Speed of Life: Dorothea Lange

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Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Jack of All Trades

by Gregg Chadwick

Jack of All Trades

(Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball)

"If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."

-Kurt Vonnegut

Giorgio de Chirico
The Enigma of the Hour
oil on canvas 1911
Private Collection

A synthesizer wash, plaintive piano, and haunting horns like those found in Michele Lacerenza's Johnny's Theme accompany the world weary singer in Bruce Springsteen's Jack of All Trades (Listen Here). The aural landscape is bleak. The world in Jack of All Trades seems as if dust blowing in from the 1930's has choked off all color and most of life in the small towns and suburbs of the US.

A hardscrabble emotional landscape remains with little in the way of work or meaning. The only wage to be found is in odd jobs and small errands. I am reminded of the haunting, empty spaces in Giorgio de Chirico's spare cityscapes and photos of the Great Depression by Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange.

Farmer and sons, dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936
Photographer: Arthur Rothstein
Courtesy The Library of Congress

I'll mow your lawn, clean the leaves out your drain

I'll mend your roof to keep out the rain

I'll take the work that God provides

I'm a Jack of all trades, honey, we'll be alright

Unemployed men vying for jobs at the American Legion Employment Bureau

in Los Angeles during the Great Depression.

I'll hammer the nails, and I'll set the stone
I'll harvest your crops when they're ripe and grown
I'll pull that engine apart and patch her up 'til she's running right
I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be alright

Gregg Chadwick
Call and Echo
16"x20" oil on linen 2011

Springsteen's song is written from experience - memories of his father's humiliation at being laid off, unemployed, and unable to find a job. In a sense Springsteen is writing from his father's point of view and putting into musical terms a story of self worth and resilience. As a father, I worry about my son and family and strive as hard as I can to provide for them. I know the pain of losing a job and moving forward - always searching for the next thing and never knowing whether it will pay off.

Gregg Chadwick
Mare e Ombra
24"x18" oil on linen 2012

A hurricane blows, brings a hard rain
When the blue sky breaks, feels like the world's gonna change
We'll start caring for each other like Jesus said that we might
I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be alright

The banker man grows fat, the working man grows thin
It's all happened before and it'll happen again

Now sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood
Here we stood the drought, now we'll stand the flood
There's a new world coming, I can see the light
I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be alright

Murray Anderson in 1942
Courtesy Geoff Micks at Face in the Blue

Something breaks and Jack of All Trades veers ominously into a world of violence and retribution:

So you use what you've got, and you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight
I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be alright
I'm a Jack of all trades, we'll be alright

The song bleeds into a mournful guitar solo by Tom Morello. The horns join in. Is it a funeral march? Or a break in the storm?

Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello

Toward Los Angeles, California. 1937
Photographer: Dorothea Lange
Courtesy: The Library of Congress

Follow Up:

Shawn Poole at the all things Bruce Springsteen geared website Backstreets.com reported -

Springsteen thanks fans by text
As reported previously, this week Dave Marsh began hosting a special daily one-hour edition of Live From E Street Nation on E Street Radio, in addition to his regular two-hour gig every Friday (which also will air in the 10 a.m - noon slot tomorrow). Dave's show has been previewing a track each day from Wrecking Ball (the same track released each day online in streaming audio), and taking calls from listeners to express their reactions. Yesterday's "Jack of All Trades" show elicited many powerful, moving comments as fans from various walks of life spoke, often through tears, about how relevant this new ballad is and how eloquently it addresses their own personal experiences. Just before beginning today's E Street Radio premiere of "Death to My Hometown," Marsh told listeners that he noticed his cell phone vibrating towards the end of yesterday's show. After he went off the air, he saw that he had been texted by the composer of "Jack of All Trades" himself: "Wow! What a show... Thank these folks for me. It was an honor hearing their stories. –B."

More Song by Song Reviews of Wrecking Ball:

1. We Take Care of Our Own

2. Easy Money

3. Shackled and Drawn

4. Jack of All Trades

5. Death to My Hometown

6. This Depression

7. Wrecking Ball

8. You've Got It

9. Rocky Ground

10. Land of Hope and Dreams

11. We Are Alive

More at:

"Bruce Springsteen's widescreen vision of America on Wrecking Ball is filled with terror, tension, tenacity and above all else, triumph which may not replenish your bank account, but it will replenish your soul."

-Anthony Kuzminski, Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball, antiMusic

"What was done to my country was un-American."

Shackled and Drawn

Jack of All Trades

Death to My Hometown

From Down Under: Sean Sennett Talks With Springsteen About Wrecking Ball

All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

The Working Man's Voice - The Wall Street Journal

A More Chaste Review of You've Got It by Jonathan Lack

Parsing the Samples and Quotes on Wrecking Ball

Bruce Springsteen, Théatre Marigny press conference, Paris, February 2012

Death to My Hometown

by Gregg Chadwick

Death to My Hometown

(Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball)

Wisconsin Hometown
photo by Gregg Chadwick

Last year Bruce Springsteen took a turn as guest vocalist on the Boston based Irish American punk band The Dropkick Murphys' version of Peg O' My Heart. They played Boston's House of Blues together in March 2011 and the sound seems to have carried over into Springsteen's rollickingly powerful Celtic inspired song Death to My Hometown (Listen Here).

The Dropkick Murphys and Bruce Springsteen
House of Blues, Boston, Mass 2011

Like Springsteen, The Dropkick Murphys have been influenced by Woody Guthrie, going as far as using Guthrie's unpublished lyrics as the basis for their song I'm Shipping Up to Boston which Martin Scorsese used masterfully in his film The Departed.

We Stand With Wisconsin
(Madison, Wisconsin 2011)
photo by Gregg Chadwick

Inspired by Guthrie's progressive politics, The Murphys were involved with the Wisconsin Union solidarity movement last year. Their song Take 'Em Down is a pro-union romp that would sound right at home on Wrecking Ball. Tom Morello, whose powerful guitar solos provide a sonic edge to Wrecking Ball, also was influential in backing the protestors gathered in Madison, Wisconsin in February 2011. Morello's deeply political album from last year, World Wide Rebel Songs, can be seen as a harbinger for Springsteen's Wrecking Ball.

Gregg Chadwick
Drum Taps
24"x24" oil on linen 2011

In Death to My Hometown, Bruce Springsteen combines the influence of The Dropkick Murphys and Tom Morello with what Greil Marcus has called "the old, weird America".

The song starts with a booming martial drum beat accompanied by penny whistle and a ghostly looped choir sampled from Alan Lomax's field recording of the Sacred Harp Singers' version of The Last Words of Copernicus.

Oh! No cannonballs did fly, no rifles cut us down

No bombs fell from the sky, no blood soaked the ground

No powder flash blinded the eye, no deathly thunder sound

But just as sure as the hand of God, they brought death to my hometown

They brought death to my hometown, boys.

In Yonkers, Jacqueline Borrero says the payment on her family’s home is $4,800 a month,
up from $4,000 last May. The loan will rise to $5,100, starting in November.
“We’re really scared,” she said.

October 2007, The New York Times
photo by George M. Gutierrez for The New York Times

No shells ripped the evening sky, no cities burning down

No armies stormed the shores for which we'd die

No dictators were crowned

I awoke from a quiet night, I never heard a sound

Marauders raided in the dark and brought death to my hometown, boys

Death to my hometown

A sign leans on a fence at a new Occupy Oakland encampment at a foreclosed property on November 22, 2011 in Oakland, California. About a dozen Occupy Oakland protestors set up an encampment on the grassy area of a foreclosed property after Oakland police shut down three different Occupy encampments over the past week, including the biggest one that was in Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of Oakland City Hall.

November 21, 2011 - Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America

They destroyed our families' factories and they took our homes

They left our bodies on the plains, the vultures picked our bones

So listen up, my sonny boy, be ready when they come

For they'll be returning sure as the rising sun

Now get yourself a song to sing and sing it 'til you're done

Yeah, sing it hard and sing it well

Send the robber barons straight to hell

The greedy thieves who came around

And ate the flesh of everything they found

Whose crimes have gone unpunished now

Who walk the streets as free men now

Springsteen's Death to My Hometown is not just a lament for what has been lost, but also a musical call to action to gather the 99% together and to bring Wall Street and the pushers of unjustly weighted loans to justice. As I listen to the finale of Death to My Hometown, the chorus begins to shift into the massed crowd in the Italian painter Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's monumental work, The Fourth Estate. Coupled with Springsteen's powerful music, Volpedo's painting provides an inspirational reference for international camaraderie and action. I am reminded of the powerful words of Martin Luther King Jr., "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

We are not alone.