Bruce Hendricks, director of 2008's Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour and present bomb Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, told MTV that he'd love his next 3D concert film to feature...Bruce Springsteen.

Considering Springsteen's knee-slidin', shtick-filled Super Bowl performance, perhaps the idea isn't so far-fetched. Hendricks has yet to pitch the Boss.

I'm awed by the apathy toward this weekend's Steelers--Cardinals matchup. What's its Roman numeral, Super Bowl ZZZ?

Nobody around here cares. I got invited to two parties on Sunday. Neither gathering has anything to do with the game.

The halftime attraction, Bruce Springsteen, has gotten a lot more attention than any game-related story line.

At his press conference yesterday in Tampa, Springsteen admitted he knows nothing about football.

He's never written a great sports tune---"Glory Days" is Springsteen's jockiest song, about an aging baseball player who once had a good "speedball"; before the tune's 1984 release, "speedball" was what killed John Belushi, not a synonym for fastball.

Read More "Bruce Springsteen Doesn’t Do Sports Real Well, But Nils Lofgren Does" »

For City Paper's current issue I wrote about Butch Street, the National Park Service analyst who used to provide the media with an official crowd estimate at inaugurations and other large events on the Mall.

Congress kicked Street and his agency out of the estimating business for DC events after the controversy over the size of the Million Man March in 1995. Street said 400,000 showed up; organizer Louis Farrakhan wanted the government to declare a crowd in the seven-figures, to match the title of his gathering.

So, there's no official arbiter anymore.

And news accounts of yesterday's concert on the mall show how mussed up historical records will be until the Park Service gets back at it.

CBS says "a crowd of tens of thousands" showed up to see Springsteen.

Radio Free Europe told its audience "some 75,000" were there for Aretha Franklin.

The Irish Times wrote that "a crowd of hundreds of thousands" showed up to see Bono.

Richard Nixon's hometown paper, the Whitter Daily News went with "more than 300,000."

The Sudbury Star of Canada divulged that the president-elect "enthralled a crowd of 500,000."

Britain's Daily Mail was less conservative, reporting that when Obama spoke at the concert, he was "facing more than half a million people."

Far as I can tell, as diverse as these numbers are, nobody guesstimated that a million folks showed up.

Farrakhan must be pleased.

I was appalled by the concert yesterday, which I was fortunate enough not to experience in person--my boss called me back inside to type up posts from Jule Banville, who was in the thick of things by one of the Jumbotrons. So I listened on NPR. The lineup was so boomer-oriented! It was creepy, like your parents offering to try pot with you your first time, because they'd been through the Summer of Love and could be good spirit guides. Gens X and Y may have been the engine of the Obama campaign, but it didn't take long for the People Who Remember Vietnam to remind us this was their dream first, even to the point of hauling out poor old Pete Seeger for one more round of "This Land Is Your Land."

I don't mind hearing about art from Ashley Judd or sacrifice from Jack Black or citizenship from Marisa Tomei. You take Hollywood money, that's the price I guess, and it's relatively innocuous. But when Bono gave a shoutout Joe Biden it was almost too perfect--a boomer rock star calling out an archetypical boomer politician. This dream, Bono announced, was the American dream. But it was also the Irish dream. And the Israeli dream. And the Palestinian dream. And so on, till the dream's significance had become so diffuse it was really more a notion, a goal, or a New Year's resolution.

After the third or fourth old white rich singer performed with gospel singers--a slam-dunk signifier of soul to boomers, who gave us gospel brunches in addition to herpes, Billy Joel, and all-star jams at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame--I just had to wonder how the music would have been different had Hillary Clinton been elected instead. Maybe Fleetwood Mac, I guess. But really the only thing missing was Sting and his fucking lute.

Photo by David Katz/Presidential Inaugural Committee

Bruce Springsteen killed the mall crowd and a national radio audience (I was a part of the latter) by co-leading a version of "This Land Is Your Land" with Pete Seeger.

That's as great an American tune as has ever been written. As the world sees it, Springsteen is his generation's greatest American songwriter.

The setting was totally American.

Except for that dang Takamine guitar Bruce was strumming.

Takamine's a Japanese product that Spingsteen has long endorsed.

This country's in some trouble on the manufacturing front. We don't make anything anymore that the rest of the world wants except cluster bombs and guitars.

When it comes to guitars, in fact, we still rule. In the last 60 years, there hasn't been a picker on the planet that hasn't coveted our Gibsons, Fenders and Martins.

Woody Guthrie, the guy who wrote "This Land Is Your Land," was known for painting his rockin' slogan, "This machine kills fascists!," on Martin guitars.

Come back, Bruce. Your country needs you.

It sucks being late. It took forever to get out of our apartment and head to the concert. We thought: The Boss has to be the closer. We were wrong. We ended up listening to the Boss on NPR in our kitchen nook! By the time we made it to the Mall (Cab to Foggy Bottom then a hectic walk the rest of the way), military dudes were giving everyone the stare down and telling folks the concert was closed. "We're only letting people out," said one.

This meant listening to Obama several blocks away. Or at least listening to an echo of Obama's speech from several blocks away. We could sort of see a jumbotron through some trees. So we learned some lessons for Tuesday. Standing outside the barriers really sucks. There are a lot of people selling Obama bootleg shirts. And there are a lot of people interested in this inauguration.

*photo taken on our long walk home.

The inauguration is still, unbelievably, worth reading about. Performers are still signing up to perform at various functions. Which is sorta big news, right? Yesterday, I learned that Brandy might just possibly be making an appearance at one of the balls. OK. Not exactly super big news. But this morning, there was some very big news. WTOP is reporting that Bruce Springsteen may be performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on January 18.

WTOP is very careful to mention that the Boss is expected to perform. So maybe this is just a bad rumor. But the station reports: "WTOP is hearing the concert will be free and aired on HBO. The time of the event is not known yet." The latest news on Springsteen's intense fansite says nothing about Obama, the Inauguration, or any free show. It's all about some video game called Guitar Hero.