Bruce Springsteen
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
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Bruce Springsteen
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
Sony, 2006
RiYL: Billy Bragg & Wilco's Mermaid Ave albums |
“Maybe it would have been better if he had gone out and hired the best folk, fiddle, horn and string musicians to experiment with instead of hiring his fucking wife, her slutty friends and other Jerseyites who are about as folk as Michael Bloomberg to play on this heap,” goes one typically grammatically entertaining post.
Why such edge and darkness? Ostensibly, it’s because, one: We Shall Overcome is the second consecutive record where Springsteen has left the E Streeters at home; two: It’s his first all-covers album ever and; three: Apparently, largely, because he sings with a twang on it.
But what the pouting misses is that the album -- twang or not -- is a hoot and a holler, an old-timey, jubilant, front-porch throwdown and a carnival of the kind of Americana that the conservative right throught it detected in Born in the U.S.A. This is American music first, rock second, and folk maybe second or third or fourth. Tracks like “Old Dan Tucker”, “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep” and “Pay Me My Money Down” simply leap out of the speakers on the power of their ragged vocals, boogie-woogie pianos, banjos, fiddles, booming horn sections, a washboard (I think), Bruce shouting out live band directions and apparently several man-sized jugs of whiskey.
An idea hatched when Bruce contributed the song “We Shall Overcome” to a 1998 Pete Seeger tribute record, The Seeger Sessions was conceived as a new-millennium retelling of songs popularized by the folk icon, but it’s an album that’s about a thousand times more fun than that might suggest. (I’ll admit, the idea gave me initial pause, especially when a leak of “John Henry” revealed that its intro sounded exactly like the one to the theme of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel). Springsteen insists in the liner notes that the idea was to capture not music being written but music being made. Hence, these tracks were laid down in just days, sans rehearsals, with 17 people who really didn’t know each other. The only E Streeters who got the call were the red-headed women: Soozie Tyrell, the violinist Bruce added for The Rising who assembled the band, and Patti Scialfa, because otherwise, breakfasts at the Springsteen house would have probably been really awkward.
But this isn’t a hoary breathing of air into faded songs. This is a sonic transfusion on the order of the Mermaid Avenue records, its most obvious ancestors (though another is Mellencamp’s underrated Trouble No More), and Springsteen has an affinity for these songs you can almost taste. “Old Dan Tucker” is a soaring folk-rocker heavy on the second half of that description, “Jesse James” revs up quickly in telling the outlaw’s tale and “Froggie’ Went a Courtin’” is driven by percussion that seems to involve Bruce slapping his six-string. And the violin-powered “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep” demands to be listened to at full volume, with Bruce simultaneously channels Tom Waits and history of gospel (yes, even in digging through the folk songbook, Bruce dug up another Mary. The man’s an animal!)
Smarty-pants writers and cable TV hosts may shuffle through We Shall Overcome looking for political over-or-undertones, but they’ll likely be disappointed. By now, even the corpse of Ronald Reagan knows Bruce is no longer keeping his politics secret, and throwing Pete Seeger into the mix certainly won’t entertain the aging chunk of his fan base that’s drifted to the red. But you’ll find no anti-Bush stuff on this record, nor even any the cautious, somewhat muted commentary of last year’s relatively rigid Devils and Dust (which, it should be noted, sounds about half as alive as this record does). When Bruce and band rev up the zydeco/Dixieland/French Quarter machine for a boom-pah version of “Jacob’s Ladder”, the music—like all New Orleans stuff these days, massive and jubilant and impossible to hear without a wave of melancholy—does the talking so Bruce doesn’t have to. That said, it’s fundamentally impossible to listen to tracks like “Mrs. McGrath”, an ancient Irish fable about a woman whose son loses half his body to war, and “My Oklahoma Home”, in which a man returns home to find his wife and crops blown away, and not draw reflexive parallels to Iraq and Katrina. “All foreign wars, I do proclaim/ Live on blood and a mother’s pain,” Springsteen sings in his singular crag in “Mrs. McGrath”, but he rather gently leaves it at that.
But this is probably several thousands words’ worth of more thinking than the project was intended to conjure up. What we have here is a side project, a toss-off, a lark. Springsteen’s studio work is so meticulously calculated, honed, edited and re-honed again (here’s a guy who by my unscientific count has junked at least six full records, and left his two most famous unreleased songs off of his four-disc outtake box), that hearing such a breezy, drinky effort is both fun as hell and a breath of fresh air. In many ways, it’s about time.
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Epilogue: Bruce Springsteen’s pre-emptive strike into the land of Pete Seeger-style protest folk, New Orleans-style ragtime and the judicious use of the tuba began life, not surprisingly, as a lark, a what-the-hell detour that he probably expected to catch on as much as it did, which is to say not much (the subsequent tour played to half-empty sheds throughout the Midwest, where the prospect of a “Glory Days"-less Springsteen concert apparently threw folks into a state of white noise and befuddlement).
But a funny thing happened when Springsteen took what was conceived as a toss-off weekend recording session on the road: it quickly turned into a conduit for the most personal and political music he’s ever produced, hence this “American Land” edition of The Seeger Sessions, an added-value (ugh) director’s-cut released six months after the original that would scream cynical cash-in if it didn’t seem more like the most efficient way he could think of to get timely music out there.
“American Land” isn’t a crucial upgrade; of the five new songs here, two—“Buffalo Gals” (no, really) and the choir singalong “How Can I Keep From Singing”—appeared as DVD extras on the original, and two others were streamed for free on Bruce’s Web site (which means finding MP3s of all them will not tax your detective abilities). But those new songs are worth the trip to the store. “American Land”, recorded during its debut at a MSG tour stop this summer, is, of all things, an Irish foot-stomper: it’s what would happen if Bruce and Shane MacGowan ran into each other and—you may want to sit down for this hypothesis—started drinking. Over lilting bagpipes and roaring key changes, Springsteen makes an extremely unsubtle argument regarding immigration—“There’s treasure for the taking, for any hard-working man, who makes his home in the American land.” Catch the video when it airs on CMT, for some reason. “Bring ‘Em Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)” is a Pete Seeger rewrite and a pretty somber plea to play for anyone still a little confused by “Born in the U.S.A.”
But the killer is “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?”, a brutal, driving rewrite of a Blind Alfred Reed song and a poison arrow aimed directly at the man Springsteen took to calling “President Bystander” after Katrina. “He said, ‘Me and my old schoolpals had some mighty high times ‘round here / And what happened to you poor black folks, well it just ain’t fair,’” Springsteen howls, emphasis on “high”. “He took a look around, gave a little pep talk / said ‘I’m with you,’ then he took a little walk.” To these ears anyway, it’s the flagship track for people who continue to find the non-response to Katrina demoralizing and appalling, and the accidental focal point of the entire Seeger Sessions detour.
JEFF VRABEL | Jeff Vrabel may look like your average, strapping Midwestern-type, but lurking inside him is a passion for all things Springsteen, "Weird" Al, and regrettably, the Chicago Cubs. He's touched Britney Spears. He knows Slash's phone number. Obey him at all costs.