One afternoon last fall, Bruce Springsteen sat sipping a beer in a room at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Los Angeles. He wore blue jeans, cowboy boots, a black leather jacket and a newsboy's cap slouched down backward over the bandanna tied around his head. Not one of the great glamour-pusses, you could say. At the peak of his twelve–year recording career, and midway through his most clamorously acclaimed tour with the precision–tooled E Street Band, Springsteen remained as wary as ever of massive success and its attendant seductions. "I never felt like I was an Elvis or a Dylan, or the Rolling Stones," he said. "I don't see myself in that way. I see myself more like a real good journeyman. And that's fine: you do your job real good, you pass on some part of the flame . . . and you stir things up a little bit if you can."

Springsteen's diffidence is a well–known component of what may now be called, with some justification, his legend: the unassuming music laureate of the working classes. Nevertheless, in 1984, he began touring in support of Born in the U.S.A., his seventh and best–selling album (5 million copies so far), the thirty–five–year–old Jersey flash found he had grown from being the country's biggest cult artist — lionized on the East Coast, more patchily appreciated elsewhere — into something very like a national hero. There appeared to be several reasons for this change. On a purely showbiz level, he is one of the most uproariously exciting performers in rock history, and while an ever–shrinking number of skeptics have sometimes found in his four–hour shows to be overblown endurance tests, there have never been any doubt about the deep emotional connection he makes with his audiences night after night.