yes-crying love-punk

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN & THE E STREET BAND
Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75
Easy to forget the underdog Springsteen was at first: what a scraggly, skinny scrounger he looked and sounded, how his very image stank of beer and butts. His poetry came off a starvation high, and his rock and roll was in that long noble foolish tradition of rock-like-there’s-no-tomorrow: One day we’ll make our compromises with job and law, but for these few years we’ll live the myth.

His moment came around and he tore it open. From that opening poured no money, only delirium; no idolatry, only excitement; no responsibilities, only explosion. In that moment he was both the feted superstar and the anonymous club rat, living the myth and deferring the compromises. Behind him was a group that stomped on an angel cloud of ringing piano and sleigh bells. Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 is a straight and glorious route back to that moment.

Today he is the solid-bodied, soul-patched, gravel-pitched man of substance who places himself in obstinate and customarily dull opposition to whatever stream is main in the pop world. No longer the underdog, he sings in the underdog’s stead. Against the momentness of before, he is centered and obliged. Means what he says, says what he means. Hand me down my walkin’ stick. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is the latest expression of Springsteen’s accruing gravity, the thickening of callow youth into solid citizenship.

Guess which image still flames? Which music still flies?

Recorded in three days on his New Jersey farm with New York musicians (all manner of folk instrumentation plus strings, horns, and chorus), We Shall Overcome consists of songs Springsteen learned from Pete Seeger versions. Most are given boisterous handling, are roughed around and banged on by a likably rowdy ensemble. A couple of ballads (“Shenandoah” and “Mrs. McGrath”) are not un-moving. It all sounds right. And yet there is nothing remotely surprising to it. Nothing there that shouldn’t be there, no element or attitude we couldn’t have imagined fitting until the right visionary stuck it in sideways.

We Shall Overcome is better than Devils & Dust, but mainly because it is louder, not deeper or farther or higher. Springsteen, unlike Elvis Costello, has simply not made the punk’s maturity interesting — let alone thrilling or magical. His own songwriting has not evolved with the years, and to these populist standards he brings little but conviction. That’s a lot more than nothing, and a lot less than enough. Additionally, it’s gotten harder to ignore how false Springsteen’s “folk” voice sounds — how forced and external, as if he’d inserted a fishhook in his voice and were tugging it this way for a drawl, that way for a sneer. Nebraska caught him working his way into a country accent, an attempt at plains-states flatness, and it fit with his characters’ ways of working themselves into their stories, as if they were unused to having attention paid to them. But on We Shall Overcome, his stuffing of Okie nasalities into the dirt farmer’s lament is nearly as blatant, and just as predictable, as Melissa Etheridge slathering phony passion over a stalker-in-love lyric. Where he always ranged loose as a rocker and could send it sailing as a popper, Springsteen is in chains as a folkie. He’s reduced to second-hand phrasing, a cupped-in-the-tongue mumble trading with a dry-gulch growl.

Springsteen is all the proof we need that it’s not enough for an artist’s heart to be in the right place. More important is that the sound be in the right place — or in the wrong place at the right moment. Springsteen will dry up and blow away altogether if he tries to follow Dylan down the sexagenarian-folkie road. He eats roots and shits boredom. What kind of future is that for him? Or for us? This solid music, drawn from dust and addressed to the ages, will, I’m certain, be forgotten next month.

But 1975 will live on. The marathon London concert, November of that fateful year, Born to Run making its move on pop history, places him before a polite English crowd that waits until a song is safely finished before applauding, that will not blight a dramatic pause by shouting Mum, you naughty girl or I’m from Stepney! Though the E Street Band’s piano-rich and rhythm-hard sound often conjures the specter of Dylan-Hawks ’66, and many in the audience already know the Born to Run songs, you can believe this crowd has never quite met this spectacle before: this American runaway Chevrolet highway jukebox dream. There’s an inch-thick charge of anticipation running through this performance that can make you need to urinate almost instantly. The night was clear and the moon was yellow and the leaves came tumbling down, Bruce sings to invoke the spirit in the night, and Max Weinberg rolls the drums like a ghost wind shivering the trees. It’s only the beginning.

This yes-crying love-punk does new songs like oldies, lays into Mitch Ryder and Gary “U.S.” Bonds as if he’d written their songs himself. He does Bo Diddley justice on “She’s the One.” Though Springsteen is heroic in remembering all those lyrics, his music kicks New Dylan claptrap to the curb: this is all pre-Beatles romance, Spector sonority, Dirt City grindhouse.

A second-generation rocker, Springsteen was among the first to be able to live out the styles he’d been given by Elvis and the Beatles and James Brown and Ronnie Spector — but he was bold and loving and gifted enough to inhabit the rock and roll body itself, not just wear its clothes. He lived the myths he’d been given, and in the process made his own.

Myth lives and flies in this London concert, as it does in the other shows one can hear from Springsteen’s early, legendary days (The Bottom Line in New York, The Main Point in Bryn Mawr, The Tower in Philadelphia). Bruce was so absolutely myth-besotted then. The rock and roll myths, that is, which ordinarily call for howls, or at least whoops. But Springsteen’s vocal arsenal of the time, you realize listening to this, is equally rife with whispers and gasps, as if he were creeping up on those sleeping myths — the phantom Chevy, the shredded graduation dress, the road leading out of town — terrified to find that the myths he was once given are alive, they do exist. Terrified to realize they might rip him apart if he wakes them.

What choice is there? He is a rock and roll hero. He wakes those myths up. And he rips them apart.

1975 will live on.

Le TIGRE
From the Desk of Mr. Lady
This Island
It was a summer’s day yesterday, one of the few really summery days we’ve had in Brooklyn this year, and the breeze was coming in the window and caressing my neck as I listened to This Island.

I first posted on Le Tigre a little while back, having been guiled by a motley array of tracks and not having done much research about who they were or where they came from. Transpires they’re the project mainly of Kathleen Hanna, formerly of the riot-grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill. BK songs were, with odd exceptions, feedback squeal, white noise, three chords: punk. (One exception, “Outta Me,” could almost have been a love song, even with that line, I remember the back of your hand.) But maybe the progression from hard punk to dance punk makes sense if we look back to John Rotten/Lydon: Le Tigre as Hanna’s equivalent to the post-Pistols PiL. Same song, second verse.

Le Tigre retain a lot of BK’s churning guitar, vocal distortion, and speak-singing in deracinated Valley Girl accents, but they’ve stuck their main style plug into an early 80s synth-pop jack. 2000’s From the Desk, their sophomore effort, is a hard toss of sound montage and catchy rhythm. Its highlight may be “Get Off the Internet,” but there’s not a dull or undynamic moment in it.

This Island, from 2004 (Feminist Sweepstakes came between, and I’ll fill in that blank later), is further post-punk obnoxion, lovable as fuck, sexy and mechanical at once, full on for body liberation without itself being very fleshy. It’s a real pop album: the longest song is under four minutes. It’s full of audio violence — sirens, battering samples and programmed rhythms, abrasive beats that sound like the scraping of dry skin. Ranges from the return of Terry Bozzio and Missing Persons (“After Dark”) to the invention of electro-soul (“Nanny Nanny Boo Boo”), from an anti-war protest collage (“New Kicks”) to a teenage football shout (“TKO”) that is clearly the millennial, illegitimate daughter of “We Got the Beat.” This is what democracy looks like / This is what democracy sounds like they chant on one track, managing not to sound tedious or self-congratulatory at it. And speaking of early 80s, they do a version of “I’m So Excited” that may be less theoretically excited than the Pointer Sisters’ original, but is certainly more listenable and therefore more practically exciting.

This Island is positive and puckish. It hits you with a bouncy hammer and smacks you with a rubber glove. It says I love you. It also says You make me sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick-sick!!! Which, oddly enough, didn’t conflict at all with the summer breeze caressing my neck.

* * * Obituaries * * *

Let us pause to wish well on the shade of June Pointer, who died from cancer April 11, surrounded by her sisters and other family. She’d been expelled from the group years ago for her recurrent drug habits, and the cancer claim sounds fishy to some, but that matters not at all now. To me she was, is and always will be one of the voices that gave us “Slow Hand,” one of the sweetest records ever.

TRAVELING WILBURYS
TONY SHERIDAN & THE BEAT BROTHERS
RINGO STARR
“Nobody’s Child”
The good-time supergroup (Harrison/Dylan/Lynne/Petty, minus the late Orbison) recorded the Cy Coben-Mel Foree country standard in 1990, as the title track of a charity album designed to raise funds for Romanian orphans. They did a touching heartfelt galumphing version that stuck close to the song’s country roots, that dried out lyrics so maudlin they were beyond maudlin:

As I was slowly passing an orphan’s home today
I stopped for just a little while to watch the children play
Alone a boy was standing and when I asked him why
He turned with eyes that could not see and he began to cry

Each of the grizzled star voices took its turn, and gave an old man’s sadness to the obscenity of children’s suffering.

In every town and village, there are places just like this
With rows and rows of children, babies in their cribs
They’ve long since stopped their crying as no one ever hears
And no one’s there to notice them or take away their fears

I went back and listened again to the first version I’d heard — Tony Sheridan’s. He recorded it in Hamburg in June 1961, backed by the Beat Brothers, aka the Beatles. Sheridan was doing his best to sound like Elvis, and getting so far into the charade that he was kicking the lines, giving them jazz and sex and stroke, forgetting what they were about. The disparity was — not immoral, exactly, only vaguely distasteful. Should you sing a song like this and sound like you’re enjoying it?

No mammy’s arms to hold me or soothe me when I cry
‘Cause sometimes I feel so lonesome I wish that I could die
I’d walk the streets of heaven where all the blind can see
And just like all other kids there’d be a home for me

Memory trips a trigger: hadn’t Ringo name-checked this tune in Volume 1 of The Beatles Anthology? Let us dig back in the archives . . . Ah, yes.

Ringo — Richie Starkey of Dingle Dale, the only Beatle who grew up truly poor, who had nearly died twice from painful internal illnesses before leaving his teens, who spent so long in the hospital the second time that returning to school stopped being an option; Ringo who had never complained about his early deprivations or youthful traumas as a child of war and want and sickness, but always taken with humor and grace the gifts that fortune bestowed; Ringo the sad clown, wise lad, accidental sage — “Nobody’s Child” had been his song.

In 1994, aged 54, Ringo sits for the Anthology interview. “Everybody has their party piece in Liverpool,” he says, remembering his boyhood. “You have to sing a song. My mother’s was ‘Little Drummer Boy’ she would sing to me. And I would sing ‘Nobody’s Child’ to her and she’d always cry. ‘I’m nobody’s child, Mum.’”

Does he cry as he sings? No. Being Ringo, he laughs, at the ceaseless wonder of life, the resilience of children.

I’m nobody’s child, I’m nobody’s child
Just like a flower I’m growing wild
No mama’s arms to hold me, no daddy there to smile
Nobody wants me, I’m nobody’s child

CHAS McDEVITT SKIFFLE GROUP with NANCY WHISKEY
“Freight Train”

The song, by Elizabeth Cotten, is a folk standard, a soulful lament. And sung by a gaggle of white Brits in full ’50s flourish, polished teeth and trimmed beards and pressed work-shirts, well-trained delivery and lip-balmed whistle, it is both catchy and haunting, pop-flavored and sorrowful.

 

STRANDED — The Countdown (11)

Backtrack 2
JAMES BROWN. Live at the Apollo, Vols. 1 & 2 (King). 1 is more famous, but 2 is more the epic document of legend. The 1962 set is hardly lackluster, and features far more fervid interaction between Brown and a hotted-up Apollo crowd. But the sound is thin and the editing between tracks unduly clumsy. Stevie Wonder’s 12-Year-Old Genius is its equal, in my ears. The later set, recorded in summer 1967, is a longer, fuller, more wrenching and pleasurable experience, with less audience presence but more talk from Brown, a duet with Marva Whitney on “Think,” and the height of passion on “I Wanna Be Around.” Brown’s music has stretched and tightened by now to its most innovative proportions: pre-maturity, pre-blaxploitation, pure stripped modernism. This is what his funk sounded like before anyone had caught up close enough to copy it, when there was literally nothing like it in the world. 1962 & 1968.

SOLOMON BURKE, “Cry to Me” (Atlantic). How could I have missed this? The soul sob is right down my street. This even sounds like a precursor of what I recently offered as a Greatest Record Ever? — Smokey’s “Don’t Think it’s Me,” from five years later. The rhythmic plucks and pops of a string section here sound exactly like those on the later record, although Smokey does them bolder and harder, far more dramatically. But this is nice, real nice. 1962.

Greatest Record Ever?
“The Only Living Boy in New York,” Simon & Garfunkel