Bruce Springsteen asked for silence, and a crowd of thousands obliged. Springsteen and the E Street Band were eight songs deep into their three-hour, 26-song set at the Pepsi Center on Monday night, and the mood had suddenly turned reverent as Springsteen introduced "My City of Ruins" as a tribute to Asbury Park, New Jersey, a town hit successively by economic hardship and, more recently, a natural disaster.

On a deeper level, he added, it was a song that acknowledged "the ghosts that we gather around us." After singing lines about a missing congregation and a brother who was "down on his knees," Springsteen asked for a roll call from the other sixteen musicians on stage. "Are we missing anybody? Are you missing anybody?" he crooned before declaring, "This is where we like to stop for a moment to feel the ghosts that walk alongside us ... Shhh." Silence descended, and the ghost of Clarence Clemons was hard to miss.

See also: - Photos: The twenty best Bruce Springsteen shirts we saw last night at the Pepsi Center - Slide show: Bruce Springsteen at the Pepsi Center - Review: Bruce Springsteen at Pepsi Center, 4/10/09 - Review: Bruce Springsteen at Well's Fargo Theatre, 5/7/05 - Review: Bruce Springsteen at Pepsi Center, 3/31/00 - Deferred Hat Tip: Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska - When it comes to Bruce, David Brooks misses the point