Stolid Seeger

The New Yorker's Alec Wilkinson wrote a splendid profile of 86-year-old folk singer Pete Seeger in the weekly's April 17 issue, one example of why the Conde Nast title, despite its many objectionable articles (anything by the histrionic Seymour Hersh or Jane Mayer), is one of the few magazines that doesn't lie in a heap in my cluttered office. Unlike Time and Newsweek (let alone the dated monthlies), whose slim pickings can be accessed online, making subscriptions unnecessary, The New Yorker still arrives in the mail with an invitation to be read in print. Editor David Remnick's talent for choosing a diverse mix of writers and topics leaves him, in my opinion, at the top of the heap in glossy journalism.

Seeger doesn't have the stature of Woody Guthrie as a story-telling troubadour, doesn't measure up to Bob Dylan or Hank Williams, but his considerable body of work is particularly valuable to hepcat youngsters who believe popular music began with Nirvana's spectacular mainstream breakout in the early 90s. The anecdotes about Seeger's long and remarkable life, discovered when Wilkinson visited the singer and his wife of 63 years at their Beacon, New York house earlier this year, are fascinating, not only for the American history-or, at least one version of it-discussed but also because Seeger is the antithesis of most publicity-seeking persons of some fame.

Seeger, who still chops wood almost every day, is a relative ascetic-not so different than the late Philip Berrigan, really-and tells absorbing tales about his life on the road, his association with the Communist Party and the resulting blackballing that befell him during the height of McCarthyism. As a youth he left Harvard (where he was a classmate of John F. Kennedy, a fellow who Seeger says had people carrying papers for him), roamed around the Northeast and then built a house from scratch.

I remember the Seeger records mixed with those of Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary in our playroom as a kid in the early 60s, at the height of the hootenanny craze and the folk movement. Even my parents, conservative suburbanites who were more partial to Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, hummed along to Seeger's versions of "Little Boxes" and "If I Had a Hammer." Seeger was devout in his politics, but his personality was so unpretentious and kindly that he was able to cut across generational lines. My favorite recording of his is a live Carnegie Hall performance from June 8, 1963, featuring an especially chilling cover of "Guantanamera."

The one discordant note of Wilkinson's profile is that it was pegged to next week's release of Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, in which the superstar celebrates some of Seeger's well-known and obscure songs. Springsteen is by all accounts a very decent man with a reverence for the scores of performers, in varying genres, that influenced him. However, in his enthusiasm, he can be almost promiscuous in his praise.

Springsteen told Wilkinson that his decision to release a recording devoted to Seeger (who, surprisingly, he only started listening to in 1997) was because "The whole history of the country is there. [Seeger] transformed everything." A reasonable case could be made for that sentiment, although again I think Guthrie was the real pioneer, but coming from Springsteen it rings a bit hollow, if only because he regularly showers superlatives upon other performers.

When Springsteen introduced Dylan at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, he said: "Bob freed the mind the way Elvis freed the body?He had the vision and talent to make a pop song that contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and changed the face of rock and roll forever."

So far, so good.

His introduction of Roy Orbison in 1987: "When I went into the studio to record the album Born to Run, I wanted to make a record with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector. But most of all, I wanted to sing like Roy Orbison. Now, everybody knows, nobody sings like Rob Orbison."

Orbison was great, but does Springsteen, the Billy Crystal of that annual event, really believe that Orbison was a better singer than Sam Cooke, Stevie Winwood or Smokey Robinson?

Springsteen's toast to Jackson Browne, 2004: "The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson, they gave us California as paradise and Jackson Browne gave Paradise Lost? Jackson was always the tempered voice of Abel. Toiling in the vineyards, here to bear the earthly burdens, confronting the impossibility of love, here to do his father's work. Jackson's work was really California pop gospel."

Like Springsteen, I've always loved Browne's early "These Days," but "bear[ing] the earthly burdens"? That's a stretch.

Springsteen's remarks on U2 in 2005: "They're keepers of some of the most beautiful sonic architecture in rock and roll?[U2's] is an incredible songbook. In their music you hear the spirituality as home and as quest. How do you find God unless he's in your heart? In your desire? In your feet? I believe this is a big part of what's kept their band together all these years."

You get the drift.

Springsteen's written and performed some of the finest pop songs of the last generation, but his covers usually fall flat-his rendition of Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" is an embarrassment-and I'll pass on his new release.

Seeger doesn't appear to have a mean bone in his creaky old body, but he must be mystified at the hyperbolic adulation that his newest convert has received over the years. Writing in the February/March Paste, Andy Whitman wrote: "Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run changed my life?I was 20 years old when Born to Run hit the shelves in November 1975 [actually, it was in September of that year], pondering what to do with my impending, useless creative-writing degree, and utterly clueless about the direction of my life?Nixon was a crook, and Ford wasn't much better; progressive rockers and '60s-hippie dinosaurs were ruining everything I cared about in music?Into that swirling vortex strode Bruce Springsteen, a scruffy kid from the Jersey Shore, who sang about chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected hotrods and gang warfare and redemptions beneath a dirty hood."

Naturally, this guy became a music critic.

A guy who's "changed" by a single rock album is one weird cat. Sure, "Thunder Road" was a very cool song, but while Whitman despaired about Nixon being a crook-the former president's resignation was uplifting for most people I knew-Television, Patti Smith, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Neil Young were all putting out great songs.

And I'll bet Pete Seeger could look at that year and find a dozen more artists worthy of merit.