Speed of Life

Monday, March 05, 2012

Something Like a Preface to My Review of the Songs on Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball

by Gregg Chadwick

"Wrecking Ball sounds like it's quite possibly Bruce’s best album in a quarter century, for what my opinion's worth. It's bracing and subversive and furious and sonically fearless. It's going to give voice to a generation. Certainly to an era. In that regard I'd put it shoulder to shoulder with Born to Run, Highway 61 Revisited, Exile on Main Street, London Calling, and American Idiot. Indelible. I hate hyperbole, but I've got to say I stand in awe of Bruce's ability to make music this angry and relevant and authentic at any stage of his career, never mind 40 years on. Thank God for him."
-Novelist Dennis Lehane

Bruce Springsteen's new album, Wrecking Ball (Listen to the full album streaming here), was officially released in Europe and Australia today and will make its debut in the U.S.tomorrow - March 6, 2012. Over the past two weeks I have been writing song by song reviews of the album and have found that readers from Italy, the Netherlands, France and the United States have linked to my essays. Thanks for the thoughts and comments from Bonzo at the Italian Springsteen forum Loose Ends, Human Touch at the French Springsteen forum Land of Hope and Dreams, No Surrender81 at the Springsteen fan site Backstreets, Judge Brown at the Springsteen tribute page Greasy Lake, and the Dutch writer Glory Cookie in his post De Gospel van Springsteen.

I also want to thank my brother Kent for the years of Springsteen related discussions and concerts. Our Springsteen connection goes way back - though I must say that I am the only son born in New Jersey. (My brother is a native Virginian.) We spent many of our summers visiting my grandparents in Montclair, Garwood, or Toms River. And we often searched in vain for the houses that my parents grew up in Newark. But it was our trips to the Jersey Shore that hold some of the most vivid memories. Aunt Jeanne lived in a small apartment in Asbury Park which we would visit at least once each summer, before we hit the creosote and saltwater taffy perfumed magic at the boardwalk. My brother and his friends would play Skee-Ball while I would gamble at the record arcades trying to win LP's. I was heavily into funk in those days as well as 60's soul and then added Bruce Springsteen to my playlist as soon as I heard the newly released single, Born to Run, as I drove my first car around the suburbs and into Washington DC to visit the museums, and attend classes at the Corcoran School of Art.

Gregg Chadwick
Under the El
30"x20" oil on linen 2012

A couple of years later, in the summer of 1978, I steeped myself in John Steinbeck novels and the paintings of Edward Hopper. My soundtrack was Bruce Springsteen's fourth album Darkness on the Edge of Town, which to me sounded like a distillation of Steinbeck, Hopper and Woody Guthrie.

I had just finished my freshman year at UCLA and this was my first summer on the Monterey Bay in central California. The pace of life was so much slower than Los Angeles or Washington DC and I found time for study and reflection in the hours after my temp job finished. I would go for a run through Point Lobos after work to clear my head and then would sit with East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath until the sun went down. I would paint late into the night trying to get these new inspirations onto canvas. I had a lot to learn but I was dogged and I let my failures lead me onto new paths.

Gregg Chadwick
Study for a Portrait of Woody Guthrie
16"x12" oil on linen 2012

The highways around Monterey were wide open in the late 1970's and the gas crisis wouldn't hit until after the fall of the Shah in Iran in 1979. Like a character in a Springsteen song I would drive to find out where I was going. Images that still need to be painted flooded in:

Early morning light on farm workers in the fields outside Salinas.
The crumbling docks of Cannery Row seemingly melting in the sea air.
Rows of US soldiers waiting their turn on the target line at Fort Ord.

On the 1st of July, I took Highway 101 up from the bay to Berkeley. I met my brother and a group of his friends at the edge of the UC campus and we wandered until we found the Berkeley Community Theater. Throughout my high school years in the suburbs of DC, my older brother Kent was studying at UC Davis and I cherished the moments we had together. Each time we reunited seemed like an epiphany. We talked and argued about life, art, politics, poetry, spirituality and music. We had seen a few concerts together on the east coast starting with a J Geils gig in Asbury Park. But neither one of us had seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play live. Until that night in Berkeley.

The concert was a revelation, almost a rock n' roll revival. But there was also an undercurrent of pain and empathy. Two songs stood out for me that night. The first was Springsteen's haunting, solo piano version of The Promise which became a sound that I tried to get into my paintings from that day forward. The second was Bruce and the E Street Band's electrifying version of Because the Night. I knew that Springsteen had penned the song and then given the not quite finished work to Patti Smith to complete and record. I took that song on as my romantic talisman. Somewhere down the line I knew I would find a partner who would feel the passion from those haunting lines and that searing music just as I did. My wife, MarySue, and I found each other in 2003 and our friend, the singer/songwriter Kelly Colbert performed a scorchingly hot version of Because the Night at our wedding on 7/7/07.

MarySue Greets Our Dear Friend Julian Murillo at Our Wedding 7/7/07
photo by Sabine Pearlman

So, please put on Wrecking Ball, turn it up loud and wander through my thoughts on the songs:

Song by Song Reviews of Wrecking Ball on Speed of Life:

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

Lady Gaga ‏ @ladygaga

Did ANYONE see SPRINGSTEEN on Fallon last night!!! Buy his new album. It is so genius its hard to even believe. Just mind-blowing passion.

Retweeted by brucespringsteen.net

jimmy fallon ‏ @jimmyfallon

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Death To My Hometown by Bruce Springsteen was probably the hardest anyone has ever rocked on our show. #wreckingball

Retweeted by brucespringsteen.net

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band with Tom Morello Play
Death to My Hometown on Late Night w/ Jimmy Fallon (3/2/12)

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band with Tom Morello Play

Jack of All Trades on Late Night w/ Jimmy Fallon (3/2/12)

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

with Tom Morello and The Roots

Play The E Street Shuffle on Late Night w/ Jimmy Fallon (3/2/12)

Bruce Springsteen Week Conclusion on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

(Entire Show - Friday, March 2, 2012)

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

Onstage and Backstage with Springsteen at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Parsing the Samples and Quotes on Wrecking Ball

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

Springsteen Visits Fallon: Streaming Videos

Stream Bruce's new album #WreckingBall in its entirety now at the newly redesigned Springsteen website: http://www.brucespringsteen.net

Don't Miss This Upcoming Event on NPR:

NPR Music will broadcast Bruce Springsteen's keynote speech from the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. The live webcast of that address will take place on NPR Music on March 15 at noon Central time.

Friday, March 02, 2012

We Are Alive

by Gregg Chadwick

We Are Alive

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

"Also, those are voices from history and other sides of the grave. If you listen to the record, I use a lot of folk music. There’s some Civil War music. There’s gospel music. There are ’30s horns in “Jack of All Trades.” That’s the way I used the music — the idea was that the music was going to contextualize historically that this has happened before: it happened in the 1970s, it happened in the ’30s, it happened in the 1800s… it’s cyclical. Over, and over, and over, and over again. So I try to pick up some of the continuity and the historical resonance through the music."
-Bruce Springsteen, Théatre Marigny press conference, Paris, February 2012

Gregg Chadwick
Ciudad de la Memoria
38"x38" oil on linen 2005
Michael and Renee Hertzberg Collection, Beverly Hills

The final track on Wrecking Ball, We Are Alive (Listen Here), is a folk hymn that weaves together death, sacrifice, memory, and transcendence. The song opens with the sound of a record needle scratching across vinyl - a nostalgic warmth that conjures up the history of recorded music. The sounds of We Are Alive bring us from Edison's wax cylinders to vinyl LP's to digital tracks. The words of We Are Alive lead us through the history of the struggle for human rights in the United States. Like a folk spirit cut loose from Dicken's A Christmas Carol, the singer of We Are Alive touches down in three stages of our country's life: the historical past of the 19th century, the recent past of 1960's Civil Rights era, and the contemporary reality of new immigrants trying to reach this land of promise.

We Are Alive's melody channels the trumpet riff from Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire as we open cinematically upon a dark scene:

There's a cross up yonder up on Calvary Hill

There's a slip of blood on a silver knife

There's a graveyard kid down below

Where at night did come to life

And above the stars, they crackle in fire

A dead man's moon throws seven rings

Well, we put our ears to the cold grave stones

This is the song they'd sing

We are alive

And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark

Our spirits rise to carry the fire and light the spark

To stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

Mitchell Friedman
The Path Between
monotype
43" x 31"
courtesy Mitchell Friedman*1

More than any other of Springsteen's songs, We Are Alive suggests a Southern Gothic world. The lyrics set us in a land neither living nor dead bringing to mind Edgar Allan Poe's haunting short story The Premature Burial. In Poe's story the main character is afflicted by a condition, catalepsy, in which he randomly falls into a death-like trance, and thus carries with him a continual fear of being buried alive.

Throughout the album Wrecking Ball, Springsteen tries to wake us from our national spiritual catalepsy. We, as a people, are asleep but not dead and need only to rise again to continue the struggles for labor rights, immigrant rights, and civil equality throughout our land.

Springsteen sings :

A voice cried out, I was killed in Maryland in 1877

When the railroad workers made their stand

Sixth Regiment Fighting its way through Baltimore

during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877

"Harper's Weekly, Journal of Civilization," Vol XXL, No. 1076,

Saturday, August 11, 1877

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 referenced by Springsteen in the above lines was arguably the key moment in the birth of the modern labor movement in the United States. The blood of the men and women cut down on city streets and country lanes across America catalyzed labor strikes and actions that woke up a citizenry yearning for a better life and hope in a depressed economy ruled by corporate giants that had bought the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes.

The actions of industrialists in this era and the corruption of Hayes and his cronies answer a deeply important political question. What happened to the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln? How did the GOP devolve into a party of privilege not progressiveness? The simple answer: the Republican party was bought off by Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad and in a perverse election deal sold off Abraham Lincoln's legacy of equality for all Americans by ending Reconstruction in the former Confederate States:

"Many Americans in 1877 believed their new president had reached the White House through fraud. Certainly Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, was not the man for whom a majority of voters had cast their ballots the previous year. Democrat Samuel Tilden overcame the Ohio governor in the popular vote but 20 disputed electoral votes from Florida and other states threw the election into theHouse of Representatives.
Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad reached a deal with Hayes: in exchange for a federal bailout of his troubled investment in the Texas and Pacific Railroad, the millionaire industrialist would deliver Congressional votes to Hayes. As a further inducement, the Republicans promised to end Reconstruction, a blatant betrayal of African Americans. Southern Congressmen deserted Tilden, handing the election to Hayes."*2

A bank panic on Sept. 18, 1873 disintegrated into a nationwide economic depression. "Weekly the layoffs, wage cuts, strikes, evictions, breadlines and hunger increased," wrote Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais in Labor’s Untold Story. As he promised to his financial and political supporters, President Hayes withdrew federal soldiers from the South and moved the forces to act as shock troops for the newly empowered corporate barons who were slashing wages across the board. Angry railroad workers took control of switches and blocked the movement of trains. As Harper’s Weekly reported the following month, "Governor Matthews evoked the aid of the national government. President Hayes responded promptly." Federal troops armed with Springfield rifles and Gatling guns arrived."

Even in the face of the overwhelming fire power arrayed against them, the railroad workers made their stand.

At this moment in We Are Alive, the folk spirit singer slides into the future and delivers us to the doorstep of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Its Sunday morning, September 15, 1963 and the Ku Klux Klan has just bombed the church killing four young African American girls.

Well, I was killed in 1963 one Sunday morning in Birmingham

"This murderous act shocked the nation and galvanized the civil rights movement. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley were dressed in their "Youth Sunday" best, ready to lead the 11:00 adult service at the church, which since its construction in 1911 had served as the center of life for Birmingham's African American community. Only a few minutes before the explosion, they had been together in the basement women's room, excitedly talking about their first days at school. The bombing came without warning.

Following the tragic event, white strangers visited the grieving families to express their sorrow. At the funeral for three of the girls (one family preferred a separate, private funeral), Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke about life being "as hard as crucible steel." More than 8,000 mourners, including 800 clergymen of both races, attended the service. No city officials braved the crowds to attend."*3

Mourners follow the coffin of a young church bombing victim during a funeral in Birmingham, Ala. in September 1963 The victim was one of four young girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church several days earlier.
Associated Press file photo

Now, Springsteen's folk spirit singer hovers in the current American Southwest at the unmarked grave of a group of immigrants who perished attempting to cross the border to provide better lives for themselves and their families while giving to our country the fruits of their labor.

Well, I died last year crossing the southern desert

My children left behind in San Pablo

Well they left our bodies here to rot

Oh please let them know

We are alive

Oh, and though we lie alone here in the dark

Our souls will rise to carry the fire and light the spark

To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

Let your mind rest easy, sleep well my friend

It's only our bodies that betray us in the end

I awoke last night in a dark and dreamy deep

From my head to my feet, my body had gone stone cold

There were worms crawling all around me

Fingers scratching at an earth black and six foot low

And alone in the blackness of my grave

Alone I'd been left to die

Then I heard voices calling all around me

The earth rose above me, my eyes filled with sky

We are alive

And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark

Our souls and spirits rise

To carry the fire and light the spark

To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

To stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

We are alive

We Are Alive introduces us to past victims in the continual struggle for justice, civil rights and a fair and equitable path to a better life. Springsteen illustrates that a shared history of sacrifice connects us, that we have been here before — countless graves hold the bodies from those who perished in 1877, in 1963, and now. Countless Americans have been gunned down or held back in chains in their pursuit of the elusive American Dream.

The ghosts in “We Are Alive” sing to us that there is hope to be found in the sacrifices of the past and the promise of the future. Though many perish, the Dream lives on. The song isn't a closing but instead a beginning…

Notes:

1. Mitchell Friedman's artwork is deeply moving. His website Mitchell Friedman Art is a treasure trove of passion, mystery and beauty. William Zimmer in The New York Times writes of his work: “Mr. Friedman’s artwork is also spiritual. A sense of epiphany, of an awesome realization of the glories of nature, permeates his art.”

2. The UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America) site provides invaluable information on the history and struggles of labor in the United States and I highly recommend spending time on their website to gather a clear history of the movement.

3. The website, We Shall Overcome, Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement, is a deeply moving and important history of the struggle for justice and equality in the United States.