Bruce Springsteen is only 58 years old. And yet, after his fantastically energetic tour with the E Street Band in 2001, with his face growing increasingly wrinkled and funny-lookin’, he has decided, I believe prematurely, that he needed to wrangle himself a new image as a crazy old coot. He is most certainly not The Boss anymore. Instead, he’s more like the old guy at the bar who, when you stop in at three in the afternoon to ask for directions, starts telling you some rambling story that seems to start in the middle and is peppered with a hankering for the good ol’ days, and, despite your non-committal grunts while you wait for the bartender’s attention, just keeps right on going trying to engage you with personal questions.
Don’t think it’s dementia settling in…this is all calculated. We know from first-hand accounts that Springsteen’s blue-collar, working-class image and his raw, rough sound are both meticulously crafted specifically to feel spontaneous and natural. I’m not a fan of this new turn, though, because it’s just not as believable as the old image was. Springsteen’s no actor, and I think his old image aligned more naturally with his values and experiences so that he could pull it off, while this mumbly old man thing is a bit of a reach for him.
But the new character needs a stage on which to spout about things he doesn’t really know to the level he wants you to think he does, and so we get We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions, a collection of traditional songs re-done by Springsteen and a large group of musicians in three one-day sessions between 1997 and 2006 (reportedly without rehearsal, though I find that hard to believe, or at least a very strict definition of “rehearsal”). I’m reminded of the taxi driver who, in 1999, positively insisted to me that a few years prior there was a Super Bowl in Chicago that was severely blurred by a blizzard when, on this disc’s accompanying DVD, I hear Springsteen talking about how acoustic instruments were meant to be more integrated into daily life than their electric brethren or how there’s some unquantifiable kind of energy in music or performances like those on this disc that, supposedly, isn’t in music that isn’t. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with him on any of these points (unlike the cabbie, who was on another planet), it just comes across as insincere and fake from this baby boomer baron of the electric guitar. What’s more, I’m frustrated that he and Patty are the hamming-it-up stars of the DVD and the brilliant musicians that shared the house-cum-recording-studio with Springsteen are ignored at best and dismissed at worst.
The songs on here are absolutely fantastic. There really is a bit of magic captured with several different feels weaving in and out of the program. The album begins with an upbeat, jug band, hoe-down feel of “Old Dan Tucker,” moves to the superbly anti-war lyrics on top of an Irish jig-ish tune of “Mrs. McGrath,” and then hits the gospel-y “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” all in the first four tracks. “Jacob’s Ladder” has a thrilling communal, gospel feel and “Pay Me My Money Down” will not fail to get you singing along while placing you, sloshed, in a bar a few hours after a hard day on the docks. Every single song has some kind of redeeming quality: even those that didn’t get kept at least made me think about it. For example, “Shenandoah” is hella annoying, but the lush instrumentation of horns, strings, and choir are brilliantly elevating.
So what makes the bad songs bad? Unfortunately, it’s the same thing that bugged me about the DVD: Springsteen himself, with his vocal style and his occlusion of the rest of the band. Springsteeen’s clearly settled on this back/top of the mouth, nasal cavity rattling, yarly singing thing, and I can’t stand it. Again, there’s an insincerity to it that makes it even worse. It’s so over the top that even the folks Springsteen is trying to emulate don’t sound like this. I’ve hated this style since it first showed up on The Rising, and if it continues much longer, I may just be done with Springsteen, a claim I can’t believe I would have made even seven years ago. I also never would have believed even a few years ago that I would feel so done with Springsteen the man. But the talent and performance of his band members, along with the crystal-clear yet wonderfully dense sound produced by Recorder Toby Scott and Mixer Bob Clearmountain, are clearly the strength of the record, yet with his stubborn insistence on mumbling in a faux-twang and on portraying himself as the leader and arranger who imbues the musicians with talent get in the way. It’s not even clear what Seeger has to do with this album, as almost all of these songs are traditional. If Seeger popularized many of them in his day, he’s not given credit for it, and so Springsteen just comes across as petty in this rude dismissal of a legend.
I wrote in my review of Devils & Dust that I was blaming Brendan O’Brien for that album and for The Rising. Springsteen himself is listed as this album’s producer, and O’Brien’s name is nowhere to be found, so the O’Brien as Brutus theory may need to be revisisted.. This is a good album, but I’m so hard on Springsteen here because after more than 25 years of continually raising the bar of what rock and roll could be while only occasionally and briefly lapsing into the suck that strikes all musicians able to go that long (primarily Human Touch), I hold him to a higher standard. 1995’s The Ghost Of Tom Joad was Springsteen’s last good studio album, so by this disc’s release in 2006 we were due. I had held out a lot of hope for this one, but the results are mixed.
Rating:
Mixers: “Mrs. McGrath,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Pay Me My Money Down”
Keepers: “Jesse James,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” “John Henry,” “Erie Canal”
Filed Between: Devils and Dust and Stanley, Son of Theodore: Yet Another Alternative Music Sampler
