Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
(This is a re-post of the review that disappeared recently. If you left a comment—sorry! Feel free to leave it again.)
On the 1995-1996 tour in support of the Ghost of Tom Joad album, Springsteen used to introduce the wistful, hopeful “Across the Border” by telling a story about John Ford’s film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, a film that offers a “connection to the beauty and vitality of life, and the mystery” that he heard in rock n roll records as a very young child, the spirit of “people trying to make a connection instead of hiding.” For Springsteen, the most beautiful and moving moment in the movie is the scene at the dance at the government workers’ camp. The camp is one of the few places in the novel or in the film where the itinerant laborers—persistently encouraged or downright forced to see themselves as individuals in a grasping, vicious competition with each other for a few jobs offering only the meagerest wages—truly put a vision of themselves as a collective, as a community, into action. This unity, of course, earns them the fear and scorn of their employers, who profit from the workers’ division, and so they scheme to have the camp shut down by sending in a posse of roughnecks to start a brawl at a dance, thus giving the camp a reputation for violence and loose morals. But the Joads and their friends, wise to the plot, defuse it by orchestrating an elaborate plan in which their do-si-do’ing and partner-trading serves to keep the trouble-makers ever on the periphery of the dancers until they can eventually eject them from the dancehall entirely. Springsteen says of this scene, “to me, that was always John Ford holding out beauty and saying that even in a brutal world, that beauty exists and it’s useful.”
The idea of that scene as embodying a “useful beauty” is a great insight; it’s a moment in the novel and the film in which creating art and practicing politics are perfectly united—the dancing and music are meaningful and inspiring purely on their own merits while they simultaneously protect the stability of that progressive community by keeping those who would sow discord among them on its margins. At the dance, there is absolutely no distinction between good music and social justice. (And I don’t mean to neglect the beauty of Ford’s filmmaking, either—Springsteen talks some about being drawn to the way Ford shoots his actors’ faces.)
It’s a beautiful story and leads perfectly into aching performance of “Across the Border.” And yet there’s also a disconnect there. The story is about Springsteen’s desire to create art that brings joy to people’s faces and makes a real, material difference in their lives. But the song that follows it is about the ways in which that light and that better life are endlessly deferred, always across another border, another bridge, another mile. The speaker in “Across the Border” barely believes in the the possibility of change anymore anyway: he’s almost convinced that it’s a mirage, that he’s dragging himself through the sun and swelter out of habit more than hope.
(“Across the Border” is a great song, by the way, despite what you may have inferred if you only know the Tom Joad album through Gorjus’ one-man impression of it—an impression which sounds like kittens dying, slowly, of loneliness.)
“Across the Border” isn’t the only time Springsteen’s music has operated at a distant remove from that vision of the dancefloor, commenting upon it instead of enacting it. “Mary’s Place,” from The Rising, is a song that’s about joy and light (and melancholia, too, to be sure), but it’s not a very joyous song. It’s a song that tells the story of a house party, and it very desperately wants to be the sort of song you could play at a house party—but it just isn’t, whatever its other arguable merits. This deficiency was most clear on The Rising tour, when Springsteen slotted “Mary’s Place” into the rabble-rousing revival-meeting let’s-meet-the-band spot that “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” held on the Reunion tour. With “Freeze-Out,” we followed Bruce down to the river for a rock n roll baptism; with “Mary’s Place,” we listened as he read aloud a better than competent short story about a rock n roll baptism.
All this to say: We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions may be the embodiment of that dancehall, house-party, useful beauty ideal that Springsteen has been striving for all these years. The album is being hailed not only by the usual suspects but even by the snark-jockeys over at Pitchfork, so I know you don’t need me to talk about the particulars of the Dixieland-by-the-Jersey-Shore sound or the songs, except to say that this is maybe the most fun album Springsteen has ever recorded—the sort of fun that he was going for with some of the songs on The River (mostly the ones you hate), that he captures in “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” or “Spirit in the Night” and, of course, in virtually every note of any live show he’s ever played. It’s an album that would wear its politics on its sleeve if it hadn’t already given you the shirt off its back. Much as I love aspects of The Rising and Devils and Dust, it’s an overall more inspring album—politically and personally—then either of those worthy releases.
I mean, seriously: it swings. You could dance to it. There are songs here you would gladly put on a party mix. None of the leadenness that has afflicted so many E Street Records is evident here, probably because Bruce’s control freakitude—remember, this is the fellow who sang Clarence’s whole “Jungeland” solo to him, note by note—is in remission. These aren’t his songs, and this ain’t his band, so we hear something we rare from Bruce—Springsteen as collaborator. The E Streeters—and you know I love ‘em—haven’t, for a long time, been real collaborators in making Springsteen music. Now, the mythology of the band is a tremendous contribution all on its own, for sure—there’s something about putting those guys and gals together on a stage that’s pure magic—but there’s never been a question that it’s Bruce’s show, and that people are there to play a role. With We Shall Overcome, there’s a real sense of creative give-and-take; the joy of creation is evident in every second that passes, and believe me, they pass too quickly.
More PrettyFakes Springsteeniana right here.
(Quotes from the “Across the Border” intro transcribed from the Bruceleg Asbury Park Night.)
For all you aspiring tunesmiths, the selections you hear in the dance scene include “Turkey in the Straw” which many of you, undoubtedly, will associate with the ice cream man, and “Red River Valley” which also provides the theme music for the film.