Last night the BBC screened Bruce Springsteen's first UK appearance with the Seeger Sessions Band,in front of a small crowd (I think they said 300 people), of extremely lively and somewhat intoxicated men and women in what looked like a church. I appreciate this isn't very precise and factual, but if you want facts, my friends...well, I've never been long on those.
He ran through several of the songs from the album and a new version of the Blind Alfred Reed song "How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times", updated by Springsteen to address the drowning of New Orleans and the subsequent abandonment of its people by "President Bystander" George Bush, to whom the song was dedicated.
I wondered how Springsteen would put over the Seeger album live, given the traditional power and bombast of his band shows, but the answer shouldn't have surprised me. He did it with power and bombast!--growling each song into the microphone as if communicating the lyrical message were his lost shot at redemption. Which is perfect, because that's what folk music is all about: redemption for you, me and everybody.
The difference between this show and the others was (and I intend no disrespect to E Street), the musicianship. Bruce knows he has a f****** superior band here (superior to ANYONE), and as any working artist should be in the company of excellence, he was happy to stand back and let the boys (and girls), show you what they can do. There were long segments of songs where the brass section or the fiddles played and Springsteen stood by plucking his acoustic and moving as irresistibly as the crowd in simple appreciation.
Try not to, even when you're listening to the album at home.
This is not a big star trip the Boss is on. The whole Seeger project has been created and executed for the love of the music--and, as the Rolling Stone critic suggested, to find a moral compass for a lost and unhappy nation. Springsteen knows what's wrong in America and it's making him so sick he doesn't want to hear his own voice talking about it. Let the Grandfather of Protest put us all right, he seems to say, I'll be a child again and learn and dance!
But, of course, regardless of the relative modesty of Springsteen's intent, there's always one man in any room that you're going to look at first, and on the Seeger Sessions stage it's still him. Somehow he even managed to make the screw-ups in last night's show look appealing. "We didn't bring the frigging organ," he said at one point, after apparently turning to look for it on stage. And the crowd laughed along with him and loosened up even more.
By the end of the show they were singing every song along with him like they'd known them for years, and the band were lined up along the front of the stage like a fantastically-multiplied E Street, sharing the grateful applause and rowdy shouting. The genie of hope and shared belief had been released and it floated above the heads of crowd and band like helium. Hold on, hold on/ Keep your eyes on the prize/ Hold on. Yes! Sometimes in the worst of times the best thing you can do is shout for joy.
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