Since he and the E Street Band began this reunion tour in March 1999, Mr. Springsteen has often referred to the show as both a "rock-and-roll baptism" and "exorcism," and there was many a moment on June 12 when that description seemed apt. After enduring a weekend of name-calling by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and other law enforcement officials because a new song he had unveiled in Atlanta, "American Skin" is inspired by the shooting of Amadou Diallo, Mr. Springsteen responded not with words but with an often-furious performance by him and the band that reduced the rhetoric that had been leveled at him to so much ash.

With the slain Diallo's parents in the audience, the tension seemed most palpable in the songs leading up to the performance of "American Skin," and Mr. Springsteen even seemed to be sending a message in his choice of alternating dark and light songs, as if there were some sort of spiritual struggle taking place there in the Garden. At times, however, that struggle was muddied a bit by the sound mix. On some songs, the band and Mr. Springsteen's voice seemed swamped by an abundance of bass. And when he broke out his steel guitar for his bluesy version of "Born in the U.S.A.," the notes felt like glass shards.

The concert opener was a new song, "Code of Silence", a dark, tense number that Mr. Springsteen co-wrote with Pittsburgh singer and songwriter Joe Grushecky. Although the song seems to be about a relationship, the title and some of the lyrics, which refer to a code of silence "that we don't dare speak," certainly could be likened to the cop code phrase for omertá , the blue wall of silence. Mr. Springsteen and the band then followed that with his gritty love anthem, "Prove It All Night." Then came "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "Be True" and "Point Blank," which, with its final lyric of "Bang, Bang Baby You're Dead" served as a chilling lead-in to "American Skin," a slow-building song that began with some of the E Street Band members taking turns singing the band's tag line, "41 shots." "That's what happens," said the woman sitting next to me as she held her cell phone in the air so that someone on the other end could experience the song that everyone has been talking about but so few have heard.

There were moments during this initial progression of songs when Mr. Springsteen looked legitimately nervous, as if he knew that something great was expected of him. But after he had finished performing "American Skin" and the cheers drowned out the catcalls, he seemed to expel the rest of his tension in a full-bore performance of "Promised Land." That's the song where Mr. Springsteen sings about a twister that's going to uproot everything "that ain't got the faith to stand its ground".

Mr. Springsteen seemed looser after that, as if he'd gotten something big off of his chest. For some performers, that would have meant it was encore time, but for Mr. Springsteen the three-hour show was barely a third over at that point. Except to plug City Harvest, a local organization that feeds the homeless, Mr. Springsteen didn't engage in much between-song patter (although when introducing the band he said "forget about that kid from Long Island," proposing instead the senator from New York would be saxophonist Clarence Clemons). The music spoke for itself.

He would summon up that tension again, most notably for an electric version of "Backstreets" and another excellent acidic new song called "Further On Up The Road," which has a "Secret Agent Man" guitar sound, but Mr. Springsteen would also have some fun with a Grand Ole Opry-style rendition of, "Dancing in the Dark," and a joyous "Out in the Street" that had almost everyone in the Garden pumping their fists and singing along to the "Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh's," rock 'n' roll's answer to speaking in tongues. Amen.

Don Henley: Hard-Ass, Soft Heart

"I hate to tell you this, but I'm very, very happy," Don Henley growls at the beginning of "Everything Is Different Now," one of the tracks on his new album, Inside Job (Warner Brothers). It's a hopeful moment, a sign that the former Eagle is staking out artistic territory other than the smug Hollywood-style activism that often weighs down his solo work. Then again, as he sings later the song, "I'm not the kind to smile and bow out gracefully."

For those who missed the 70's, Mr. Henley was the chief architect of the Eagles, pretty much the most static, indulged rock band of the 70's. But all the excess visited upon the group never led to real musical abandon, the way it did, for instance, for Led Zeppelin. For the Eagles, it was too much Apollo, too little Dionysus.

And when he went solo, Mr. Henley seemed to overcompensate for the hedonism of the Eagles by becoming Mr. Rock 'n' Roll Moralist. From 1982's I Can't Stand Still through 1989's The End of the Innocence and the protracted tour that spanned several years, Mr. Henley emerged as the H.L. Mencken of FM radio, holding forth on the press ("Dirty Laundry"), social ills, the hypocrisy of elected officials ("The End of the Innocence") and record executives with a zeal unique to the self-satisfied.

But what has mostly redeemed Mr. Henley is his lovely, arid, tenor voice, the aural equivalent of the parched flatlands that he must have seen while gigging around his home state of Texas as a teenage musician. Mr. Henley grew up in the rather more verdant town of Linden, not far from Dallas, where he moved after earthquakes destroyed his Hollywood home in 1994. And it is there where Mr. Henley, the onetime playboy with a penchant for proselytizing, has become a married father of two.

So, in places, a new and generous perspective informs Inside Job , Mr. Henley's first album of original material since The End of the Innocence 11 years ago. Three songs, "Taking You Home," "For My Wedding" and "Everything Is Different Now," form a suite that showcases the emotional evolution that Mr. Henley began with 1989's sweeping single, "Heart of the Matter."

They're modest songs that are nonetheless enlivened by Mr. Henley's talent for plain but evocative language and his penchant for clean, 80's-style production. When was the last time you heard a piano solo on a modern pop song? Mr. Henley's got one on "Taking You Home" and "Goodbye to a River," and both are pleasant in an archaic way.

On "For My Wedding," Mr. Henley indicates that his break with the past is permanent. "For my wedding I will dress in black / And never again will I look back," he sings. "Ah, my dark angel we must part / For I have made a sanctuary of my heart."

If only he had explored the subject of his late-life domesticity further, Inside Job could have been a much more resonant album. But old habits die hard with Mr. Henley, especially his tendency to sermonize.

"Workin' It" is Mr. Henley's "little valentine to corporate America," as he described the song at his June 8 concert at Radio City Music Hall. It includes a rapped laundry list of modern society's evils–cell phones, talk shows, book deals and lawyers, among others–but should also carry a label warning that freighting a song with "meaning" and weighty pronouncements is hazardous to that song's health.

On the album's title cut, Mr. Henley rails against the work-for-hire clause amended to copyright laws last year, which in essence surrenders authorship of recordings to the record companies releasing them. (Representative Howard Coble, a Republican from North Carolina, recently wished carpal tunnel syndrome on Mr. Henley when the artist didn't show up for a congressional hearing on the work-for-hire clause.) It is laudable that Mr. Henley protests this, but "Inside Job" is a dreary dirge that hinges on variations of the ham-handed lyric, "While you were looking the other way / They'll take your right to own your own ideas." Thanks for telling us what to think, Professor Henley.

In fairness, Mr. Henley does acknowledge his reputation for pontification on "Damn It, Rose": "We're being treated to the wisdom / Of some puffed up little fart / Doing exactly what I used to do– / Pretentions to anarchy and art."

It's much easier to take Mr. Henley's preaching when it's joined to sweeping song structures such as those found on "They're Not Here, They're Not Coming," an energetic meditation on how our "… cold, cold, / Post, postmodern world" has become too barren for heroes, spirituality or even extraterrestrial life. It recalls the magnificent "The Boys Of Summer," as does the last track on the album, "My Thanksgiving," where Mr. Henley seems humble for the first time in his recording career. "I trust you will forgive me if I lay it on the line / I always thought you were a friend of mine," Mr. Henley sings. Then, later in the song, Mr. Henley tells his friend: "Have you noticed that an angry man / Can only get so far / Until he reconciles the way he thinks things ought to be / With the way things are?"

I can only hope that said pal returned the favor and told Mr. Henley to heed his own advice.

–Rob Kemp

Pole: Soul of the Machine

When King Tubby and his royal followers pioneered dub music in the 1970's, they beveled the edges of reggae's hard-line rhythms with tools crafted almost entirely by hand. Using jerry-rigged circuit boards and echo boxes built from whatever primitive gear was lying around, they smeared sound into a horizontal spread of low-end bass rumble and slowly dissolving echo. Pole, a German techno-dub project manned by Stefan Betke, takes a similar approach to electronic dance music. But where Tubby & Co. groped for new ways to melt wires together, Pole is more interested in tearing them apart.

Pole started as an outgrowth of Mr. Betke's work at a record-mastering plant in Berlin, where he scrutinized scores of techno records looking for extraneous aural debris that might spoil the finished product. When the Waldorf 4 Pole sound filter that he used in his work went haywire, though, he heard an accidental symphony. And a way to slip beneath dance music's bony frame to manipulate its soft underbelly.

Because it is much easier to articulate, the process behind Pole tends to get top billing over its musical results. In a different century, the fractured glitches and sonic dust emitted by the defective filter on 3 (Matador) might be described best in the language of warm, scratchy vinyl records. But in the techno tongue, its murmurings work like ambient reminders of beats whispered in Morse code.

Mr. Betke is more than just a clinical deconstructionist, though. Like the early Jamaican dubmasters before him, he mixes his science with ageless musical soul. On "Silberfisch," 3 's opener, he scatters clicking echoes and clipped synthesizer lines over a low-end background that could be either a muted call from the dance floor or a jolly sousaphone march. The soothing layer of static on "Taxi" sounds like sheets of rain. Or is it solar wind? Either way, Pole reels in shades from the grayest areas of sound and recasts them as beautiful colors that bleed far beyond the typical musical spectrum.

– Andy Battaglia

To reach Manhattan Music, e-mail fdigiacomo@observer.com.

The scholar Perry Meisel once wrote a thoughtful essay about the modernist "esthetic of difficulty," the cult of obscurity and opacity for its own esthetically toughening, challenging self-the intellectual equivalent of the argument for dietary fiber. It could be said there's a kind of esthetic of difficult emotions as well, dark, complex ones of course, being so much more deeply serious. Perhaps it's a derivative in the emotional realm of the cult of authenticity, the reverence for reticence rather than passion. You see it in the white folkies, who not only sneered at Dylan for going electric but look down their noses at the likes of Buddy Guy and Otis Rush, the whole brilliant Chicago electric Blues school, for lacking the authenticity of soporific Delta Blues acoustical strummers.

And look at the way certain people think it somehow validates their intellectual sophistication to diss Paul McCartney-as if the Beatles were only about John Lennon, rather than the dialectic of John's and Paul's sense and sensibility. Speaking of sense and sensibility, you see the same syndrome among Austenites in those who pronounce Mansfield Park superior to Persuasion because the latter is deplorably romantic rather than merely astringent.

You know who knows about this? Sandra Bernhard, a performer no one accuses of being overly sentimental. She's surely our patron saint of ironic astringency, yet she'll do things in her concerts like giving full-blown, all-out treatments to schlocky sentimental ballads like Journey's "Don't Stop Believin.'" Not just to make fun of it in the easy, obvious, camp way-she's doing something much more interesting, she's playing with the borderline between sentiment and sentimentality, between the secret indulgence in sentimentality we crave, and our guilty self-consciousness about it. She's not despising but savoring that side of her that can be stirred by the potent spell of cheap sentiment. She's savoring her sentimentality with an appreciative knowingness that saves it from being mere, or pure, sentimentality, transfigures it into-what? Dare we call it Meta-Sentimentality ?

What prompts this meditation on sentiment and meta-sentimentality is a desire, a hesitant, slightly shameful desire to say something in favor of the Eagles. Hesitant because nobody who cares too deeply about his critical credentials would be caught dead saying a kind word about the Eagles. You might as well try to defend Neil Diamond. These days, this is "the love that dare not speak its name." In fact, I wouldn't even say I love the Eagles; I like the Allman Brothers better, for instance. But the Eagles are so universally sneered at, you could call it "the like that dare not speak its name."

In any event, it was a moment of mutual shamefaced Eagles confession I shared with someone recently that started me thinking about risking the shame of making my Eagles thing public knowledge in a column. It was literally a "Hotel California" kind of moment. I was wandering jet-lagged through the lounge of the Westwood Marquis on a two-day turnaround trip to L.A. last month, when I ran into another New York journalist, a guy who writes for The New Yorker and whom I'll designate (to spare him the shame of public exposure) Mr. X. We sat around in the lounge talking about our perverse affection for things L.A.-me for the L.A. of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye , the lens through which I see everything out there. We even admitted to one another we had a thing for Jackson Browne's guilty, heartbreaking, sweetly self-tormenting Late for the Sky LAX sentimentality.

It was at this point that one of us, I think it was me (O.K., it was me), leaned over, and actually looking around nervously to see that no one was in earshot , took that final fatal step beyond the suspect but defensible affection for Jackson Browne. And actually said, well, whispered : "You know, I even actually kind of, sort of like the Eagles." Actually, I probably didn't even have the courage to say that. I probably said something more temporizing like, "I kind of like some Eagles songs , too."

But to my surprise and relief Mr. X did not suddenly get up and recall an appointment he was late for. He actually confessed that he kinda, sorta liked some Eagles songs as well.

Once the dread words were spoken, once the mutual confession had been made, the dam broke, we both felt free to speak the unspeakable and compare notes. "Lyin' Eyes," killer! "Take It to the Limit"-how can you not love it? Thumbs down on the heavy-handed moralizing of "Life in the Fast Lane," mixed feelings about "Hotel California." But then we went even further, one step further into a kind of terra incognita of terminal shameless unhipness. Thank God no one was listening: We even admitted there were certain songs from Don Henley's solo career we liked. I admitted I was a complete sucker for "The Last Worthless Evening," and Mr. X admitted that-well, let's draw the curtain of privacy over his choice.

At this point, we were really out there in a zone beyond hope of ever being cool again. Everyone is supposed to diss Don Henley. Every card-carrying hipster in the universe will recite in Pavlovian fashion at the very mention of Henley's name the song that Mojo Nixon, gadfly rock satirist, wrote, called "Don Henley Must Die." (You know, because he's too slick for words and dresses like Don Johnson.) What they won't tell you is the story I heard, that when Mojo Nixon did "Don Henley Must Die" in an audience that included Don Henley, Mr. Henley gamely joined him on stage and sang along. After which even Mojo Nixon kind of thinks Don Henley is cool, he told the Observer . And he's changed some lyrics in the song to " Sting Must Die."

But wasn't it interesting that when the Eagles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a couple of weeks ago, hardly anyone had a good word to say for them (as opposed to the truly obnoxious Fleetwood Mac) and many (surprise!) found reason to diss Don Henley for making pompous remarks about rock history. Like the whole idea of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with its kitschy poshlust (there!) Swedish Academy trappings of pretension, isn't too pompous for words in the first place.

In any case the whole shameful Hotel California confessional session and the uneasy Hall of Fame induction (which undoubtedly sent America's rock critics into spasms of cringing) set me to thinking about what the deal is with the Eagles, with my Eagles thing, what is it about the band I find so shamefully appealing, so appealingly shameful, and whether it's possible to separate the shame from the appeal.

Which brings me to another shameful confession, a huge mistake I've made about the Eagles for some two decades now, a mistake about my all-time fave Eagles song, "Ol' 55." I fell in love with "Ol' 55" when I first heard it on a motel room radio early one morning someplace in the upper Midwest, on my way to the hollow mountain in Colorado that housed the early warning system for nuclear attack. (I was investigating the Strategic Air Command's ability to prevent accidental nuclear war.) I was having one of those moments of doubt that had always afflicted me as a reporter, one of those motel room morning moments Joan Didion captured so well in the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem . The moment when she finds herself out on assignment in the middle of nowhere sitting on a motel room bed afflicted with self-doubt, trying to wrench up the determination to make another call to the local D.A. who doesn't want to talk to her about a story that may not work out anyway and what's the point of trying except, she suggests, self-respect.

"Ol' 55" isn't really a song about self-respect. It's really a song about self-pity and forgiveness for self-pity. Some guy getting ready to leave some motel, at dawn; to leave some situation, probably some embittered romantic situation which has left him crippled by remorse, facing a future of infinite regret but still somehow (barely) glad to be alive. As I said, it's not so much about self-respect as self-pity, but in a pinch, romanticized self-pity will get one out the door when self-respect is not entirely forthcoming.

Anyway, I always loved "Ol' 55" for that. (Ol' 55, I assume, is the '55 Chevy he's going out the door to. It's one of the two best anthems to cars anyone's written-the other being Neil Young's incomparable "Long May You Run.") But here's where I discovered my big mistake. Every once in a while, I'd unearth an old Tom Waits album from my CD pile, the one that has Waits' version of "Ol' 55" on it, and play it incessantly for a while and think to myself, isn't it great that Tom Waits would cover an Eagles song, doesn't that kind of validate my whole Eagles thing? Because Tom Waits is certifiably cool, he's a romantic, sure, but he's not considered a sappy sentimentalist. He used to be like that with Rickie Lee Jones, after all. He sees what I see in the Eagles, so it's O.K.

Then, just as I was looking at the credit sheet of the CD of On the Border , the early Eagles album I got just so I could relisten to their version of "Ol' 55," I discovered something I'm probably the last person in America to know: "Ol' 55" was a Tom Waits song! He wrote it, the Eagles covered it, not the other way around. At first I thought, jeez, what an ignoramus I am. But then I thought, maybe the mistake explains something: that what I like about the Eagles is the gritty self-lacerating Tom Waits sensibility, the Chandleresque, neon noirish nihilism beneath the deceptively sweetish surface of their seductive melodic lines. Like Waits, the Eagles wrote about my favorite emotions: remorse, regret, self-pity, even (my new favorite) self-loathing. O.K., yes, there are a few exceptions, "Peaceful Easy Feeling" (which I like) and "Take it Easy" (which I can't stand mainly because I can't stand the kind of person whose most profound advice is "take it easy." Yeah, easy for you to say, buster). But most of their songs are self-lacerating, guilt-ridden in that narrow but exquisite emotional range between romantic self-pity and bitter self-loathing. I ask you: What's not to like about that?