How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live

Our second cultural excursion of the weekend was a Saturday night trip to Wembley Arena to see Bruce Springsteen and the Seeeger Sessions Band. This is a big band he put together to record his last album, which was a tribute to the songs popularised by Pete Seeger in the 1950's. Seeger is pretty right-on but in a slightly nerdy Sunday-school way, it is alleged that he wanted to cut the power to Bob Dylans electric performance at the Cambridge Folk festival in 1965, which as a reaction to what is considered to be a major turning point in the development of contemporary music is less than radical. The band was huge, waistcoats, neck-scarves, braces and boots, trombone, banjo and accordians galore. This was an American musical history lesson: New Orleans dixie-land jazz, western swing, baber-shop harmony, blue-grass, big band boogie-woogie and slave ship spirituals, and that was just the first song.

In fact the first song was a re-invention of 'Blinded By The Light' as a bluesy/jazzy rocker. Not only did Bruce bring new life to the song, but it seemed that if he wanted to he could have changed the course of his career, and re-tooled his entire back-catalogue in the same style, without losing any it's Springsteenesque qualities, such was the power and glory of this band, and Springsteen's belief in these traditional musical forms. One of Springsteens strengths is the powerful dynamic arrangements his songs take on in a live setting, where the climaxes are held and drawn out with an almost unbearable tension before a sublime release. Applied to the wide variety of a 35 year back catalogue this approach puts Springsteen at the peak of the list of live performers of rock music. However applied to this much more limited repetoire the musical build-up occasionally seemed histrionic, and the lack of tonal/textural variety began to show. He threw in some more re-interpretations of old songs, 'Atlantic City' was excellent, but 'Growing Up' felt a little forced, but the set cried out for a solo spot, or at least a stripped down section. At one point, at the end of 'Lay Me My Money Down', he led the band off-stage, and I thought this would happen, but then they all trouped awkwarldy back on? Just another theatrical gesture.

There's no doubting the timeless power of some of these songs. In 'Mrs. Mcgrath' the lines 'All foreign wars I do proclaim, live on blood and a mothers pain' may have been written about the Napoleonic war, but are equally applicable to Iraq, or when Seeger would have sung them, to Viet-Nam. It is that transferrability that is the best thing about this 'experiment' of Springsteen's, that songs written many generations passed, are still relevant today, and still have something to offer an audience in 2006, albeit a rather long in the tooth crowd such as us. Not all of the songs had the same degree of resonance, 'Froggy Went A Courting', however passionately it is performed is still a nursery song.

There was also a great sense of optimism following the mid-term election results, and hearing this band and this musical history, actually gave me some hope that there may be enough decent folk in the US to turn things around.