There’s Just a Meanness in This World (The Nebraska Project, World Financial Center)

Who exactly thought this was a good idea?

The 2006 New York Guitar Festival, three weeks of concerts “examining virtually every aspect of the guitar’s musical personality” opened last night with “The Nebraska Project,” a free concert featuring a rotating cast of musicians interpreting songs from Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska.  Though it’s been done before – a CD tribute called Badlands (featuring Los Lobos, Ani DiFranco, Johnny Cash) was released in 2000 – it sounded interesting, and the line-up of performers was both respectable and respectful.  But the source material is so strong it managed to undermine almost the entire show.

Nebraska’s strength comes from its intimacy.  Springsteen knew this:  He scrapped the studio tapes made with his E-Street Band and instead released the four-track demos recorded in his Colts Neck, New Jersey, bedroom.  The collection of stories –about a bunch of have-nevers doing their best to ignore the ultimate despair of their condition – are largely told in the first person.  Unrepentant spree-killer Charles Starkweather quietly confides that he wants his girlfriend to watch him die.  A luckless man in a loveless relationship gambles that there’s a better life in crime.  A cop forced to choose between his integrity and his family finds himself betraying both.  It’s a world where a better life is locked away inside a gated mansion, where God has abandoned his house.  While Springsteen’s lyrics have often been downbeat, Nebraska refuses to hide them behind the usual bright cacophony of horns and piano and xylophone.  It’s just a man alone with a guitar and a harmonica.

Cheery.  While the album is among the most respected of Springsteen’s works, it’s not the celebratory stuff that inspires audiences to gather for three hour concert marathons.  And it certainly seemed an inappropriate choice to “kick off” a “festival” in an “atrium.”

The World Financial Center is half-mall, half-corporate park, and the area used for the concert – the “Winter Garden” – feels like it doubles as an overblown food court.  Rows of palm trees – palm trees! – rise from the center; black columns as wide as sierra redwoods surround the space.  The stage – which, were it not for a backdrop, would have been up against a glassed-in view of the Hudson River – faced rows of folding chairs, a good many of them roped off for press and VIPs.  At the back of the room, a wide staircase fans upwards; it had been turned into risers by the overflowing crowd.  People also clung to the railings of the second floor overhangs, though the areas closest to the stage had been blocked off.

Nebraska’s strength comes from its intimacy.

It’s also not especially a “guitar record.”  While there’s some variety on display – acoustic and electric, there’s quiet finger-picking, percussive strumming, both blues and rock boogie – it’s all in support of the storytelling.  Most performers last night acknowledged as much, and kept noodling to a minimum – or at least, in the background.

The first instrument that caught my attention, actually, was a horn:  Michelle Shocked had trumpeter Rich Armstrong accompany her on the album’s title track, and his work had me mesmerized.  Not that it was especially showy – I’m sure I’d be able to pay more attention if the show makes its way to the net (host John Platt announced the show was being recorded, and would hopefully be broadcast at some time) – but I couldn’t quite figure out how he was doing what he was doing.  He started by recording a short bit with a mute; that looped throughout the performance.  Armstrong then switched off between his trumpet(pic) – which had some sort of extra tube hooking out in front of the bell (a mic? or something else?) – and a larger horn (pic – a flugelhorn, perhaps); he may have simply been looping himself, but at times it really sounded like he was playing two notes at once.  Which is impossible, right?

The upshot, though, was that I completely ignored Shocked’s performance.

After the song, Shocked (whose official site actually has a page of quotes from herself ... and her own font so you can see it “the way it was meant to be seen”) explained that she’d planned to interpret her number as a sinister take on the Adam-Eve story, or explore the “virgin-whore paradigm”... but then found it was all based on fact, and decided just to serve the song.

Songs were served in a variety of ways, and with varying degrees of success.  Only a couple acts expanded their selections to standard band instrumentation:  Jesse Harris did so with “Atlantic City,” one of the more full-bodied songs on the CD, and it didn’t work at all; the drum kit boomed throughout the cavernous room, totally overwhelming Harris’ anemic voice.  The National’s take on “Mansion on the Hill” worked better; the song can get a bit monotonous, and the band gave it a slow, steady build.

There was plenty slow and little steady as the night progressed.  The format would seem self-evident:  There are ten songs on Nebraska; play them.  But there were near-constant breaks, additions, and blather.  While a stage crew expeditiously changed set-ups in-between acts, Platt gave each performer a post-song interview; he asked about their performance, about the song, and gave them a chance to plug upcoming projects.  Everyone got asked why they chose the song they did:  Laura Cantrell sang “Used Cars” because it was one of the few songs she thought could come from a woman’s point of view; Martha Wainwright saw herself as the troubled brother in “Highway Patrolman,” so relished singing the cop’s part; American Music Club’s Mark Eitzel liked “My Father’s House” because “it’s about your dad, it’s about heaven, and it’s beautiful.”

I kept waiting for someone to say they picked a song because it was the only one left.

Platt’s questioning often floundered, killing both time and interest.  Though a blogger favorite, the FUV-flavored crowd wasn’t familiar with The National (though a small pocket of vocal fans noted their introduction); the host’s interview with singer Matt Berninger was primarily about the band’s name (“A hasty choice that should have been reconsidered,” the bandleader offered.  “No one can find us on the Internet.”) and tried to plummet political overtones that just weren’t there.  At one point, Platt offered that “Mansion” had to do with Pilgrims approaching Plymouth Rock.  Berninger, and everyone else in the venue, just shook their heads.

The host was better when he stuck to simple introductions, noting the performers and reading quotes from Springsteen’s Songs book.

After every second song, an “instrumental interlude” was provided wherein additional performers reinterpreted one or both of the songs that had just been performed.  Though this represented the spirit of the festival, what revelations did anyone expect from a wordless replaying of “Johnny 99” on a twenty-string Indian mohan vina?

An hour into the show, a short intermission was announced.  Up to that point, five of Nebraska’s ten songs had been covered.  The album being honored is less than forty-one minutes long; “The Nebraska Project” began promptly at eight o’clock, and ended a little after eleven.

Nebraska’s strength comes from its intimacy.

Some performers defiantly strived for that intimacy, a few achieved it.  Chocolate Genius guru Mark Anthony Thompson – who curiously said “Johnny 99,” a song in which a man facing life in prison begs for his execution, reminded him of Arnold Schwarzenegger and “Tookie” Williams – sat cross-legged, strumming an acoustic guitar.  Doveman’s Thomas Bartlett crouched in the shadows behind him, adding odd bits of fill on an omnichord as Thompson slowed the tune down to a death row dirge.  Eitzel took his “House” personally, and kept it honest and small;  it helped that, of all the performers, he sounded the most like Springsteen – he has the same commanding, masculine voice.  Unfortunately, he came so late in the evening the antsy audience prematurely applauded when he took a dramatic pause between verses.

The best performance of the night didn’t involve a guitar, or a song from Nebraska.  To further expand the show, the organizers included a pair of songs written during the album’s conception but recorded later.  Jen Chapin, daughter of the late storyteller Harry, took the usually-misinterpreted “Born in the U.S.A.,” stripped it of its stars and stripes and laid it bare before a stunned crowd.  Accompanied only by husband Stephan Crump on an upright bass, she successfully de-anthemized the song, putting the pain of its lyrics up front and solidifying its presence among the other songs from the period.

For most of the show, you felt like you were waiting for something to happen.  Chapin’s performance was, before the end, the only time it felt like something was happening.

Given the lack of marquee names, the talky, dragged-out format, and the dreary material, the audience was respectfully restless.  From the intermission on, folks filtered out, perhaps disappointed that this wasn’t the Boss stuff they were used to.

Nebraska provides a few potential rockers, but none of these were explored enough – or exploded enough – to satisfy a Saturday-night crowd.  There were two takes on “State Trooper.”  The great, guilt-ridden vehicle got taken apart by ex-Del Fuego Dan Zanes and Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid.  Backed by bongos and a tuba, they pretty much settled into the song’s minimalist groove; given the performers’ eccentricities – Zanes wore a bright red suit, his Steve Martinish face poking out from under Sideshow Bob hair – one expected a little more.  Reid finished by improvising a spoken word pullover... sort of undermining the concept of the song. 

Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas had a little more fun with his instrumental version.  He called what he was doing “Psychedelic Primitive;” mostly, he was switching off between two guitars, looping himself, and adding various effects.  While it would have been more conceptually perfect had he built the overdubs up into something overwhelming, Lucas’ effort represented the sort of thing that might have made the night distinctive; a woman behind me, though, sighed “Cut him off” near the middle of his turn.

Otis Taylor completely smothered the woogie out of  “Open All Night,” strumming a banjo and mewling its yodelicious lines into an insufferable monotone.  Taylor, a last-minute replacement for MeShell Nedgéocello, seemed frustrated the crowd wouldn’t do the work for him.  It is the one liberating track on the album – the last line, “Hey ho, rock and roll, deliver me from nowhere,” is pure punk – but it left the performer and the crowd angry at each other.

A real shame, because “Night” is Nebraska’s natural climax.  The final song, “Reason to Believe” takes the very notion of hope and spits at it; dripping with irony, it hardly makes for a rousing finale... but that didn’t keep former Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ frontman Kevn Kinney from trying to make it one.  Aided by NYC mainstay Lenny Kaye (who, omigod, doesn’t have a website!) on guitar, Zanes on mandolin and Crump on bass, Kinney’s attempt was itself a bit of self-immolation, and like life it just went on, and on...

Not every expedition finds something, every experiment can’t be a success.  Harry Manx – the same man who played that exotic, irrelevant Indian instrument – returned (with one of the worst intros of the night; Platt brought him out with, “If you weren’t wild about Harry before, maybe you will be this time...”) to perform “I’m on Fire,” another non-Nebraska track.  He did so ably on a contraption he’d built out of a cigar box and a pair of broom handles; the point, he told Platt while thumbing his nose at the festival, was that “music is in you, not the instrument.”

What the Guitar Fest discovered – by poking, prodding, expanding and exploring Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska – is that it’s pretty much perfect as it is.

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But, hey, it was free.

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...and it was the sort of event that could be saved, in some ways, by pulling a Big Surprise Guest out of its ass.

I hadn’t considered the possibility of Springsteen’s attendance until someone right before the show mentioned that a New York Times article had hinted at it.  Even then, my only concern was how many stargawkers would use this as an excuse to pack the venue.  As soon as I found a spot to stand, I forgot all about it...

...until the slow rumble of “Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce” filled the hall.  Finally, something that suited the acoustics of the place.

After Platt interrogated Kinney, all the night’s musicians filled the stage for The Dreaded Everyone Jam.  Has one of these ever been a positive musical experience?  It’s always confusion.  The jams are directionless and the sound impossible.  It’s inevitably a waste of time, and inevitably wastes a lot of time – everyone has to take their turn, you see.

Here it was doubly disorganized – singers spent half their time singing into mics that weren’t active, passing lyric sheets back and forth like secret study hall notes.  The crowd, though, was finally getting what they wanted, a chance to see the man responsible for the music being celebrated.  After Platt’s quick intro – “Bruce Springsteen has always acknowledged the influence Woody Guthrie had on his music...” – the oversized band launched into Guthrie’s “Oklahoma Hills,” and Springsteen came out in a pinstripe suit and bedhead hair to a standing room.

It’s a song that had little to do with the concept, but that really didn’t matter:  It got Springsteen to hop the river and join in, and provided a round, repetitive chorus a group could sink its singalong into.  After they’d had their fill of it, Platt grabbed the Boss – who’d been milling around on stage, spending time with all the musicians who’d been honoring him – and asked if he had anything to add.  “Only,” he grinned, “That all the interpretations were wrong.  [The songs] were all about trying to get girls to pull their pants down.”

That’s right:  Nebraska’s strength comes from its intimacy.

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More?

• I have a handful of photos of Springsteen performing (across from Jen Chapin’s baby Maceo) here, and more in this Flickr set.


• Brooklyn Vegan (who – d’oh – left early) has his recap here and backstage photos of Springsteen and The National here.


• Recaps by the WFMU blog and Jay Lustig in the (Newark) Star-Ledger.

tags: new york guitar festival  bruce springsteen  nebraska project  

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