If I had a hammer, I'd take it to Springsteen's new record

By Paul Mulshine
The Newark Star-Ledger
Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Let's do a little thought experiment here. We'll try to think up the most boring CD imaginable.

Barry Manilow does the Bee Gees' greatest hits?

John Tesh covers the Carpenters?

Wait, I've got it: Bruce Springsteen performs a collection of Pete Seeger songs.

Unfortunately, that last one is real. It was announced last week that Springsteen will be releasing an album of Seeger covers next month.

Crank up the coffee pot. Get out the No-Doz. The new Springsteen disc, "We Shall Overcome/ The Seeger Sessions," has the potential to be the single most boring event in rock'n'roll since, let me think for a minute, oh yeah, since Springsteen's last album. That was the one in which he did a bad imitation of the early Bob Dylan. The tour was so unexciting that toward the end the man whose band fills football stadiums was having a hard time filling movie theaters.

The reason for the empty seats was obvious. Springsteen may be a hell of a rocker but he is an awful folk singer. If you doubt this, I invite you to hunt down the Springsteen version of "We Shall Overcome" that is available on the Internet as a preview of the album to come. The first thing you will notice about it is that Springsteen is singing in a sort of generic middle- American drawl. The second thing you will notice is that he is singing out of tune. The effect is to create a false air of authenticity.

Seeger was just as bad in this regard. While posing as a humble hick, Seeger was in fact a Harvard dropout who adopted a folksy air as a means of inflicting his Marxist views on audiences. Dubbed "Stalin's songbird," Seeger sang these lyrics on a 1941 album by the Almanac Singers:

"Franklin D., listen to me,"You ain't a-gonna send me'cross the sea."

The album also included a ditty in which President Roosevelt was decried as an agent of banker J.P. Morgan because of his insistence on aiding the British in their struggle against Uncle Joe Stalin's noble ally. A week after the album's release, however, Hitler invaded Russia. The albums were pulled from the racks and a new one issued calling for the U.S. to get into the war.

I'd pay good money to hear Springsteen cover those Seeger songs. A complete retrospective of Seeger's work would remind Americans of just how thoroughly misguided the so-called Old Left was in the 20th century. Just what did these folkies find so attractive about Marxism? Whatever it was, it didn't carry over into the rock era. Seeger famously resisted Bob Dylan's move to electric guitars at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, saying, "If I had an ax, I'd cut the cable."

The cable remained intact, however, and Dylan escaped the world of fake folk music and entered the electric'60s. This was a wonderful era, an era when even Seeger tunes could be made listenable. The Beach Boys' transcendent version of "Sloop John B" apparently stemmed from Brian Wilson's having heard Seeger mangle the song. And then there was the Byrds' wonderful version of the Seeger song "Turn, Turn, Turn," the lyrics for which Seeger, who lacks any visible talent for either singing or songwriting, lifted directly from the Bible.

If Springsteen were planning that sort of a remake of the Seeger songs, this CD might be worth the effort. All evidence, however, is that Springsteen plans to drone on in that fake hick accent of his. His fans aren't happy. Every Springsteen fan I know dreads the thought of this disc. One wag on a Web site in Minneapolis created a spoof story headlined "Springsteen to release album of TV Song Covers." The article by Steve Perry quotes a bogus Boss telling the listener that the theme from "Green Acres," a 1960s sitcom about a Manhattan couple who moves to the country, "captures a strain of agrarian utopianism that has very deep roots in America."

The funny thing is, it does. The music of sitcoms is every bit as authentic as the "folk" music that emanated from Seeger's crowd. In both cases, you had a bunch of city slickers trying to figure out what goes on in the real America. Seeger at least had the common sense to imitate the true practitioners of authentic folk music -- Appalachian fiddle players, Mississippi Delta blues singers and the like. Springsteen imitates the imitator.

His fans would prefer if he would just imitate himself. The concert video he released with the 30th anniversary CD of "Born to Run" shows the band dressed like a bunch of pimps on a Saturday night. The look was perfect and so was the music.

Back then, Springsteen was supposed to be the future of rock'n'roll. It turned out he was just the present. And now he's the past.

Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist. He may be reached at pmulshine@starledger.com.