Who's The Boss

The iron link between Bruce and his audience made him, for many people, the inspiration and conscience of his time. Of course, since his glory days the world has changed. And so has he. So we have to ask, especially since his albums aren't selling: Will he ever matter as much as he did then?

His own transformations have been troubled. He took up with Scialfa before divorcing actress-model Julianne Phillips, to whom he'd been married for three years, and documented the torment in his last album, Tunnel of Love. He also divorced, so to speak, his longtime musical collaborators, the E Street Band. He told the audience at a benefit he played in 1990 for the Christic Institute (a left-liberal gadfly group) that he'd gone into therapy. ''I spend enormous periods of time feeling very isolated," he told the crowd. ''We love you, Bruce,'' a fan cried. ''But you don't really know me,'' Springsteen shot back.

One thing that hasn't changed is his character. Yes, his move to L.A. took him decisively far from his working-class, New Jersey roots: His new home is a $14 million estate hidden at the end of a private drive in Bel Air, the exclusive enclave that's also home to Ronald Reagan. Even so, Bruce manages as much as any superstar could to act like a regular small-town guy. He still rents videos at his local store; he still treks to the supermarket alone to buy dog food. He still shows up at restaurants toting bottles for Evan and Jessie. In January, at a party Sony Music gave in New Orleans, he talked about being a father. ''My son only knows me as Dad,'' he told a Sony executive. ''To him I'm not a rock star. I'm not Bruce Springsteen. I'm just Dad.''

But can he still be a rock star? He labored over Human Touch for two years. Then, as he played music in his car one day, a long-buried Bob Dylan tune called "Series of Dreams" (from The Bootleg Series) took him by surprise, inspiring him to make his own songs more fiery and intimate. Working in his home studio, playing nearly every instrument himself, he blazed his way through Lucky Town in just eight weeks.

Now, he must have thought, his music truly spoke for him. But would it speak to his fans? They've changed too. They're putting down roots. They've got spouses, kids, and mortgages. Do they even have time for music any more? Maybe Springsteen does still speak to them, no longer hurling them toward some unknown transcendence but urging them to stand their ground: If he found peace, he might be saying, they can find it too. As he sings in ''Better Days'': ''I'm tired of waitin' for tomorrow to come/Or that train to come roarin' 'round the bend.''

But is that what his fans want to hear? Or, like so many fans of any rock star, do they want him to keep singing his old, yearning hits? Do those hits even mean what they used to? Bruce himself seems to think they don't — on his last tour, in 1988, he sang ''Born to Run'' with just a single bare acoustic guitar, declaring that the quest for freedom on the open road in the song had been nothing but a myth.

And what about the larger pop audience? New voices have arrived to shape pop's agenda — on the conservative side, country voices; and out on the edge, the younger, sharper, more insistently angry voices of militant rappers and rock bands like Nirvana and Metallica. Where does he stand on the L.A. riots that so notably breached the peace in his adopted ''lucky town''? In a private performance at New York's Bottom Line three nights before he appeared on Saturday Night Live, Springsteen spoke of the riots and lamented the gap between blacks and whites. Yet in ''Souls of the Departed,'' a song from Lucky Town, he shows, honestly enough, that he really can't bridge that gap. Mourning yet another violent death in the Compton ghetto near L.A., he thinks of his own son's safety and sings: ''I want to build me a wall so high nothing can burn it down/Right here on my own piece of dirty ground.''

You can't blame Springsteen for wanting his wall; during the riots, many families in South Central L.A. must have wished they had one. But meanwhile, on the angry edge of current music, rappers leap the racial gap, bringing the fury behind the riots to a young audience that's both black and white. It's hard to see how songs about walls could electrify any audience, not Springsteen's older one, still lost in its dreams of joining him in his rush down Thunder Road, and certainly not the younger crowd, inspired and provoked by music of its own time. Springsteen, cocooned with his family, may never shake the world the way he used to. The L.A. riots dramatically show that we've entered a new era — and Springsteen, for the first time in his career, sounds like a bystander.