Bruce Springsteen loves America
Tonight's Springsteen concert at Madison Square Garden was a radical political protest accomplished through the agency of America's musical heritage. And while Springsteen was using his ferocious interest in musicology to entertain, educate, and raise up the crowd, it occurred to me: Bruce Springsteen loves America.
OK, he didn't do his E Street Band stuff, and I can't say I wasn't hoping for I Came for You. (Like that would happen.) But he repurposed the folk songs of Pete Seeger and resurrected the musical glory of New Orleans with a backup band so potent you could smell the beer on Bourbon Street. He panned for the gold of America's frontier days, retrieving haunting, fervent nuggets of social protest.
Springsteen expresses his patriotism through musicology. And if that sounds fusty, there was nothing fusty about the roaring crowd that ate up Seeger's Bring 'Em Home, written in 1965 during the Vietnam War, and just as chillingly apt today.
And it didn't hurt that I had a skybox ticket courtesy of Seth Rosenthal, a senior account executive at the New York Post.
