{"id":120341,"date":"2018-01-17T11:00:22","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T16:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120341"},"modified":"2018-01-17T16:35:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-17T21:35:00","slug":"dont-weep-bruce-springsteen-cure-despair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/17\/dont-weep-bruce-springsteen-cure-despair\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t You Weep: The Bruce Springsteen Cure for Despair"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bruce Springsteen<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

One year down, three to go.<\/p>\n

Season one of the Trump unreality show was a fire that wouldn\u2019t stop burning, set against the apocalyptic backdrop of real California wildfires that consumed over a million acres in the fall. Huge tracts of psychic energy, funds of hope and goodwill, were consumed by the effort to make sense of what was happening to the nation, to respond meaningfully, and to maintain sanity. Millions ranted about the \u201carsonist in chief,\u201d yelled at their televisions, at their laptops, yelled on Facebook and Twitter or at protests in the street. Some, it is true, retreated into permanent Cat Video Land. But almost everyone was looking for evidence of hope.<\/p>\n

Twelve years ago, New Orleans was still on its knees after Katrina. I remember January 2006 well. Four months after the disaster, vast sections of the city were still mud logged and disfigured; citizens were still being pulled\u2014soaked, bloated, dead, stinking\u2014out of shipwrecked houses. The failure of the federally funded and constructed levee system, the Bush administration\u2019s bungled, ineffectual response, and, in the background, the ongoing disaster in Iraq made it feel as if the country were going off the rails.<\/p>\n

That spring, Bruce Springsteen played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. It remains probably the single greatest performance that I\u2019ve ever seen, by anyone. It wasn\u2019t just the music itself but the way Springsteen and the band grasped the moment, understood what the city needed, and delivered it to an audience made up largely of people who had lived through, and were still living through, disaster. For years, I\u2019ve wished for some kind of document of that afternoon, and now there is one. A company called Nugs.net\u2014do you know these guys?\u2014has just issued a two-disc\u00a0set of the entire concert,\u00a0Bruce Springsteen, Fair Grounds Race Course, New Orleans, April 30, 2006<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Somehow, the Jazz Fest producers had pulled the program together, even though the Fair Grounds Race Course, where the festival takes place, is located in an area that had badly flooded. New Orleans musicians such as Dr. John, the Meters, Kermit Ruffins, Irma Thomas, and Trombone Shorty, along with contingents of Mardi Gras Indians and brass bands, performed alongside\u2014and sometimes along with\u2014performers from outside the city,\u00a0such as Elvis Costello (who did a scorching set with the great Allen Toussaint), Bob Dylan, the Dave Matthews Band, Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon, and many others.<\/p>\n

On April 30, Springsteen took the stage as the last act of the day. He was breaking in a new band, and this was going to be its first public appearance. He called it the Seeger Sessions Band: they were drawing their repertoire from the kinds of politically charged folk music identified with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.<\/p>\n

I stood in the field in front of the stage along with thousands of others, and as the time for the performance approached, the stage filled up with a full horn section, several guitarists, two fiddlers, a pedal-steel setup, an accordion player, a banjo player, background vocalists \u2026 This was no E Street Band. Finally, the announcer introduced Springsteen, who came out, hoisted on an acoustic Gibson flat-top, and said, \u201cAll right, this is our first gig; let\u2019s hope it goes well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first musical sound was a moody, walking-tempo, minor-key barroom piano introduction. It wasn\u2019t really what you\u2019d expect to open a show. It went on for eight bars, no more, and then it trailed off. A lone fiddle took its place, warbling in that same troubled minor key for eight bars, and then it, too, trailed off. Then the horn section, unaccompanied, playing the same uneasy minor-key stuff, New Orleans style, but gathering in intensity. And as they came to the end of their eight bars, suddenly the entire band entered, rolling in over them, pounding like a tidal wave. It was overwhelming. And over that wave, Springsteen rode in, roaring the opening lines of an old spiritual,<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I could, I surely would
\n<\/em>Stand on the rock where Moses stood.
\n<\/em>Pharaoh\u2019s army got drownded,
\n<\/em>Oh, Mary don\u2019t you weep \u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I remember standing there stunned, with the hair on my arms standing up. Everyone seemed to be having the same reaction. We knew who \u201cpharaoh\u201d was. We fucking well<\/em> knew. Here was a voice saying not to weep, that help and retribution were on the way. When Springsteen sang, \u201cBrothers and sisters don\u2019t you cry \/ There\u2019ll be better times by and by,\u201d the force of the band, and the singer, lifted everything up: the stage, the audience, the fairgrounds, perhaps the entire universe, right then and there. Springsteen hadn\u2019t come just to entertain; he\u2019d come to raise the dead.<\/p>\n

The show went on with an energy that was beyond belief. They did a few songs from Springsteen\u2019s own songbook, radically reimagined\u2014a slow, New Orleans rhumba version of \u201cJohnny 99,\u201d and a flat-out big-band swing arrangement of \u201cOpen All Night,\u201d but the beating heart of the set consisted of folk songs, civil rights songs, outlaw ballads, anti-war songs: \u201cJohn Henry,\u201d \u201cOld Dan Tucker,\u201d \u201cJesse James,\u201d \u201cBuffalo Gals,\u201d \u201cWe Shall Overcome,\u201d \u201cEyes On The Prize.\u201d It felt, after five and a half years of the Bush presidency, like an attempt to reclaim what was good in the American vocabulary. Against all the vile catering to corporate greed, the history of slavery and racism, the warmongering and lies, against all that gray-suited death wish, it was a reassertion of the courage of the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women\u2019s movement, of the joy in music and dance. It was possibility itself: a great yes<\/em> in the face of all that stinking no<\/em>.<\/p>\n

About midway through, Springsteen introduced\u00a0with a few spoken remarks his reworking of a song recorded in the late\u00a0twenties by Blind Alfred Reed, \u201cHow Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?\u201d \u201cWe had a chance to travel around New Orleans yesterday,\u201d he said, \u201cfrom Lakeview to the Ninth Ward, and I think I saw sights I never thought I\u2019d see in an American city. The criminal ineptitude makes you furious.\u201d (The crowd cheered.) \u201cThis is what happens when political cronyism guts the very agencies that are supposed to serve American citizens in times of trial and hardship, and it\u2019s what happens when people play political games with other people\u2019s lives.\u201d He then dedicated the song to \u201cPresident Bystander.\u201d There is a video of this moment on YouTube, by the way.<\/p>\n