Who wants Bruce Springsteen’s Harley Fat Boy?

It’s not Tony Soprano’s Chevy Suburban but it has way more cache: starting today Bruce Springteen’s 1991 Harley Davidson Fat Boy is up for grabs on the charityfolks.com online auction house.

The white Harley is owned by Springsteen who says it has been driven 9,198 miles across (the Badlands no doubt). The bike will be part of the live auction at the November 7 Stand Up for Heroes event, with proxy bids placed on behalf of the online auction’s winner.

Along with the Harley, the high bidder will also receive a print of the picture on the site, signed by Springsteen of course. Bidding currently is at $15,000. Online bidding ends 11.7 at 6 p.m. Eastern.

Proceeds from The Stand Up For Heroes: A Benefit for the Bob Woodruff Family Fund auction go toward service members injured while serving in the United States Armed Forces. According to the charity’s Web site, special emphasis is placed on soldiers with traumatic brain injury and combat stress injuries including post-traumatic stress disorder.

Conan O’Brien will host the benefit at New York’s Town Hall and the evening will feature intimate performances by Lewis Black, Springsteen and Robin Williams.

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Springsteen pulls a rabbit out of his hat

My friend Phil calls me a Bruce Springsteen “purist,” and to an extent, he’s right. The romantic, mysterious boardwalk characters of his first two albums, the hope and longing of Born to Run, the collision that occurs when that hope meets the grim reality of Darkness on the Edge of Town, and the ultimate paradox it creates on The River combine to form perhaps the most compelling series of albums in all of rock & roll.

Springsteen and his long-standing sympathetic comrades The E Street Band managed to achieve seemingly incompatible aims: telling tales of the search for moments of humanity amid hardships and disappointments while making the most joyous, life-affirming music. Driven by Springsteen’s eternally youthful sense of wonder and his uncommon intensity, the albums and the live performances left listeners with an unbreakable bond of community, a hint of a greater purpose and a feeling of elation which made them, in the words of one of his songs, “glad to be alive.”

Bruce Springsteen makes “Magic” at The Palace

AUBURN HILLS — Five Championship Drive became Magic Street on Monday night, courtesy of Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band.

Some devotees worried that a confluence of factors might result in a more “typical” kind of performance Monday — though in Springsteen’s case “typical” is a rarefied standard in its own right. Nevertheless, a blockbuster show in Cleveland the night before, a weak (sic) night booking in these parts and a well below capacity crowd seemed to stack the odds against getting something special at the Palace.

But in his sixth Detroit area appearance in as many years — but first with the E Street Band since 2003 — Springsteen and company delivered another powerhouse with enough treats and surprises, as well as energy, to render those concerns moot.

It didn’t hurt that the nine songs from his latest album, the chart-topping “Magic,” proved well-suited to live performance — particularly the show-opening rocker “Radio Nowhere,” the pensive “Gypsy Rider,” the dynamically rich “Devil’s Arcade” and the ringing “I’ll Work For Your Love,” making its debut appearance on the tour and providing a perfect preface for “Tunnel of Love.” Springsteen, who met with Motown star and Detroit City Councilwoman Martha Reeves before the show also unsheathed “Jackson Cage” from 1980’s “The River.”

And during the encores he grabbed a sign from a young fan in the front row asking for “Ramrod,” delivering a spirited rendition of the song (instead of the planned “Kitty’s Back”) and noting that “this kid’s been rockin’ all night long! My kid’s 16; he’d be asleep by now.”

Mostly, however, the show worked because of Springsteen’s well-established knack for finding a thematic pulse and structuring the repertoire around that, finding an ebb and flow that manages to make its points while still raising the roof in an expression of rock ‘n’ roll salvation. That the shows on this tour are shorter than the E Street Band marathons of yore — the Palace’s 23-song set clocked in at about two hours and five minutes — does not diminish their impact; on Monday, in fact, it made for a punchy and potent exposition whose energy level never flagged.

The central tenant of Springsteen’s show was still voiced in “Badlands,” when he declares his belief in faith and hope and their ability to raise him — and his audience — about the tribulations of everyday life. But these are troubled times, and Springsteen’s new songs voice his concerns, as did his introductions to “Magic” and “Living in the Future,” the latter of which met with some boos from the same fans who were singing along to the sha-la-la’s at the end of the song. But carefully crafted song tandems — “Magic” with a shuffling rendition of “Reason to Believe,” “Living in the Future” leading into “Promised Land,” and an ending run of “Devil’s Arcade,” “The Rising,” Last to Die” and “Long Walk Home” before “Badlands” — provided a context for the evening that required no rhetorical embellishment for those who were paying attention.

And those who weren’t? They still had a fine time, raising their fists and pounding their feet for anthems such as “Night,” “She’s the One,” “Born to Run” and “Dancing in the Dark,” and jigging along to the Celtic-flavored show-closer “American Land,” a pointed celebration of the country’s immigrant heritage whose notion that “There’s treasure for the taking, for any working man/Who will make his home in the American land” was as much a hope for the future as a salute to the past.

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