, I've found myself with less and less time for reading books (at least books that aren't illustrated and don't rhyme). This busyness, somewhat paradoxically, makes me a target demo reader for James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything , an inquiry into how and why so many of us feel pressed.

However, the only quality time I could set aside to read Faster was on a recent vacation in Maine, and, floating on an inner tube in a lake while a heron flew by, I found the book less convincing than I otherwise might have.

In his opening chapter, Mr. Gleick–whose two previous books, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Chaos: Making a New Science , were both nominees for the National Book Award–declares, "We are in a rush. We are making haste. A compression of time characterizes the life of the century now closing."

In Mr. Gleick's eyes, Time has become the ruling god of our culture; we're all too damn busy, hurtling forward at exponentially increasing speed. Time has been commodified; efficiency industries have sprung up to (allegedly) save us time, we all "multitask" to accomplish our chores milliseconds quicker.

Yet it's all in vain. Devices like the remote control and redial button, conceived as leisure-enhancing, have instead ratcheted up our activity. The TV networks have been squeezing content into shows' end credits trying desperately to hold our attention. We are drowning in a sea of information, laden with Palm Pilots, beepers and cell phones lest we start falling behind.

"Time, not money, takes center stage in the new economy," Mr. Gleick argues. Elsewhere, he adds: "Our culture has been transformed from one with time to fill and time to spare to one that views time as a thing to guard, hoard and protect."

I certainly can sympathize. Writing is one of the professions most acutely affected by this recent acceleration. Back in 1983 when I was working on my college thesis, half my time was taken up just retyping drafts. I remember feeling lucky that for the final version, I had access to my father's cumbersome office contraption that stored two (yes, two) typed pages on a magnetic card the size of a business envelope, which then had to be hand-fed back into the machine to get a daisy-wheel printout. My early freelance articles were typed on an electric typewriter and mailed to editors via (gasp!) the U.S. Postal Service.

This behavior now seems as archaic as churning your own butter. Yet the speeding up hasn't given me more time for anything. Editors simply want stories written and rewritten that much faster. The Web, despite providing innumerable shortcuts, is also one of the biggest time sinkholes ever devised. I pick up e-mail every half-hour–then spend the next 15 minutes replying.

But in Maine, I was definitely out of the eye of Mr. Gleick's hurricane. I left the laptop home to keep e-mail (and Ebay) at bay; I had no answering machine and only beeped in for messages every couple of days; once or twice I even forgot to buy The New York Times . (This is not to suggest that Maine isn't wired: A woman down the road baked bread in her kitchen and sold her loaves at a roadside stand; her business card included an e-mail address.)

Still, Mr. Gleick is a wide-ranging thinker who finds traces of this modern disease in everything from shelled pistachio nuts to prewashed jeans to a Starbucks "travel lid," and deftly interjects references to everyone from Karl Marx to H.G. Wells to Nicholson Baker. Readers are treated to fun historical factoids and figures, like Frederick W. (Speedy) Taylor whose1903treatise,"ShopManagement," instructed industrialists in the science of stepping up the throttle on the humans working factory machines.

Mr. Gleick is at his most entertaining when he's debunking books on time-saving, which, he notes, never accurately depict how people actually spend their time, and are "constantly admonishing people to do things," many of which, he notes, are less pleasant than the activities they replace, and barely save any time to boot.

Faster is certainly a quick read–except for an impenetrable foray into numerical theory–because Mr. Gleick himself almost seems in a rush to finish each chapter. Indeed, they're not so much chapters as thought bytes, rarely longer than 10 pages, self-consciously designed for today's dwindling attention span. But the brevity can make it too choppy to follow his train of thought; for instance, sandwiched between one chapter that discusses air-traffic controllers and another about how airlines decide where to send a particular jet every day, he inserts one about cooking and efficiency experts. He barely spends any time on Fed Ex, which would seem a natural centerpiece, but inexplicably spends time with director Barry Levinson on the set of Sphere .

Mr. Gleick tries to prove several points about today's populace by citing the personal experience of a single obscure individual without identifying how he

came to find these subjects–my guess is through Internet queries, since most of them mention e-mail. That would pass muster in a newsweekly's "trend" cover story but looks flimsier in book form. Lacking hard figures, he's often forced just to shrug his shoulders: "It seems that we are quicker-witted," he writes, "but have we, by way of compensation, traded away our capacity for deep concentration? No one knows for sure."

His somewhat nuttier research forays include getting actress June Lockhart from the old TV series Lost in Space to comment on how their set designers misimagined the future (there were rotary phones on the spaceship), and visiting the Government's atomic-clock keeper and trying to discern what kind of watch he wears.

Ultimately, Mr. Gleick winds up stating the obvious–that we are as busy as we make ourselves. But he ignores several deeper, more interesting questions about this phenomenon. For instance, early on, he glancingly acknowledges that this acceleration is predominantly felt in large, prosperous cities; which begs the question of the millions of other Americans who are, for example, milking cows or setting lobster traps, not to mention the world's inhabitants who have never seen, say, a pair of shoes.

Much later, Mr. Gleick mentions in passing: "Having a secretary … is, of course, one of the most time-honored of all time-saving tips, but it doesn't help if you can't afford a secretary or if you are a secretary." This is the only time he even hints that there's a budgetary divide in this acceleration. Are the technological have-nots being dragged along into moving faster, or is their world being left in the dust by the haves? Ultimately, his use of the first-person plural ("We are in a rush") doesn't

really hold water.

is our era's progress really the speediest ever, or are we just myopic? The other book I read in Maine was Moss Hart's autobiography Act One –even though I'd read it before, so efficiency experts would classify me as a real time-waster. This time I noticed that in recollecting the 1920's, Mr. Hart described many speedy changes around him–like the new mass manufacture of cigars, which put his father, who hand-rolled them, out of business–that could have led someone back then to write a book not unlike Mr. Gleick's.

Which leads me to conclude that things have always moved faster than they did yesterday. Except, of course, for that heron flying lazily across Damariscotta Lake.

Born Stephen Nason, he dropped out of the Royal College of Music in 1977 after answering the ad "Keyboard player required for rocking pop combo." The combo turned out to be Elvis Costello's new band, the Attractions, who embarked on a barnstorming tour of England with fellow acts on the Stiff Records label.

At the time, Mr. Nason, the London suburbanite son of a bank manager and a bookseller, was 19, and his behavior on the road (about which he refuses to elaborate) led another performer, Ian Dury (of "Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll" fame), to dub him "Steve Naïve." The name stuck, if not the spelling.

Through his many years of genre-bending melodicism with Mr. Costello–from staccato punk to Farfisa soul to their most recent incarnation as a kind of post-punk cabaret duo–Mr. Nieve has grown to embrace the somewhat silly moniker.

"When I was young, I didn't really want to be naïve," said Mr. Nieve, who will fly in from Paris to play the Knitting Factory on Wednesday, Aug. 18. "Now that I'm older, I would like to be naïve."

He doesn't have to try that hard, at least when it comes to today's music scene. This summer, he and Mr. Costello played the touring Guinness Fleadh festival and Woodstock '99–two party-hearty settings not all that conducive to a low-volume set performed by two over-40 musicologists. Asked about the rampant baring of breasts at Woodstock, Mr. Nieve drolly replied, "Of all the bands that played, we probably did the best on that front."

So which acts sandwiched them at the festival-turned-riot? Mr. Nieve drew two blanks. "Well, we went before a woman, and I can see her face, but I can't think of her name.… And I'm not sure who was directly before. The man was kind enough to lend Elvis an electric guitar …"

The woman and man, it turns out, were Jewel and Everlast. So Mr. Nieve is not up on pop culture; no matter. His own musical ambitions lie elsewhere, and are, well, ambitious.

His set at the Knitting Factory–with Brad Scott on double bass, Jon Handelsmann on bass clarinet and saxophone and singer Dean Bowman–will consist of three distinct works in progress: music inspired by ambient landscape sounds and linked to the opening of an exhibit of landscape paintings in the club by Mr. Nieve's friend Alain Blondel, called "Only a Tree"; an opera co-written with the French screenwriter Muriel Teodori about a steelworker smitten with an opera singer; and a selection of what Mr. Nieve calls his "chance songs"–personal numbers he worked up by improvising to lyrics he'd written, with bare-bones titles like "Keyboard" and "Words."

Does this mean Mr. Nieve, whose vocal stylings during years with Mr. Costello were mostly limited to yelling "Hey!" on the choruses of "Lipstick Vogue," and more recently providing the backup for the live version of "Red Shoes," is going to be stepping out as a lead vocalist?

"I don't think I'm really a singer," he said. "But these songs I can perform in a certain way that will work."

Mr. Nieve has bounced back from a long unhappy spell that began when Mr. Costello abandoned the Attractions (who also included drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Bruce Thomas) after the 1986 album Blood and Chocolate . "It was a shock," Mr. Nieve said. "It also coincided with problems closer to home and resulted in a depression that eventually caused me to take a long hard look at myself and make some difficult changes." (He has been separated from the mother of his two teenage children for about five years.)

In the interim, he served as band leader for Jonathan Ross, the David Letterman of England, with Pete Thomas on drums, backing everyone from Paul McCartney to James Brown. He released his second solo album, It's Raining Somewhere (his first, Keyboard Jungle , came out in 1983), and did some session work with producer Clive Langer for the movie soundtrack to Absolute Beginners and with the bands Madness and Hothouse Flowers. More recently, he composed his first score, for the French film Bleu de Ville .

Mr. Nieve hadn't seen Mr. Costello for years until Mr. Langer was producing a record for Sam Moore of Sam & Dave. Mr. Costello, who'd written a song for Mr. Moore, came in to rehearsal to discuss it. "We got chatting in the break over a tea, and I was invited to a session where Elvis was cutting tracks with Pete Thomas. That was how casually Brutal Youth began," he said, referring to the 1994 album that reunited the Attractions.

Mr. Nieve formed his current trio in Paris, where he's been living for four years, around another exhibition of Mr. Blondel's paintings. "Solitude is Alain's obsession," he said. Each painting in "Only a Tree" portrays a "solitary melancholic tree alone in a landscape," he said, but the cumulative effect is "a joyful community like a forest," which Mr. Nieve finds "quite moving."

"I think it's a great idea to connect painting and music," said Mr. Nieve, who first collaborated with his friend Mr. Blondel when he went to the artist's atelier and recorded him at work. He later edited down the sounds of Mr. Blondel's brushwork to 40 minutes, put it on a continuously looping CD that played in the room where the painting was hung for an installation called "The Noise of the Painting ( Bruit de la Peinture )."

That went so well that Mr. Nieve decided to write songs loosely based around other field recordings. While touring for the past several years, he's brought along a DAT machine and captured the natural sounds of cities and countrysides.

One of his favorites comes from a small town in Morocco called Taprayud. "It's right in the middle of this mountain, so it's kind of like in a crater," said Mr. Nieve. "Round about 6 o'clock in the morning, the guy in the mosque began singing, and then the mosque in the next village began singing, and I managed to record this for about an hour, and I've edited that, and I've used that to improvise piano to. Some of the sounds are quite industrial–walking around Dublin when they're just closing all the bars. They just spark off things and take us into different worlds, so it's great beginnings for an improvisation."

The way it works in concert is, Mr. Nieve compiles 40 or 50 sound bites on a CD, then has them play at random. "We never know what's gonna happen," he said. "So something could come in quite unexpected and inappropriate. And that's quite good."

Despite the random-sounding approach, he stressed, the songs are "quite melodic, and quite constructed. It's not freeform jazz, it is a composition."

Mr. Bowman will be singing the male arias from Mr. Nieve's operatic collaboration with Ms. Teodori, another Paris friend, tentatively titled The Parasite . In the story, a steelworker becomes so obsessed with an opera singer that he quits his job to sleep outside the opera house, trying to meet her. In one scene, he falls asleep outside the opera house and three ghosts from past operas appear, counseling that he's so much like a character from an opera, he ought to kill himself.

If the opera is produced for stage or an album, Mr. Nieve envisions the women's parts being played by trained opera singers, but for the men he's talked to Tom Waits about playing the director of the opera, Robert Wyatt as the chief of police and Mr. Costello as the steelworker.

"The Parasite" ends with a duet between the opera singer and the steelworker. She sings, "It's very unlikely that a woman like me could be in love with a man like you," while he counters that it's the unlikely things in life that are beautiful.

The same could be said for a punk keyboard player who has ended up making jazz and opera and who turns mosque wailings and brushstrokes into songs. Naïveté, it turns out, can get you very far.

But now Ms. Basner has a better reason to avoid You've Got Mail . The plot-in which a conglomerate bookseller opens a megastore in the neighborhood and drives a mom-and-pop bookstore out of business-may strike a little too close for comfort.

Ms. Basner is the manager of My Favorite Place, a charmingly cluttered toy store on West 87th Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. Since its 1995 opening, My Favorite Place has been thronged with intense neighborhood moms and dads piloting their "Boo"s and "Tooshie-Wooshie"s in overladen MacLaren strollers. But this past June 6, the Long Island toy chain Noodle Kidoodle opened an imposing 5,500-square-foot outpost in a former Sloan's supermarket just two blocks north, with an in-store appearance by Peter Pan 's Cathy Rigby.

And suddenly My Favorite Place-like several of its boutiquey brethren-is sweating.

Noodle Kidoodle is attempting to be the toy store equivalent of Barnes & Noble, providing volume and hangouts that space-challenged local competitors can't match. Whereas My Favorite Place's selling floor barely squeezes in a wooden train play table, Noodle Kidoodle has two of them, not to mention three hands-on computers loaded with video games, several benches in front of nine TV screens playing kiddie movies, a reading table, an electric Rokenbok truck display table and walls and walls teeming with kids' merchandise, from stickers to toys to books to dress-up-including, it should be noted, the video of You've Got Mail .

"They've definitely cut into our business," said Ms. Basner ruefully. "Even my own kids hang out there, but they know the rules: They can't buy anything."

Since Noodle Kidoodle opened, the revenues of My Favorite Place and similar neighborhood toy shops have suffered. Jennifer Bergman, owner of West Side Kids on Amsterdam Avenue and West 84th Street, reports that her June sales were down 23 percent from a year ago. Laura Pintchik, owner of the Children's General Store on West 92nd and Broadway, puts her hit at between 10 and 12 percent-and adds that Noodle Kidoodle hired three of her employees. Only Penny Whistle, a safe hike away at West 82nd and Columbus Avenue, has seen an upturn compared with last summer.

Ms. Bergman of West Side Kids recalled when Noodle Kidoodle first opened: "The manager came over once to introduce herself, saying, 'We're your new neighbor, we hope you send people to us and we'll send people to you.' I was like, 'Yeah, sure!'"

My Favorite Place owner Godwyn Morris said: "It's a little hard to be friendly with an elephant who's trying to step on you."

Noodle Kidoodle's manager, Margaret Murphy, directed all inquiries to the home office, which did not return phone calls. When asked about her visits to the other stores, she snorted derisively,"We were recruiting!"

In the past few decades, the neighborhood still caricatured in some quarters as a hothouse of liberal politics has metamorphosed into ground zero of conspicuous child-rearing. Among the new West Side demographic, the phrase "party affiliation" doesn't conjure up the question of Democrat or Republican, but which space you'll be renting for your kid's birthday bash (at $300 to $750 a pop). The talk in the local Starbucks is not of Trump's latest atrocity, but battle plans for admissions to private preschools and kindergartens that charge upward of $15,000 a year. Since cars are mostly hidden away in garages, status is measured by brand of stroller. The cause célèbre has been the upgrading of the Riverside Park playgrounds to include foam flooring, play fountains and safer equipment. And if someone mentions "going to the new exhibit at the museum," it's not about "Fame After Photography" at MoMA, but to "Body Odyssey" at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, where little Zoe and Henry can slide down a replica of the human tongue.

For that same demographic, the specialty toy stores have become just as emblematic of the neighborhood as the specialty food troika of Zabar's, Fairway and Citarella. With so many birthday parties to attend, there's been a lot of room for reliable sources of quality gifts costing $15 to-well, in My Favorite Place one recent day, I saw a woman looking to spend $150 for "a 2-year-old who already has everything."

Five years ago, the only toy stores on the Upper West Side were West Side Kids, then 900 square feet, opened in 1981 by Ms. Bergman's mother as a kids clothing consignment and handcrafted toy shop; and the slightly larger Penny Whistle, also opened in 1981 by Tom Brokaw's wife Meredith as a sister store to her Madison Avenue boutique.

Now, in addition to those two, the neighborhood has the Children's General Store and My Favorite Place.Toys are also sold at many other establishments in the neighborhood, including the Cozy's Cuts for Kids haircutting salon, the Kids Are Magic clothing store, the Children's Museum of Manhattan, the trendy Alphabets boutique and any number of card and gift and drug stores. Also in the mix, starting late in 1998, is the chain Kay Bee, which turned an out-of-business Boston Market restaurant into a temporary Christmas store; it did so well it has stayed open.

But the neighborhood toy specialists are a different breed, one of the nicer aspects of raising kids in New York: They offer carefully edited merchandise sold by experienced employees with a lot of knowledge (and patience), wrapped elaborately.

"I just moved here from Minneapolis," said one woman toting a My Favorite Place bag as she shopped in Penny Whistle with her 1-year-old, "and the toy stores there aren't as unique or original. Here each has its own flavor."

The owners, city residents themselves, know their customer: the ultra-busy, price-conscious, educationally pushy, yet fun-seeking parent. Each boutique's identity is as shaped by what they won't carry (e.g., Pokémon products, guns, TV characters) as what they do.

The West Side Kids philosophy, said Ms. Bergman, is this: "Play is a child's form of work, and toys are the tools we use. They should stimulate the imagination, creativity, open-ended play. So we don't carry talking dolls, or Barbies, which aren't good for little girls' body images."

"I don't base my selection on what I think will sell," said Children's General's Ms. Pintchik, "but my personal reaction and what I think a child will get from it."

The workers in Children's General Store pride themselves on not carrying anything from "that space movie"-indeed, not even knowing its name. Its best sellers include the upscale Muffy Vander Bears and science items like a butterfly garden; Penny Whistle's is a wooden scooter skateboard painted the colors of a city taxi; West Side Kids sells a lot of games, crafts and infant toys; My Favorite Place, less specialized, sells games, Playmobil and Brio items and party favors. (To hedge her bets, Ms. Morris set up a party space and a classroom, so toys are 60 percent of her business.)

Until the arrival of Noodle Kidoodle, those stores were all thriving. Kay Bee's arrival last fall didn't affect them, because it is their antithesis, selling movie tie-ins, video games and plastic guns, and having a staff with no discernible interest in their jobs.

"Kay Bee can get crowded," said Ms. Basner, "but with people we don't recognize."

Noodle Kidoodle, however, poses a real threat. Its bright yellow awning announces "Kids Learn Best When They're Having Fun." And it claims to have a similar point of view about what it will carry-there are supposedly no genre or action figures, no water guns or violent toys-though a lot of Star Wars merchandise seems to have gotten past the gatekeepers. ("No Darth Maul, the bad guy," pointed out one assistant manager.)

As soon as it opened, the neighborhood stores started seeing longtime customers coming in with bright yellow Noodle Kidoodle bags. West Side's Ms. Bergman said, "People tell me, 'We'll buy our staples at Noodle Kidoodle and get specialty things here.' And I tell them, 'If you do that, we'll be out of business.'"

General Store's Ms. Pintchik said, "If people aren't careful, it's just a matter of time before New York City becomes Route 35 in New Jersey."

The shops have already rejiggered their stock and methods. My Favorite Place has doubled its paper and party goods, added candy and started putting fliers in other neighborhood stores. West Side Kids started a frequent-buyer program, in which customers who spend more than $750 get a 10 percent discount, free delivery and assembly.

They're hoping their know-how and personability will win out over Noodle's shopping carts, headphone-wearing employees, buyers based on Long Island, and impersonality. During a recent trip to Noodle Kidoodle, I saw people more hanging out than actually purchasing things: A mother was nursing an infant on the bench in front of the TV screens, another was changing a diaper in the nook of science toys and a baby-sitter was sitting at a computer playing a video game, her toddler strapped into a stroller looking on.

"Noodle Kidoodle is more like an entertainment, a mall store," said commercial real estate specialist Faith Hope Consolo of Garrick-Aug Associates Store Leasing Inc. "People go to play and hang out." Since summer is usually a slow time, anyway, the fall and Christmas seasons will determine how the small stores will fare.

"There are so many kids in this neighborhood," said Ms. Bergman, who recently opened a gift and furniture boutique nearby called Kids Down the Block. "Today, I had four pregnant women in the store at the same time."

Ultimately, their biggest challenge might not be Noodle Kidoodle as much as plain old kids. One afternoon, Betty Saltzman, a 13-year Upper West Side resident, was shopping at My Favorite Place, carrying bags from Noodle Kidoodle and Kaybee. "I shop at a lot of the stores," said Ms. Saltzman, "But I find them too educational. You want stuff they can really play with." She picked up something called a Disc Shooter. "Like this kind of junk. Kids just want junk. You get enough of the other stuff at school."

Singing "Thunder Road" at the Continental Airlines Arena on the night of July 15, Mr. Springsteen got to the line "So you're scared and maybe you're thinking we ain't that young anymore"–a line he wrote when he was maybe 24–and he couldn't keep his face from breaking into a self-conscious grin.

Mr. Springsteen turns 50 in September. He's newly inducted into the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame. He has not released an album of new rock music since 1992, nor toured with his longtime E Street Band since the 80's. In other words, he ain't that young anymore–and neither is his audience.

So an hour and a half into his exhilarating performance, when he started playing the rave-up "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," turned up the house lights, and started introducing every member of the band, you could almost feel the crowd breathe a sigh of relief: Clearly, we were heading into intermission, like the old days, and everyone would have time to recover from being on their feet, screaming, dancing, singing, before round two.

But Mr. Springsteen refused to leave the stage. He danced up on the toes of his black boots; he paced like a mad preacher, improvising lines from Curtis Mayfield's "It's All Right," goading the crowd to match his new falsetto notes, falling to his knees before his wife-guitarist Patti Scialfa, locking hands with his saxophonist Clarence Clemons. Then he romped and crooned a half-dozen more songs, including the epic "Backstreets" and the fist-pumping "Light of Day."

By now, the show was well more than two hours along, and the exhausted audience couldn't even clap or yell "Brooooooce." They just stood in their seats, stunned at his vitality. Mr. Springsteen finally left the stage for about three minutes–and then came back for about an hour of encores. He definitely works with a better trainer than most of his audience.

Mr. Springsteen's albums–even the live box–have never done justice to what is his supreme achievement, the ability to forge community in a room, whether it's the Stone Pony Club in Asbury Park, N.J., or the basketball arena in East Rutherford. I can understand people who might be ambivalent about his recorded output. But it's hard to imagine anyone at one of his concerts standing with arms folded, saying, "I just don't get it."

If the July 15 show had a theme, it was reconciliation with that community–with the band, for ever having deserted them (whether for financial or artistic reasons), and with the audience, for his long absence. A high point was when he divvied up the vocal part for "If I Should Fall Behind"–a sweet ballad from the underrated 1992 album Lucky Town –among his singing band members. As Steve Van Zandt (now a star of The Sopranos ), Nils Lofgren, Ms. Scialfa and Mr. Clemons took their turns at the microphone, it felt like a symbolic representation of the band's diversity and interdependence.

Then Mr. Springsteen described this tour (which started in Europe and goes across the country after 15 nights in New Jersey) as "a rebirth and rededication of our band and our commitment to serve you."

Who else among the other longtime great rock-and-rollers would come up with that as a theme for a tour? Certainly not Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who have been going through the motions for two decades. In contrast, Mr. Springsteen–who a few years back admitted to something of an addiction to the high he gets from performing–has always given the impression that it's not about the adulation, it's about the bonding.

Mr. Springsteen's connection to his fans is admittedly trickier to achieve the richer he becomes. (It's said that he gets 97 percent of the take from each of these shows, which, even after overhead, should at least put his three kids through college.) And his audience has also changed: when I met someone who told me he planned to attend eight of the 15 shows, my first thought was, "He doesn't have baby-sitting issues yet." When they sing about being raised above these "Badlands," there has to be some distance, since most paid $75 for their ticket, and many were playing the concert to friends via cell phones.

But Mr. Springsteen's spirit is undousable and unfakable. Thanks to the propulsive drums of Max Weinberg and backbone bass of Garry Tallent, the dual keyboard attack of Roy Bittan and Danny Federici, the wall of guitars played by Messrs. Springsteen, Lofgren, Van Zandt and Ms. Scialfa, and the throaty tenor sax bleatings of Mr. Clemons, songs like "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "Murder Incorporated" and "The River" lost none of their intensity–and foot-stompers like "Out in the Street" were joyous. Most significantly, the material from the albums he made on his own–"Youngstown" and the title song from the Ghost of Tom Joad and "Mansion on the Hill" from Nebraska –benefited greatly from the band's presence.

Mr. Springsteen's desire to own up to who he is today was most apparent in one of the show's two new songs, "Freehold," a folk musing about his hometown that he described as "Whitmanesque–Slim Whitman." Like many in his generation, Mr. Springsteen, who recently relocated back to New Jersey after several years on the West Coast, has found that for all the pains of his youth, home exerts a powerful pull. "Freehold" touches on his first kiss ("I walked home with a lump but I felt just fine"), his sister getting pregnant at 17 and his father being buried there ("his ghost flipping the bird at everyone in Freehold"). It ends with a giddy riff about masturbation that makes me think he's not going to commit it to vinyl.

If the concert had a weak spot, it's that Mr. Springsteen feels compelled to balance his soaring power and poetry with feel-good rockers: "Stand On It," "Where the Bands Are," "Darlington County"–even the song he's decided to start every night with, "My Love Will Not Let You Down." It's true that fans need a breather from the emotional roller-coaster, but few in the audience would rather take any of those over "Prove It All Night" or "Adam Raised a Cain" or "The Fever" or …

In fact, as the drained crowd wended its way through the Meadowlands parking lot, one fan groused, "We see the first show in the States, the first show back, and we got nothing!" He was referring to the fact that the set list was virtually unchanged from that of the European tour (widely distributed on the Internet). People see Mr. Springsteen so many times that for some the pleasures have to be measured in novelty. "No speeches or anything," he continued.

"Maybe it's 'cause we dissed him with Tom Joad and Lucky Town ," suggested his companion.

"Hey, don't give me that. We came here and saw Shane Fontayne play guitar for him–more than once!" the first man retorted. He was making reference to the hired gun who played in Mr. Springsteen's hired band during his 1992 tour.

His unhappiness inspired me to devise a suggestion: Since the New Jersey Nets are about to abandon East Rutherford for downtown Newark, when Mr. Springsteen is done touring he should park himself and his band in this arena, like Bobby Short at Cafe Carlyle, for six months out of every year. That way he can stay home with his wife and kids, commute to a job he loves and play every song everyone wants to hear for anyone who wants to see him.

Is that too much to ask?