The Cabernet Grapes of Wrath Tour '95, page 2
Those distances are pretty surreal. Bruce opened his recent show in Berkeley, California saying, "Silence played an important role when I wrote these songs so I'd appreciate it if you could keep quiet. Down in LA, their cell phones made me have to get heavy with some super models." I figured that was a crack indicating some awareness of the income bracket he was attracting, but it was probably just the truth. And when Springsteen introduced one song by saying that many folks are just a few paychecks away from homelessness, and that he'd found himself imagining not being able to care for his wife or help his kids -- I'm sorry, but I couldn't quite suspend that much disbelief, not while gazing at a guy who figured in the Forbes 500.
Finally, I don't know how important Springsteen thinks it is that the people he's evincing such profound sympathy for be reached or touched by these tunes where he impersonates their misery. I don't know if he hopes the songs will reach much beyond folks (like me) who pay their PBS pledges with airline mileage credit cards. But I couldn't help but think that Woody and Dylan made some effort to run with the folks about whom they wrote -- and to craft music in a vernacular they shared. Springsteen is more concerned with invoking his subject's plausible cultural and historical antecedents than their current tastes, needs, or concerns. (Hell, the folks he's singing about are probably listening to gangsta rap, Metallica, and Garth Brooks.) His Carveresque tales of desperation amongst the marginalized seem contrived from an uncomfortable distance, and I doubt that many of the songs' subjects dropped four Alexander Hamiltons for a chance to catch him in Berkeley.
In Preston Sturges' film "Sullivan's Travels," Joel McCrea plays a successful Hollywood director of screwball comedies who feels compelled by the Depression to make a serious Capra-esque film about social justice. Setting off disguised as a bum, he ends up jailed in a dismal Southern prison. At a rare screening for the prisoners, McCrea discovers that the anarchic humor of a cartoon provides the cons with glorious brief respite from their grim lives. McCrea learns first-hand that a dose of laughter and delight can offer the oppressed something they need far more than any earnest indictment of social ills.
Of course Sturges managed to have it both ways: crafting a gloriously improbable comedy with an astute social conscience. The point, though, is that a "rock" LP by the Boss stands a much better chance of appealing to the misfits chronicled on "Looking for the Ghost of Tom Joad," and offering them some visceral inspiration, than the mock-daguerrotypes on his current release. If seeing "The Grapes of Wrath" helped shape Springsteen's current LP, Landau ought to send him to "Sullivan's Travels" before he undertakes another.
What do you think -- is "Tom Joad" a dose of corporate folk from an out-of-touch millionaire rock star, or an earnestly written tribute to the misbegotten from a humble Jersey guy? Tell us in the Tom Joad topic in the Music category of Table Talk. If you haven't registered yet, now's your chance.
