Bruce Springsteen at 62

Good lord, I thought, look how old these people are. It was a few minutes before 62-year-old Bruce Springsteen and his now multigenerational E Street Band went onstage. The crowd was pouring in, waiting on line for a beer or a hot dog or an appallingly overpriced T-shirt.

I had seen older people at previous Springsteen concerts, of course -- going all the way back to my first, in 1984 in Toronto, when I scored a seat in the 14th row by taking advantage of a desperate scalper with excess inventory just before show time.

That was when I was 17, the age that another musical son of New Jersey, Frank Sinatra, famously singled out as "a very good year" -- the point where youth begins revving up into adulthood.

The average age of this crowd was well past 35, the last digits cataloged by Sinatra in the lyrics to "It Was a Very Good Year."

Until Monday night, I was usually able to convince myself that those people had been dragged to the concert by their children or grandchildren. But now they were everywhere, outnumbering the younger folk -- many of whom had clearly been dragged there by their parents or grandparents.

My seat was in the upper deck, next to a married couple from Orange County who had seen Springsteen in concert about 30 times. The best show, according to the wife, had been a stop on the "Darkness on the Edge of Town" tour at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, N.J.

"I was pregnant out to here with my 33-year-old son," she recalled, indicating the sort of belly you wouldn't want to have pressed against the stage.

"It was on my bucket list," she said.

"You might need to work on your bucket list," I said. "Isn't it supposed to be for trips to Tibet, things like that?"

She shrugged and glanced at her husband.

"He got to go to the Super Bowl, I get this," she said.

Her favorite show had been among a set of September 1978 concerts renowned among Springsteen fans for their intensity. The Capitol Theatre was torn down in 1991, one of many legendary venues from the rocker's career that are now gone.

Sinatra was on the cusp of turning 50 when he recorded "It Was a Very Good Year," which can be found on the 1965 LP "September of My Years."

For connoisseurs of elegant midlife male self-pity, the record simply can't beat it: The tracks include "How Old Am I?," "Don't Wait Too Long," "Last Night When We Were Young" and "September Song" ("Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few").

There are plenty of downbeat songs on "Wrecking Ball," especially in its first half, which offers a gallery of men and women unmoored by hard times. The title track comes at the midpoint, where an earlier generation would have gotten up to flip the record over.

If it's possible to write a deeply profound song about a doomed football stadium, this is it. "When all this steel and these stories drift away to rust/And all our youth and beauty has been given to the dust," Springsteen sings, "... Bring on your wrecking ball."

The song -- which came early in Monday's show -- is a laugh in the face of mortality, a fist waved in the air not simply at the current economic crisis but at the human condition, Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp" with a horn section.