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 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.”

Over the next two and half decades, Springsteen’s expanded on those themes, cut loose his band, and settled down and became a family man. There have been triumphs along the way – the stark Nebraska, the superstar-making Born in the USA, the adult-looking Tunnel of Love, and the rocking yet introspective Lucky Town. But especially in the last decade as epitomized by Devils and Dust and the more recent Seeger Session rootsy hootenannies, Springsteen has preferred to take the back streets, morphing into a more down-home, travelling troubabador and preferring to leave the fickle pop world to younger upstarts. There have been brilliant moments indeed, but it seemed like the days when a Springsteen tune could make the hairs on the back of my neck stand were long gone.

His one proper E Street Band rock album since Born in the USA – 2002′s The Rising – was a flawed, yet noble attempt to make sense of 9/11. But aside from the title cut and “Lonesome Day,” it sounded like Springsteen was tired of using rock & roll as a forum for his music. And when he did, like on a retread like “Mary’s Place,” it was a hollow shell of his glory days.

However on Magic, it appears he’s rediscovered the music of his youth once again. And that revelation has freed him of the “Bruce Springsteen” man of the people shackles and has enabled him to have some fun.

CREATED AGAINST the backdrop of the Iraq war, Magic’s heady topics and Springsteen’s typically cautionary, succinct lyrics (astutely commented on by Post editor David Horovitz in last Friday’s paper), are tempered by some of the sharpest rock and pop hooks he’s ever pulled out of his book of tricks.

In similar fashion to The River, he offsets the dire narratives of lives being shattered and of shadowy governments with effervescent pop songs about life and love. The Spectorish flourishes of “You’ll Be Comin’ Down” and “Girls in their Summer Clothes,” the taut E Street rock of “Gypsy Biker” and “I’ll Work For Your Love,” the workmanlike anthem “Long Walk Home,” the 80s classic guitar of “Radio Nowhere” and the baroque, latter-day REM pop of “Your Own Worst Enemy,” clearly demonstrate that the all-encompassing seriousness which has made some of Springsteen’s recent music occasionally tedious and one-dimensional, has been sidelined in favor of a big oldies AM radio with heart.

Springsteen hasn’t sounded this relaxed and comfortable since “Sherry Darling” and you can hear it in his voice. There’s virtually none of the “old man” inflections and vernacular that has marred so much of his latter day work, ironic since this pop icon is now pushing 60 – he sounds younger than ever.

And just as importantly, instead of inventing down and out characters to sing through, Magic finds Springsteen – much like he did in Lucky Town – writing and singing in his own voice.

Producer Brendan O’Brien, just as he did with The Rising, doesn’t pay much heed to the E Street Band’s historic wall of sound, and directs a modern pop record, heavy on guitars, and full of inventive arrangements. But he’s astute to include just enough E Street touches for continuity – the keyboard flourishes and from masters Roy Bittan (check out his classic intro to “I’ll Work For Your Love”) and Danny Federici, and the occasional prototype Clarence Clemons solos. But more often than not, the emotional foil for the new material is violinist Soozie Tyrell.

Even the most retro sounding tune “Living in the Future” (a dead ringer for “Tenth Avenue Freezeout”) works in its own right as a perfect example of another serious Springsteen lyrical statement set against a robust R&B arrangement, which enables the band to stretch their soul roots.

While some call Magic Springsteen’s big foray into politics with clear anti-war material like “Devil’s Arcade,” “Last to Die” and the stark title song making no mistake where he stands on the Iraq war, he’s been a political animal for decades, whether it be in performances of “War” and “This Land is Your Land” during the Reagan years to his own populist songs like “Promised Land” and “Badlands” and the often misunderstood “Born in the USA.”

“Devil’s Arcade” breaks out of the radio-friendly rock direction of the previous 10 songs. It’s an ambitious pop composition, building from a muted strummed acoustic guitar to an orchestral full band crescendo led by Tyrell’s evocative violin and Max Weinberg’s foreboding, syncopated drumming. The chilling music is matched note for note with a meticulous description of loss caused by the ravages of war. It’s a breathtaking and chilling album climax.

“Terry’s Song,” an added-on tribute to Springsteen’s longtime assistant and friend Terry McGovern, sums up the album with a return to the Boss’s beginning. You can imagine a scrawny, scraggly-bearded Springsteen singing this to John Hammond at his 1972 audition for his first recording contract amid “Growin’ Up,” “Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “Does the Bus Stop at 82nd Street?”

The refrain “When they built you brother, they broke the mold” may have been sung for McGovern, but it also applies to the song’s writer.

Magic recalls past glories while remaining firmly focused on the present, and the future. It’s more than a Springsteen purist could hope for.

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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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