Thanks for the kind words about my daughter, too. I worry about her, but they’re good girls, and have a great mother; she’ll make it through the bluesy seasons of her life, I’m sure.

The thing that really entrenched itself during the Baby boomers era is the Financialization of the Economy which Kevin Phillips ably describes in his books. Victory Culture and Finance conspired to cater an endless party that turned the Peace and Love Tokers into War and Consume Takers. Everything was a “lifestyle” as though life itself was a consumer product to be pitched and polled. Springsteen covers the joy and vigor as well as the dark underbelly of the times but lately, I’ve been wondering, despite how hard he works in concert and the fantastic enjoyment of them, if his albums have not become too overproduced and slick….quite unlike his concerts.

The Blues, on the other hand remain entirely authentic and are informing a new generation of musicians that are producing all kinds of interesting music that mashes up every manner of roots with current life. I even hear the accordion coming back and if that aint a throwback to folk traditions , I don’t know what is. So, it weren’t a total loss, we produced Rock and Roll and that baby, aint bad.

Something tells me the young lady will do just fine Russell. …farm, or no farm

For me, many of Bruce’s songs are about a restive longing for what’s been lost or left behind – which, seems for him to deeply reflect the loss of belonging to a place and the memories that places hold dear and fast. One example, not whitewashed or “nostalgicized,” but which emphasizes what is at once common and in the process of being lost, is a song from his album “Born in the USA”:

My Hometown

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I’d sit on his lap in that big old buick and steer as we drove through town
He’d tousle my hair and say son take a good look around
This is your hometown, this is your hometown
This is your hometown, this is your hometown

In `65 tension was running high at my high school
There was a lot of fights between the black and white
There was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a saturday night in the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come to my hometown
My hometown, my hometown, my hometown

Now main streets whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there aint nobody wants to come down here no more
They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back to
Your hometown, your hometown, your hometown, your hometown

Last night me and kate we laid in bed talking about getting out
Packing up our bags maybe heading south
Im thirty-five we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good
Look around
This is your hometown

___________

Last night Bruce stopped playing at one point to call on the audience to support a local DC food pantry for the indigent – calling on the people in attendance to care for those in their midst. It was a great departure from the usual celebrity call for us to donate money for people distant and unseeable by us in some international plight, who surely deserve what help we can give them but distract us from things immediately present (Caleb’s recent post points this out with great acuity). That, to me, was the essence of the Boss’s sense of rootedness, a man who never seems to have forgotten that he’s basically just a working Jersey stiff. What a great night….