Music Review
Rock’s Royal Genes, in Endless Recombinations
By Jon Pareles
Published: October 30, 2009
Performers at Thursday's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame benefit concert included John Fogerty, left, who joined Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band onstage to play tunes by Creedence Clearwater Revival and Roy Orbison
History lesson, star showcase, oldies singalong, canonization and romp — on Thursday night, the first of two Madison Square Garden celebrations and benefits for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was all of those.
The headliners were Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon and Crosby, Stills and Nash, and a dozen of their fellow members of the hall, along with some aspirants, joined them onstage to share songs, trace connections, offer praise and spark one another. The nearly six-hour concert was to be edited into an HBO program to be shown on Nov. 29.
Yet even with cameras rolling, most of the performers stayed loose, whooping it up as they played unexpected songs in combinations that might never happen again.
The two concerts — a Friday show featured U2, Aretha Franklin and Metallica — were billed as the hall’s 25th anniversary, although the foundation behind the hall was incorporated in 1983, and its first musicians weren’t inducted until 1986. (One of them, Jerry Lee Lewis, led off Thursday’s show with a two-fisted “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On.”) The museum in Cleveland opened in 1995. The “25th anniversary” tag anticipates the 25th induction ceremony in March. If the hall were a musician, it could now be inducted into itself, since to ensure historical perspective, its founding rule is that nominees must have started their recording careers a quarter-century earlier. Decades can take a toll on voices and lives, but Thursday’s performers were still vital.
To sort out rock’s past — a fertile tangle of cultures, races, classes, artistic ambitions and business imperatives — the hall traces lineages and influences. It’s a workable approach, and as pedagogy it can help lead curious fans back through generations. Yet the correlations — Hall of Famer equals Ancestors A plus B plus C — never tell the whole story. Great musicians listen widely, but then they twist, misconstrue, recombine ideas and mirror their own instincts in what they learn from their chosen mentors.
Mr. Springsteen, a Hall of Fame mainstay who happily credits his sources, was presented as a successor to the agitprop of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, as well as a disciple of Roy Orbison, Phil Spector, Elvis Presley and the soul of Sam and Dave.
That’s a passable summation, but still incomplete, leaving out the facet of Mr. Springsteen that comes up with New Jersey romantic epics like “Jungleland” and “Badlands,” two centerpieces of his set.
Mr. Springsteen showed his agitprop side by having Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine — playing a guitar with “Arm the Homeless” written on it — join him for “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and the Clash’s “London Calling.” And when Mr. Springsteen shared the E Street Band with John Fogerty, their first song together was “Fortunate Son,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s blast at the uneven burdens of war. But Mr. Fogerty and Mr. Springsteen also sang a duet on Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.”
For his Spector side, Mr. Springsteen brought on Darlene Love, a Spector frontwoman who’s nominated for the hall this year — he lobbied fervently — and can still belt “Da Doo Ron Ron.” Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave, unleashed his high tenor for “Hold On, I’m Comin’ ” and “Soul Man.” After Mr. Springsteen declared that continental drift had pried apart Long Island and New Jersey, Billy Joel arrived, trading verses with Mr. Springsteen on Mr. Joel’s songs and doing a dead-on Springsteen impression during “Born to Run.”
In an irrepressible set, Mr. Wonder played the night’s Dylan song — “Blowin’ in the Wind” — and a Michael Jackson tribute, “The Way You Make Me Feel,” pushing it back toward a 1960s Motown beat. In the concert’s blues moment, B. B. King performed “The Thrill Is Gone” with wiry elegance; Smokey Robinson sang his own “Tracks of My Tears,” amplifying its heartbreak.
Pecking sly syncopations from his Clavinet and puffing zigzag harmonica solos in his own songs, Mr. Wonder also brought on admirers: John Legend, who overreached in his attempt at Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me (the Ecology)”; Sting, digging into the bass line of “Higher Ground” before stepping forward for his own “Roxanne”; and Jeff Beck, who made his guitar snarl, cackle and wail during “Superstition.”
Mr. Simon’s set included the latest Simon & Garfunkel reunion, with “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” transposed down to help Mr. Garfunkel’s weathered voice reach the high notes, and “The Sounds of Silence,” segueing from its pristine acoustic-guitar version to the folk-rock hit.
Mr. Simon’s guests were doo-woppers: Little Anthony and the Imperials, harmonizing a cappella in “Two People in the World,” and Dion DiMucci of Dion and the Belmonts, his voice still swaggering in “The Wanderer.”
Mr. Simon sang a wistful version of George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” with David Crosby and Graham Nash. But none of those guests accounted for the African and Caribbean rhythms and jump-cutting imagery of songs from Mr. Simon’s solo years, like “You Can Call Me Al,” with Mr. Simon confidently cuing a full-arena singalong.
Crosby, Stills and Nash don’t harmonize as neatly as they did in the 1960s and ’70s, so Stephen Stills compensated with aggressive, bluesy guitar solos. The trio countrified its old songs and brought friends — Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt — in a lineup recalling another rock anniversary: the 1979 No Nukes concert. (Mr. Springsteen performed at it, too.) On Thursday Ms. Raitt sang “Love Has No Pride” with glowing tenderness, then applied her slide guitar to the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider.”
The concert strove to touch, if only briefly, every rock influence from boogie-woogie to pop to power chords, winding up with Mr. Springsteen’s troupe performing the gospel-rooted “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” Luckily, the night didn’t belong to schools or categories, but to endless hybrids and raucous, upraised voices.
Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/arts/music/31hall.html?emc=eta1
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Rock n Roll Hall of Fame Show MSG 30/10/09 (Read 31,631 times)
