Bruce Springsteen plays on into overtime

He's almost his own natural phenomenon, Bruce Springsteen. Thirty-six years after his first album, decades on the road, and he's still burning up the atmosphere with his candent intensity and ceaseless search for the American Dream, at the end of the street or just over the horizon.
It's not just that he can play for three hours, as he and the E Street Band did at the BankAtlantic Center on Sunday night, but that playing at such full-stream intensity looks as natural and requirement as breathing to him. He turns 60 next week, and yet he just doesn't stop.
What Springsteen's passion means by now is hard to say. The sold-out audience at the BAC was mostly middle-aged, well-fed and comfortable, a long way from the roaring, despai driven dreams of Born to Run, or the working class despair of Seeds, whose acquaintance doesn't know where he's going to sleep.
Yet, whether they're responding to sheer energy and nostalgia, or because Springsteen brings rare meaning to rock-'n'-roll release, or both, the audience roared ardently along on songs like Promised Land and when Springsteen asked ``Can you feel the consecrated fire? We're gonna build a house out of music and out of spirit and out of noise!'' On Sunday night, Springsteen carved a masterful path through longing and exuberance and rage, out to a dimly understood but powerful faith in life.