Music Review: Bruce Springsteen With The Sessions Band - Live In Dublin

(Deluxe CD/DVD Edition)
Written by Glen Boyd
http://blogcritics.org
Published June 07, 2007

As big a Bruce Springsteen fan as I am — and I've seen the man in concert 32 times — I was not exactly crazy onboard for the Seeger Sessions project when it was first announced last year. I just figured that after a year of Springsteen doing the acoustic thing on the Devils & Dust album and tour, that he'd got the folk bug out of his system. Like a lot of Springsteen fans, I was ready for some E Street Band action.

So, the last thing I wanted or expected in 2006 was what sounded suspiciously at the time to me like another round of Springsteen getting his folk on. To me, it seemed too much like another "vanity project." But when I voiced that opinion over on the message boards at Backstreets Magazine, I was damn near chased out of town by angry Springsteen fans.

Seems some of those folks knew something I didn't. And it turned out, they were right.

One listen to the joyous noise made on the track "O' Mary Don't You Weep," and any doubts I had about The Seeger Sessions were wiped clean off the map. In a gruff voice reminiscent somewhat of a born again Tom Waits, Springsteen summons all the fire and brimstone of Moses himself as he belts out the lines about how "Pharoah's army got drownded" while his gospel army of singers and musicians wail on in rapturous delight.

As my fellow Blogcritic Lisa McKay put it in an email just the other day, "'O' Mary' kicks ass." Yes it does, Lisa.

Live In Dublin, the new concert CD/DVD document from last year's Seeger Sessions tour is worth owning for the inclusion of that track alone. Although this album comes in both CD and HD-DVD only versions, your best bet is to spring for the deluxe version which includes the entire 23 song performance on both the DVD and 2 CDs. This is a concert that needs to be seen as much as heard.

The setlist here runs the gamut from the Springsteen Songbook to the Smithsonian. You get the "Seegerized" versions of Springsteen classics like "Atlantic City," "Blinded By The Light," and "Growin' Up." You also get well chosen covers from the folk tradition like "We Shall Overcome," straight up Dixieland jazz in the form of "When The Saints Go Marching In," and even spirituals like "This Little Light Of Mine."

In performing these songs, The Sessions Band (shortened here from its original "Seeger Sessions Band" moniker) draw from multiple uniquely American music traditions including New Orleans Jazz, Southern Gospel, and even Roadhouse Blues to create a ruckus that is quite unlike anything you have ever heard. In their own way, these guys make every bit the noise with their banjos, trombones, and fiddles that the E Street Band does with their own guitars and drums. Like those legendary E Street shows, the crowd also gets into the act quoting entire song verses in unison. And Springsteen himself appears to be having the time of his life here.

The highlights on this set are too numerous to mention. They include a reworking of Springsteen's "Open All Night" where the stark number from Nebraska becomes a boogie-woogie workout, complete with a mid-section featuring four female vocalists (led by Patti Scalfia) trying to out doo-wop four male vocalists doing their best to keep up. Bruce gets into his best tent-revival preacher's mode here leading the call and response.

"Long Time Comin" from Devils And Dust gets a surprisingly straight treatment here - albeit with a full band featuring horns, fiddles, and the rest. One of the best songs from that album, it sounds great here in a full-on band arrangement which has me whetting my lips to hear it again with the E Street Band. By the time of "Pay Me My Money Down," the crowd is eating out of Bruce's hand, continuing to sing even after the song has ended. The DVD also has an impromptu, uncredited backstage performance of "Cadillac Ranch."

The Seeger Sessions tour never played my hometown of Seattle, making it the first Springsteen tour I've missed since I first saw him on the 1975 tour for Born To Run. Experiencing this great performance on both CD and DVD makes me realize just how great a show I missed. It also shows a side of Springsteen that has never before been revealed.

Live In Dublin really does need to be seen as well as heard.

You'll find music journalist and freelance raconteur Glen Boyd sharing his Thoughtmares about everything from music to politics to professional wrestling at his blog The World Wide Glen: Welcome To My Thoughtmare. In his alter-ego as "Disco Glen," Mr. Boyd is also the undisputed king of the dancefloor.

Springsteen's Dublin live set as mighty as the real thing



By BEN WENER
The Orange County Register
June 08, 2007

Naturally I was planning on reviewing Bruce Springsteen’s new Live in Dublin set – but then I remembered I already had, more or less, when I saw him and his Seeger Sessions Band a year ago at the Greek (pictured above, by Kelly A. Swift). It isn’t the same exact set list, I realize – we got “Ramrod” and "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)," the Irish got “Blinded by the Light” but not “Bring 'Em Home” – and the difference between audiences is night and day. Now that I can hear the Boss’ Super Hootenanny appreciated by an enthusiastic crowd’s roar of recognition – not to mention hearty singing – I’m more intensely aware just what a stuffy lot I was sitting among at the Greek.

As if there’s a comparison, the uptight Hollywood elite vs. a sea of reverent-but-reveling Irish. And yet that L.A. show – easily among the Top 3 live performances I witnessed last year – still resonates with me, deeper and deeper the more I play the live set. The boisterous crowd noise of Live in Dublin just colors in the framework holding what I recall.

And I am listening to it repeatedly, by the way, not watching it. Happy though I am to have the DVD – it’s riveting, alternately starkly lit and warmly colorful – I’m getting much more out of the performances, finding finer nuances and a more vast sense of space, without the visuals to distract. As a live recording, it’s another mighty, masterful addition to Springsteen’s officially released canon, one that very likely will come to stand as one of the most significant moments in his career.

Beyond that, and the fact that I’d grade it an A, everything else I’d say about what I hope isn’t a one-time-only attraction is contained in last year’s account.

[Speaking of last year's account...here it is: - jtf]

Meet the old boss
Review: Springsteen's breathtaking Greek debut finds him achieving a new peak in Americana revivalism.



By BEN WENER
The Orange County Register
Tuesday, June 6, 2006

Hyperbole comes quick and easy when discussing Bruce Springsteen. It's a fool's trap, of course: Monday night's tremendous performance with his momentary Seeger Sessions Band was just another show on just another tour.

So catch me as I fall into a pit of shameless adulation, for I've never seen anything quite like what I witnessed when the Boss of Brotherly Love's Traveling Salvation Show filled the stage at the sold-out Greek Theatre, marking his debut at the legendary venue.

Heck, I'd go so far as to say that Springsteen has taken something very old – folk music in its purest but also broadest sense – and turned it into a sprawling, free-wheeling, resoundingly profound hootenanny unlike most anyone has seen since these things went out of fashion in the '60s.

You could say Springsteen's entire career has been leading to something like this. "Something like what?" however, is difficult to answer. He himself doesn't have a satisfactory description. Introducing "Ramrod" – one of a half-dozen remarkably restructured originals that peppered a set otherwise devoted to his album "We Shall Overcome" – Springsteen dubbed his new version a combination of "Tex-Mex, ska-polka and punk-funk."

Punk, maybe not. Funk, definitely, though there wasn't nearly as much funkiness as came through in the Prince-ly guitar riff and Stax/Volt groove (replete with ahhh-oop-oop backing bits) that he applied to radical rearrangements of "Johnny 99" and "Atlantic City," the most immediate songs off 1982's forbidding folk opus "Nebraska."

To that list of musical strains, you could add Cajun gumbo, Irish lilt both dark (the moving antiwar ballad "Mrs. McGrath") and waltzingly lovely (as in a reworking of "If I Should Fall Behind"), Texas swing, blues, bluegrass, loads of gospel and tons of ragtime and New Orleans Dixie jazz.

That's a far larger stew than Pete Seeger ever concocted, but Seeger's spectre hasn't been raised by this project to be cloned. His presence is felt in the spirit of these revisionist proceedings – the historical song selections, for instance, and the atmosphere of political protest that Seeger carried forth after Woody Guthrie.

Statements abounded, as you might have expected. Some were directed locally, as when Springsteen briefly drew attention to the plight of Los Angeles' South Central Farmers. Others were more philosophical: Leading into the uplift of "Jacob's Ladder," he warned the modern, contented crowd, "Ain't no carpool to heaven. Ain't no backstage pass to heaven. We're all climbing Jacob's ladder rung by rung" – placing an even greater emphasis on the final line of its chorus, "We are brothers, sisters all."

But Springsteen aimed his most pointed commentary at two targets: the war and the destruction and botched recovery of New Orleans, where this velvet-and-chandelier-draped Seeger Sessions attraction premiered a month ago at the annual Jazz & Heritage festival.

"If you're a musician, it's pretty sacred ground," he said of the Crescent City, while recalling the sight of its citizens "torn from their homes, sent off to make their way. You never think you're gonna see something like that. But we have.

"It'll take such a long time and so much national attention for (people there) to get back on their feet. Check your short attention spans on that one."

He dedicated the next song – the Depression-era "How Can a Poor Man Stand in Such Times and Live?," given an authoritative Band-like treatment – to President Bush, or "President Bystander," as he called him in New Orleans. Elsewhere he has used "My City of Ruins" to kick off encores, but here he tackled the war head-on in another dusted-off folk staple, "Bring Them Home." "If you love this land of the free," he sang, "bring 'em home, bring 'em home / Bring 'em back from overseas."

Those were the most overt moments in a charged performance that otherwise let music do the talking. Whereas Neil Young has been dutifully hitting people over the head with his latest treatise and Paul Simon has remained esoteric about his feelings, Springsteen has (once again) said it best – with conscientious patriotism, subtlety, beauty, humanity and the depth that comes from exploring roots of at least half of this country's two centuries of popular music.

Faced with these times, well, "What can a poor boy do but play in a ragtime band?" he joked at one point – and what a band it is. There are 17 players in all, and in a show of solidarity Springsteen strides on stage amid them, shrouded in darkness, careful not to steal the show.

Frankly, he rarely does. More so than when he's with the E Street Band (from which pianist Roy Bittan showed up for the finale, as Nils Lofgren had two nights before in Phoenix), Springsteen here seemed like one more old-timey player who had simply been voted leader because, well, he's got that voice.

On any given number, his quartet of horns (tuba, trumpet, tenor sax and, on trombone, Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg of the Max Weinberg 7) would easily steal his thunder with infectious cacophony. Likewise, whenever guitarist Marc Anthony Thompson (who records as Chocolate Genius) filled Little Steven's shoes, the audience was duly rapt, taken with the soulful power of his voice on a verse of "Eyes on the Prize" and the counterpart he brought to an elegiac, show-closing rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In."

These are "songs you start out not being able to hear," Springsteen explained. "They've become so much a part of the landscape, you drive right past 'em." So much so that he mistakenly assumed, even on an anthem such as "We Shall Overcome," that a typically staid L.A. crowd would remember the melodies and words without prompting. More than once he chided the star-studded assemblage for its timidity (though Tom Hanks, in the third row, was fully animated and wailing).

Indeed, the audience's reaction was sad at first, for though fans seemed rightly astonished at the breathtaking sound, they didn't seem to feel the celebratory spirit that must have skaken people in New Orleans to their foundations. Eventually, by the time of "My Oklahoma Home," the crowd responded – and got on its feet for good, dancing exultantly as it should have from the get-go.

Clearly that's part of Springsteen's intention: fun. He's never had so much in years. And he's never connected the dots of both his own music and that of generations before him so superbly. All along he's been about revivalism; preacher-man shtick has been part of his persona since '75. But his take-'em-to-church approach intensified after 9/11 (obviously) and has been deepening ever since.

Now, he's hit upon something that unfurls like an American tapestry. I'd say it was the peak of his role as a synthesist of heritage music, as he's always been. But, more creatively restless and passionate and vision-filled at 56 than he was at 36, there's no telling what he'll conjure next.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2248 or bwener@ocregister.com.

ROOTS

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN WITH THE SESSIONS BAND
Live In Dublin (Columbia)
****

It was inevitable that when his obsession with classic American pop and rock faded, or when he outgrew it, Bruce Springsteen would find a way to extend his musical life by plunging wholeheartedly into the American folk music repertoire, and gleefully reinvent himself as the biggest, baddest, folk singer on the planet. Hence last year's earthy living-room recording The Seeger Sessions and this extraordinary live concert set featuring an enormous band capable of embracing a vast range of musical styles, from Appalachian ballads to New Orleans trad jazz. It's American folk theatre on a grand scale, crude, energetic, loud and sentimental, and impossible to ignore. Top track: "Pay Me My Money Down," a swampy, Calypso-Cajun singalong stew with bold brassy trimmings.

Greg Quill
The Toronto Star
June 12, 2007


Bruce Springsteen: Live in Dublin
3 and 1/2 Stars

Last year' s Seeger Sessions was cut in just three days with a twelve-piece band that hadn't played together before. This Dublin stop, taped at the tail end of a seven-month tour, finds Bruce and the band going at the same material with a raw gusto that connects American traditions: mountain string bands, whorehouse Dixieland jazz, juke-joint rockabilly, Western swing and E Street soul. Across two CDs drawn from three concerts, Springsteen rips up old folk songs and revises nine slices of his back catalog – "Blinded by the Light" is yoked to Gypsy violin (strange, not wondrous); "Highway Patrolman" is fleshed out as a country weeper (fantastic, maybe definitive). At home, the Sessions Band had trouble selling out Asbury Park. Overseas, they were greeted as heroes, and this is the proof of their heroism.

ANDY GREENE

Rolling Stone

(Posted: Jun 11, 2007)


Bruce Springsteen Bellows on New CD

By Douglas Lytle

Bloomberg.com

Bruce Springsteen and the Big Sessions band June 13 (Bloomberg) -- Bruce Springsteen is back, with all his usual passion and musicianship -- though little of the voice of the Boss at his best.

His new CD ``Live in Dublin'' (Sony Music) was taped at the end of a long tour through the U.S. and Europe.

This live recording and DVD is meant to document Springsteen's 2006 project with the big Sessions Band, which set out to interpret Pete Seeger's music before expanding to take in traditional American music and Springsteen's own catalog.

The energy is high, the musicianship smooth and assured and the passion great. Still, Springsteen's voice appears to be failing him on the CD, perhaps the result of tour fatigue. He is forced into a raspy bellow, especially on ``How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,'' which was covered to better effect on a separate version released last year.

The album works best on the quieter numbers, including ``O Mary Don't You Weep'' and ``Further on Up the Road.'' I saw several of the 2006 European shows and have to wonder whether this was the best evening to document for posterity.

The DVD, sold separately or as a combo, was apparently edited for low-attention-span Blackberry addicts, because its choppy montage is chaotic and annoying.

What ever became of long, steady shots in music films? It only diminishes the joy of seeing the band work together in what were wild rave-ups. Ultimately, this record and video are placeholders until we get something fresh.


To contact the writer of this review: Douglas Lytle at dlytle@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 13, 2007 01:20 EDT