Hold Tight To Your Anger
Springsteen Gives Voice to the Working Class - Again 

by Al Hart,
Managing Editor, UE News

UE News
(United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America)
Independence Day 2012 issue

Yes, he's a huge rock star and he's a millionaire. He's been
filling arenas for nearly 40 years and selling records by the
millions. He owns a 378-acre horse farm.

But unlike politicians who try to "connect" with us with
stories about their grandfathers who long ago did real work,
Bruce Springsteen really does seem to remember where he came
from. The son of a bus driver from Freehold, New Jersey
started out writing songs rooted in working-class life, when
he sent us, in 1973, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. - the
aging Jersey Shore amusement park. His was the voice of young
workers who find moments of escape from alienated labor in
machines they control: "Some guys they just give up living and
start dying little by little, piece by piece. Some guys come
home from work and wash up, and go racing in the streets."

As Springsteen and the E Street band honed their talent as
pop-oriented rockers through the '70s and '80s, their songs
and albums, through Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born to Run,
The River, were populated by working class characters who
stories said so much about America. His bleakest portraits of
working-class life came in 1982's all-acoustic Nebraska, and
later in the similarly minimalist Ghost of Tom Joad (1995).
Although Reagan and his aides deliberately misinterpreted it
as an ode to jingoism, Born in the USA (1984) expressed the
perspective of Vietnam veterans who'd been used and then
discarded.

Throughout his career, Springsteen provided a voice to the
dispossessed. In 2001 he recorded "American Skin (21 Shots)"
about the shooting death of Amadou Diallo at the hands of the
New York police. He's given us powerful antiwar songs about
Iraq and Afghanistan, from a soldier's point of view - "Devils
and Dust" (2005) and "Last to Die" (2007). But with the 13
songs of his new CD, Wrecking Ball, Springsteen offers his
angriest and most militant protest against what's been done to
our country and our people by the greed of Wall Street.

Springsteen and the E Street Band opened this year's Grammy
Awards broadcast with the first song on this disc, "We Take
Care of Our Own," about a country that is failing its own
people. Springsteen asks where our values have gone -- the
eyes that see, the hearts with mercy --  but also, "Where's
the work that'll set my hands, my soul free?" Unemployment is
on his mind in many of these songs, including "Shackled and
Drawn," where he sings that freedom is "a dirty shirt, the sun
on my face and my shovel in the dirt." We're living in "a
world gone wrong," where the speculators and the bankers rule.
"Gambling man rolls the dice, working man pays the bill, it's
still fat and easy up on Banker's Hill."

"Jack of All Trades," built on a slow, repeated piano line, is
an understated masterpiece expressing the mix of emotions
people feel when survival becomes a daily struggle.
Springsteen's voice is that of a worker calmly resigned to
getting by on odd jobs - mowing lawns, cleaning gutters,
fixing engines. He repeatedly assures his spouse - and himself
- "we'll be all right." But within this acceptance of
"learning to make do," he finds hope that "the world's gonna
change", based on Jesus' call to "start caring for each
other." Then we see a hint of anger at "the banker man" who
thrives at the expense of the "working man." But it still hits
us with a jolt when the character declares: "If I had me a
gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight." Even that
revenge fantasy is expressed with seeming calm, and followed
by the song's refrain, "I'm a jack of all trades, we'll be
alright." To emphasize Springsteen's rebellious intent, the
song ends on a guitar solo by Tom Morello, formerly with Rage
Against the Machine and still with the Industrial Workers of
the World.

With some of the Irish instrumentation he picked up doing The
Seeger Sessions (2006) and Live in Dublin (2007), Springsteen
takes us back, 28 years later after Born to Run, to "My
Hometown." Sounding like some ancient ballad of England's
crimes against Ireland, "Death to My Hometown" describes a
different kind of aggression, one in which "no cannon ball did
fly, no rifles cut us down." But nonetheless, the "marauders
raided in the night" and "destroyed our families, factories
and they took our homes."

In the title song, Springsteen takes on the persona of Giants
Stadium, demolished in February 2010 - but his voice is soon
that of the working class. Throughout, he taunts an unnamed
foe to "take your best shot, bring on your wrecking ball." The
American working class has experienced more than our share of
wrecking balls over the past few decades.  The steel mills of
Pittsburgh, auto plants of Flint, and factories across the
country have fallen to the wrecking ball. For New Orleans
residents who survived Katrina, the next blow came from Bush's
Department of Housing and Urban Development, which in late
2008 tore down the best public housing in the country, for the
sake of private developers. After the banks foreclosed and
evicted the residents, they bulldozed thousands of homes in
cities like Detroit and Cleveland - entire blocks of single-
family houses - because they can't sell them, and they won't
let people live in them if it doesn't make a profit for the
banks. Economists used to write about capitalism's "creative
destruction", but now it just looks destructive.

Springsteen doesn't want us to forget or forgive. "Hold tight
to your anger," he sings three times, "and don't fall to your
fears." Working people have been battered by economic
hardship, over and over again, he reminds us in words from an
1854 song by Stephen Foster. "Hard times come, and hard times
go" - Springsteen repeats that line five times - "yeah, just
to come again." This is, to me, the most very powerful
sequence in a great song - one that can stand alongside a
handful of songs that have captured the economic pain endured
by workers: Yip Harburg's "Brother Can You Spare a Dime"
(1932), Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940), Bob Dylan's
"North Country Blues" (1964), and Marvin Gaye's "Inner City
Blues" (1971).

"Rocky Ground" calls the shepherd to "tend to your flock" - a
biblical reprise of the message of "We Take Care of Our Own."
And the Bible enables Springsteen to again condemn the
banksters, reminding us that Jesus chased this sort of people
out of the temple. If "Rocky Ground" is a sort of new gospel
song, "Land of Hopes and Dreams" is based on a very old one,
"This Train is Bound for Glory." But Springsteen's train
accepts everyone - "saints and sinners, losers and winners" -
and like the best of gospel, it lifts our spirits and restores
our hopes. "Dreams will not be thwarted, faith will be
rewarded."

In a review of Springsteen's European tour in early June, a
writer for London's Guardian called him "the last of the
protest singers." There is certainly no other big-time rock
star who has been on the side of workers as consistently as
Bruce Springsteen. And today he's expressing, like no other
major entertainer, the fears, hope and rage that we
legitimately feel. At a time when working people can use all
the help and all the inspiration we can find, Wrecking Ball is
a gift.

=====

ueTube

Explore the Music

by Al Hart,
Managing Editor, UE News

YouTube.com is an amazing resource that has many uses. You can
watch important speeches, and witness demonstrations you were
not able to attend. You can view documentary clips of
important historical events. And you can explore music, for
hours on end, following leads and your whims, as each  song or
artist reminds you of something else you want to see and hear.
And you can do it without spending money.

In light of our high praise for Bruce Springsteen's new CD
Wrecking Ball, reviewed on this page, the UE NEWS would like
to recommend YouTube clips of some of our favorite songs on
the disc, as well as songs that are referenced or served as
source material for the album.

The video for the first song, "We Take Care of Our Own",
certainly merits a look. You can see the official video here
http://youtu.be/-x8zBzxCwsM, and there are several live
versions - including the one with which Bruce and the E Street
Band kicked off this year's Grammy Awards broadcast.

Springsteen actually premiered the powerful title song in
2009, in a concert at Giants Stadium in farewell to that
sports coliseum, http://youtu.be/lqASHIMbkcg. The song quotes,
with great effect, an American classic written 108 years ago
by Stephen Foster, "Hard Times Come Again No More." See
Springsteen performing the Foster song, in a 2009 show in
England, at http://youtu.be/v6JoSruSCos. Of course many other
people have done this song - see the great Mavis Staples sing
it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ixbah9u234.

"Jack of All Trades" is another brilliant song - watch a live
version here http://youtu.be/k1zj9LdesNU. It includes the
lyric, "The banker man grows fat while the working man grows
thin" - an obvious reference to "I Ain't Got No Home in This
World Anymore" by Woody Guthrie, where Woody sang, "The
gambling man is rich and the working man is poor." Hear Woody
sing it here http://youtu.be/GTnVMulDTYA.

As mentioned in the review, Springsteen's song "Land of Hope
and Dreams" draws on the great gospel song "This Train is
Bound For Glory," which has been recorded by far too many
artists to list. You can find many versions on YouTube, and
here's an interesting 1977 rendition, in honor of the
recently-deceased Elvis Presley, by a "power quartet" of
Elvis' friends Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and
Roy Orbison: http://youtu.be/Wi7MFZ84uSM. Towards the end of
"Land of Hope and Dreams" it also quotes from "People Get
Ready," one of the most beautiful and best-known songs of
Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions. Check out that 1965 soul
classic at http://youtu.be/XJRxZibFQ2U.

====

[Many thanks to Al Hart for sharing this double column
celebrating the "independence music of our country" with
Portside.]

==========

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