He turned You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch) into zydeco. He gave his ∺tlantic City an arrangement with banjo and fiddles.
He used every stock trick in the trade to make his performance of these hundred-year-old songs bigger than life. He had the four-piece marching band section complete with sousaphone braying and blasting over almost every chorus. He shamelessly dangled false endings at the crowd. In a short black jacket and vest he borrowed from Johnny Cash, Springsteen gave everything his own trademark full throttle treatment, rasping and exhorting his way through all but one of the 13 songs from the new album, along with a few retooled versions from his back catalog. With three or four guitars, an entire dixieland jazz horn section, banjo, accordion, steel guitar, keyboards, drums, bass, various other percussion, and as many as seven or eight people raising their voices in song, the Seeger Sessions Band didnt so much play the songs as overwhelm them.
Instead, Springsteen chose to rescue from elementary school songbooks the American folk ballads that lie at the core of Seegers repertoire and, indeed, all American folklore John Henry, Oh Mary Dont You Weep, ∾rie Canal, Jesse James. Like Seeger, Springsteen understands the power of the American myth and, in a day and age when right-wing evangelicals routinely appropriate the countrys most time-honored, fundamental emblems as their own, he seeks to reclaim and refresh some of the very values these songs represent. And, unfortunately, his songs have never been more relevant. He was a man who fought to save the environment before they even called it that. With the world in an uproar and the country going to hell, the time couldnt be better to resurrect some of Seegers fiercely left-wing sentiments, his anti-war songs, his union songs. A mere year after the acoustic noir of ∽evils & Dust, Springsteen is back in relative short order with another new project rummaging through the songbook of Americas great folksinger, Pete Seeger, still alive at age 87 to enjoy some of the fruits of this tribute from the his famous disciple.
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