Bruce Springsteen: "Shackled And Drawn"

"Shackled And Drawn."  What does the phrase mean?  It sounds great, fits the tune, evokes the requisite Americana, but what does it mean?

Bondage, that's what it means.  We're chained up so we can't move, and dragged so we can't not move.  We're back on the chain gang.  The music takes us there, too:  after a modicum of techno-shuffle we get what could be the sound of sledgehammers on stone, breaking up rocks for another Southern highway.  We're in Alan Lomax territory here. 

Of course, this being Bruce, he's going to try to free us slaves, redeem us from our bondage, and so the chain-gang rhythm is shotgun-married to a sprightly country-Celtic jig, fiddle and mandolin and Fairport Convention guitar twiddling, not to mention a celestial choir, all giving way in the end to some tent-revival testifying.

The Gospel:  that's how we know we're in bondage.  The singer wakes up one morning, takes stock of his situation "midway through this life's journey" (sez Dante), "another day older, closer to the grave" (sez Bruce), and realizes that he's in bondage.  Did somebody chain him up in the night?  Or has he always been shackled and drawn, and just now knows it?

And who's running this chain gang?  Who's sitting high on the horse, toting a shotgun, daring us to try and spree (like the guy in "Easy Money")?  The "gambing man" who sits high "up on Banker's Hill" where "the party's going strong."  You've seen them:  the people on the balcony drinking champagne in this video.  Slave drivers, every one of them.

Revival.  That's how we know we're in a "world gone wrong."  If that means "I can't be good no more, not like I did before," then whose fault is that really?  In other words, "how can a poor man stand such times and live"?

Bruce Springsteen: "Easy Money"

Bob Dylan once sang, "Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you king."  That bit of inimitable pith is the text of Bruce's sermon in this song.

It's sung by a guy who wants to go out and knock over banks for a good time, for a lark on a date, who wants to indulge his inner demon in some rape and pillage. But who also knows full well that if he, as a poor man, does this, he's subject to vilification, arrest, torture, prison rape, and starvation administered by the very same forces that, as rich men, can do the same thing and get off scot free.  That have done it, to all of us, and have gotten off scot free. 

It gives us a country - the country we live in, the country of the verses in "We Take Care Of Our Own," rather than the chorus - in which cheating, lying, stealing, gambling, making easy money the only way easy money can be made, is celebrated in the rich and castigated in the poor.  It gives us the country Charles Pierce described here, where gambling, chasing the easy money at any expense, has been raised to the status of a state-supported religion, where even Mormons, who are supposed to believe gambling is a sin, think it's okay as long as the markers are companies rather than chips, and the stakes other people's jobs rather than your tithing money.  It gives us a country where we're all expected to gamble, to look for the main chance, but where the poor get arrested when they count cards and kicked when they lose while the rich get rewarded for both. 

It ain't a pleasant sight.

So Bruce puts a coat and a hat on it (fixes its hair up pretty as if for a night out on Atlantic City).  Underpins it with a kind of logging-camp two-step, gussies it up with fiddles and accordions.  Works it out with hickory-smoked swamp guitar.

It's here that we we begin to hear how this album is not just a Born To or Born In or a Darkness On for the New Depression, it's a summation of everything Bruce has been up to for the last couple of decades.  It has the synthesized, modern-urban influences of the "Secret Garden" and "Streets Of Philadelphia" period, and the deep Americana of the Seeger sessions.  A lot of the latter on this track.

And this is Bruce:  he's no dummy.  He knows exactly what this does.  It connects the New Depression to the old one, and the one before that:  it clothes his 2012 stickup man in the duds of Jesse James.  It reminds us that the class war has been going on as long as there have been classes, and that resentment of laughing fat cats has deep roots in the American tradition - at least as deep as those of the laughter itself.

Bruce Springsteen: "We Take Care Of Our Own"

So, yeah, this song is trying to be a "Born In The U.S.A." for the New Depression, an ironic anthem whose gung-ho chorus will tattoo it onto the biceps of enough people that maybe its bitter verses will seep into the blood of a few, just maybe enough to make a difference.  Probably not - I don't have the kind of faith and hope in the people that Bruce has (we'll get to that) - but you can't fault a guy for trying.

In 2012 what it meant for Bruce to make this kind of record is very different from what it meant in 1984.  Then it was all testosterone:  grinding guitars and organ, an arrangement so stark that when I first heard it on the radio (in real time, and on WHFS no less) I couldn't figure out what this strangeness was (it's hard to realize now just how radically stripped down that record was, since it's become so ubiquitous).

Now it's something different.  It's a lush, Phil Spectorish pop record - as detailed and chock-full-o'-nuts as Born To Run was.  Layers of guitars, synths, voices, rhythms.  Rhythms and synths:  if it recalls anything from the Born In The U.S.A. album it's "Dancing In The Dark."  Like that song it's all breathy urgency, rather than anthemic declaiming.  But there's just enough anthem in the arrangement - the boot-camp backing vocals and handclap accents, the glockenfuckenspiel - to make it a public song rather than a private one.

All that popcraft is necessary this time, because Bruce has elected to undersing the lyrics - wisely so.  The disconnect between verses and chorus is even more pronounced than it was on "Born In The U.S.A."  There you could kind of imagine the whole lyric being sung by the same narrator - a guy desperate about the straits he's in, and struggling to balance his knowledge that his country is responsible for them with the fact that he loves, feels he should love, that country anyway - and all of it busting out in a big strangulated hernia of a cry.

In "We Take Care Of Our Own" it's next to impossible to relate the verses to the chorus in any way other than bitter, obscene irony.  It's as if they're describing two completely alternate universes:  one in which the citizens of the US take care of each other in good times and bad, and one in which those same citizens say to each other, "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."  There's no reconciling the two:  they can't coexist.  One of them doesn't exist.  And Bruce knows it.  So he sings the chorus, not anthemically, but wistfully, almost in a whisper, weeping.  And that makes the sweet pop of the arrangement just unbearably poignant.  It goes down easy - it's a real earworm - but there's nothing easy about being down there with it.

Willie Dixon: I Am The Blues (1970)

At the end of the '60s, Willie Dixon left Chess Records, which was circling the drain anyway.  Having performed in a kind of desultory way all throughout his years as a songwriter, session man, and A&R man for Chess, he stepped up as a performer, recording a number of albums as a leader beginning in 1969.  The new Willie Dixon website lists them, and there are more than you'd think in the '70s.  I say that because the only one of them in print is 1970's I Am The Blues. 

I suspect that what we have here is record company muscle, pure and simple.  The others were on small labels:  Dixon's own Yambo, or Ovation.  But this one's on Columbia.  Everybody seems to agree that it's no great shakes, but it's still in print;  Willie Dixon is a name, and Columbia is a name, and so it sells.  Without the others as a context, though, it's hard to know quite what to make of this record.  The roster of players is stellar (although you wouldn't know it from the CD, which leaves out all such frills as musician info):  Sunnyland Slim, Walter Horton, Johnny Shines.  But was this Dixon and the band at their best?  Or just their safest?

It's not bad by any means.  The backing is solid, and at times nearly definitive;  the arrangements are loose but careful, at least attempting to give these chestnuts a fresh look.  And I won't even take Dixon's singing to task.  He doesn't have the power of Wolf or Muddy, to be sure, but there's a wry intelligence in his voice that almost compensates.  He wrote these lyrics, some of the best ever written, and he sounds comfortable singing them.

I think what underwhelms me about this album is the feeling that, in 1970, it's so far out of time.  It's hard to know what an old bluesman could have done in 1970 to sound right, though;  Electric Mud is as scary as you'd think.  Were the only choices an embarrassing capitulation to young, mostly white trends or an embalmed classicism?  This isn't quite the latter, but close.  It sounds like music made on a Thursday morning when the rest of the world is at work and you're not.  Not like a stolen rest, more like a befuddling idleness. 

This version of "The Same Thing" I do love, however. 

Oliver Nelson: Verve Jazz Masters 48 (1995)

Impulse! has more cachet than Verve.  It was and is a cooler label.  It's a fact - don't try to argue.  And Oliver Nelson's 1961 album The Blues And The Abstract Truth, on Impulse, is his best known.  I won't argue with that:  I've had it for nearly twenty years and it's never failed me yet.  "Stolen Moments" pretty much defined my sense of what was cool in my twenties.

This disc draws from three albums Nelson recorded for Verve in the '60s, plus a few rarities.  It's a good next step after The Blues And The Abstract Truth.  And more of this chronically, criminally underrated musician, arranger, and composer is always welcome.

He was a man out of time, is what Oliver Nelson was.  He wrote cool jazz for biggish, and outright big, bands in an age when cool jazz was played by small, lean combos, while big bands tended to the lush, the Latin, the goofy, or the nostalgic.  Nelson was none of that:  his music certainly has a lot of Duke in it, and a sense of adventure in the instrumentation that betrays an awareness of Evans, but he's more in tune with Coltrane and Miles than anything from the swing era.  He's about thirty years ahead of his time, in other words. 

(You want evidence that Impulse! has more hip value than Verve?  How about this:  I can't find anything from this album to link to on youtube.  But all of Blues and the Abstract... is there.  But:  choice tracks are "Full Nelson," from 1962, which is almost as coooool as "Stolen Moments";  "Ricardo's Dilemma", which is a lot more rewarding than a straight cop of Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" should be;  "Complex City," which has Stravinsky taking the A train;  and "Patterns For Orchestra", one of the rarities, which is probably the best place on the disc to hear Nelson's ingenious combination of a hot '60s rhythm section [Albert Dailey on piano with Ron Carter on bass and Grady Tate on drums] with a high-gloss orchestra.)

John Le Carré: Smiley's People (1979)

The missus' reading of the film version of the first book, suggesting that we could suspect Smiley himself of being the mole, turned out not to be tenable in the book itself.  But she was on to something, of course, because by the end of the third book, the parallels between Smiley and Karla are almost painfully inescapable, and at the end of the third book we're forced to think that, for all intents and purposes, they're no different.  Or maybe Smiley's worse. 

In other words, this book is just as full of that intoxicating Cold War pessimism as the first two were.  Stings like whiskey going down.

But of course what Le Carré gives us is more than just trenchant commentary on the Cold War.  What we realize at the end of this book, when the man we all assume to be Karla (itself an assumed name) walks out of East Berlin, is that this enemy, this nemesis, this namesake for the trilogy, has been entirely unglimpsed until now.  All we've "seen" of him is a single encounter, shrouded in mystery, buried in the past, given to us only in Smiley's deadened memory.  Everything we (i.e. the Circus) "know" about him is speculation - worse, deduction.  Karla is as much as anything a construction of our minds, based on ambiguous clues and tortured logic, and suspicion.  Which isn't to say any of it is wrong - after all, he does come walking out of East Berlin, and he does have Ann's lighter - but a correct guess is still a guess.

Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Derrida:  all the ontological nyets that haunt the modern solipsistic consciousness.  Le Carré gives them all to us in Smiley and Karla.  But the genius of it is that this isn't a piece of navel-gazing, ennui-ridden literature - following Vonnegut's advice, the characters all want their own glasses of water - there are stakes here.  It matters whether or not the cat is dead.  The popular fiction nature of it demands it, but more than so does the urgent emergency of the modern world (that's why the second book is so important).  Smiley, or Karla, ponder silently in London or Moscow, and another bomb goes off in Vientiane. 

John Le Carré: The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

The old BBC adaptations of these books skipped this volume, and it sounds like the new film series will too.  I guess I can see why, if you see the project as a star turn for Smiley/Alec Guinness/Gary Oldman.  Smiley's certainly a major character in this book, but he doesn't dominate it like he does the first and third books of this not-really-a-trilogy.  Here he divides our attention with a field agent, Jerry Westerby.  Who's almost as interesting a character in his own right - Le Carré's people are just as compelling here as they were in Tinker, Tailor.

But really Westerby is just a vehicle, a set of eyes, to get us, the reader, into the field.  The first and third books are mostly armchair spycraft - almost all the work takes place in Smiley's head.  Here we're thrust out into the world.  A world that's falling apart:  Southeast Asia in the wake of the US debacle there.

That's the overriding impression this book leaves with me.  Actually most of the field agenting parts of the book take place in Hong Kong, which gets echoes of the war but not much else, but it's the tour of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand in the last third of the book that really sticks with you.  We don't actually see many Americans - they're conspicuously absent, busy getting airlifted out of embassies.  Nor do we really see much of the actual killing fields.  We get a lot of bombs, random bullets, junkies, casual corruption, and violence just around the next bend.  In other words Le Carré is giving us the feeling of touring a war zone, rather than fighting in it.  That's scary enough, and allows us to preserve something of the journalist's objectivity (back when there might have been such a thing).  No room for obfuscation:  look at what the US did.  Look at the world we made.