Happy Birthday to AHN

Saturday marks the third anniversary of this blog. To commemorate it, I'm re-running my first post of February 4, 2009. I'm very grateful for the tens of thousands of visits American History Now has received since its launch, and hope it will have many more. Thanks for coming, and keep an eye out for Bruce Springsteen's new album, Wrecking Ball, which will be released early next month.

--Jim Cullen

Outlaw Pete:

Springsteen Makes a Western

Among the many virtues in Bruce Springsteen’s music is a rich sense of history. And like many of those virtues, that sense of history has emerged organically over the course of his career. Springsteen’s first albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, were marked by a powerful sense of immediacy; to a great extent, they’re records of the present tense. Beginning with the release of Born to Run, a consciousness of history – principally in the form of a growing awareness of past failure, and a desperate desire to avoid similar mistakes – begins to suffuse the consciousness of his characters. This consciousness is deeply personal, typically expressed, for example, in generational tensions between fathers and sons. That’s what I mean by “organic.”

By about 1980, Springsteen’s sense of history begins to get broader. It emerges in a series of forms, ranging from his decision to perform songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (reading 1980 Joe Klein’s biography of Guthrie as the suggestion of his manager, Jon Landau, seems to have been a watershed experience) to recording original songs like “Wreck on the Highway,” avowedly patterned on the style of country & western singer Roy Acuff. His 1982 album Nebraska is saturated with a sense of the 1930s (his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad even more so), and even deeply personal songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” connect the private struggles of their protagonist to much larger historical ones. This trajectory is a striking, and impressive testament to an artist’s power to grow and integrate everyday life into a broader human drama.

One of the less remarked upon aspects of Springsteen’s body of work is his fascination with the West. This is, of course, counterintuitive – Springsteen is nothing if not the voice of New Jersey, an embodiment of urban, ethnic, working-class values and culture typically associated with the Northeast Corridor. But the western signposts are there, as early as “Rosalita,” which climaxes with a vision of triumphant lovers savoring their victory over paternal repression in a café near San Diego. That’s a fleeting reference. But beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town – think of the “rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert” of “The Promised Land” – the West becomes a vivid and indispensable setting for a number of songs. Springsteen being Springsteen, he’s not always content simply to invoke or use such settings in conventional ways. So, for example, the gorgeous yearning that marks his 1995 song “Across the Border,” redolent with music, instrumentation, and language of the Southwest, is purposely ambiguous which side of the border its protagonists long to go. Springsteen’s mythic tendencies are often marked by creative friction with the concrete details and ironic realities of everyday life.

“Outlaw Pete,” the leadoff track on Springsteen’s latest album, Working on a Dream, represents the next turn of the wheel in a way that’s somehow predictable, surprising, and inevitable all at once. Superficially, the song, like the album as a whole, is something of a throwback, a return to the dense, lush, melodic pop songs that were once Springsteen’s stock-in-trade. At eight minutes long, it’s also the first time in decades that’s he’s recorded a mini-epic on the scale of “Incident on 57th St.” or “Jungleland.” For thirty years now, the overall trend in Springsteen’s work has been toward more sparse, even minimalist songs that approach spoken-language records, though the approach here was first broached on Magic in 2007.

It’s almost jarring to hear his eager embrace of melodic hooks and multi-track harmonies. It’s also almost jarring in that “Outlaw Pete” so willfully introduces us to a protagonist who seems like a cartoon figure from an imitation John Ford movie, who “at six months old” had “done three months in jail” and “robbed a bank in his diapers and little baby feet.” Pete’s signature question, “Can you hear me?” seems like a childish insistence for attention. Some might be amused by such a description; others might dismayed, even irritated by its triviality. One could be forgiven for perceiving that Springsteen is slipping into superficiality in his advancing age, perhaps trying to recapture the sense of popular appeal that once seems so effortlessly his.

But appearances are deceiving. More specifically, our perception of Outlaw Pete is deceiving. After hearing the seemingly requisite description of a horse-stealing, heart-breaking scoundrel – rendered in an amused voice that suggests the narrator views him as a figure closer to a rakishly charming Jesse James than a hard, frightening, Liberty Valance – the story turns on a dime (the music, which shifts to a declining phrase of repeating notes, indicates this) as Pete gets a vision of his own death that prompts him to marry a Navajo and settle down with a newborn daughter on a reservation. Yet in some sense the story is only getting started. A vindictive lawman – another staple of western mythology – is determined to bring Pete down and precipitates a confrontation. “Pete you think you have changed but you have not,” Dan tells him, in so doing posing the existential question at the heart of the song, which is to what degree we have agency over our characters and thus our fate. In the showdown that follows Pete is nominally the victor, yet Dan literally gets the last word in observing before his death that “we cannot undo these things that we’ve done.” The question “Can you hear me?” is turned on its head, as Dan speaks to Pete instead of Pete speaking to the world.

Pete, now a fugitive from the law, makes an ambiguous disappearance from the story. Is it to be understood that his encounter with Dan demonstrates the fixed nature of his personality and the impossibility of any lasting mortal redemption? Or is it an act of abnegation that protects his wife and daughter from the wickedness that surrounds him? The final verses of the song depict Dan’s daughter braiding Pete’s buckskin chaps in her hair – original sin and grace at once – with the question “Can you hear me?” now completely reversed, as we listeners seek the vanished Pete. Like Alan Ladd in Shane or John Wayne in any number of westerns, Pete catalyzes action that leads to resolution, but pushes him beyond the frame.

Like a great many works of art, “Outlaw Pete” asks many more questions than it answers. But there are at least two things it does clarify. The first is the ongoing vitality of western mythology (now nicely updated with a multicultural accent) as a vehicle for exploring the complexities of American life. The second is the ongoing vitality of Springsteen himself, 37 years into an enormously broad and deep body of work, to reinvent himself through reviewing and revising our cultural traditions. He hears us, and we see ourselves.

Bruce Zirilli (Springsteen)

The Boss circles back to an (ethnic) road not taken in The Promise

Like all great artists, Bruce Springsteen has always been first and foremost a great editor. Any Springsteen album in the last four decades has always begun with many more songs that actually ended up on the record, and no doubt much of his work has ended on a proverbial cutting room floor for good. In the last dozen years, however, Springsteen has begun opening his vault to release what he regards as worthy work. Tracks (1998) was a broad, multi-CD collection that spanned his whole career, as was an intriguing bonus CD of rarities that accompanied The Essential Bruce Springsteen (2003), part of the fine Sony Records Essential series. Springsteen has also taken to repackaging his work -- like Born to Run, released in a 30th anniversary edition in 2005 -- and releasing live performances, audio and video. He's taken this process a step farther this fall with The Promise, a package that exists in multiple iterations: a documentary on the making of his classic 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town, a reissue of the album itself, and -- the focus here -- a two-disc collection of material recorded at the time of the Darkness sessions that did not actually make it to the album.

Of course, even merely talking about this music in such a way dates it. With the advent of digital downloads, owning recordings has become a virtual experience more than a literal one. The album, vinyl or CD, as an artifact is a largely generational phenomenon, and Springsteen is tapping a large, relatively prosperous and middle-aged fan base here with a product line well-insulated from the fickleness of mass taste or the recent upheavals of the music industry. Notwithstanding some real gems that have surfaced in this segment of Springsteen's oeuvre -- like his beautiful tribute to his mother, "The Wish" (Tracks), or the deceptively comical “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” (Essential Bruce Springsteen), this is not really the best way to meet The Boss.

Nor is The Promise. If the first Springsteen songs you ever heard were "Racing in the Street ('78)," "Come On (Let's Go Out Tonight)" or "Candy's Boy," you would plausibly regard them as fine pieces of songcraft. But they're just not as good as the "Racing in the Street" that ends up on Darkness, or the transformation of “Come On” into "Factory," or that of “Candy’s Boy” into "Candy's Room." The final “Racing” and “Factory” have a more stripped-down arrangement and stately pace; “Candy” is more frenetic. Each makes more emotional sense in its final version. It's fascinating to hear the insertion of a reference to Elvis Presley's death in "Come On," or the reference to a 1932 Ford in "Racing," given that a 1969 Chevy is what (more plausibly) made it on the album. But this makes these songs curios, not great pieces of music.

That said, The Promise is also an intriguing document of a road not taken. Darkness on the Edge of Town marked a decisive turn in Springsteen's work in opening up a imaginative landscape with settings that included the Dakotas ("Badlands") and the Utah desert ("The Promised Land"). He wrote hard, lean songs stripped of the ornate embellishments that had characterized his first two albums, and the baroque arrangements that dominated Born to Run, typified by the ten-minute epic of "Jungleland." This new orientation is evident on the packaging of this music, which has always emphasized its western orientation.

But Springsteen's core influences, much more apparent in his live shows than in his recordings, had always been the classic rock of the late 1950s and early 1960s. That means Elvis, of course, and Buddy Holly, whose spirit is palpable here in "Outside Looking In." It also meant Gary U.S. Bonds, whose career he helped revive in the eighties, and represented by "Ain't Good Enough for You." And Phil Spector, whose girl groups receive homage treatment in "Someday (We'll Be Together)."

More specifically, though, there was an east coast, urban -- and, more specifically still, an Italian -- strain in Springsteen's music of the seventies. Ethnically, he's pure American mutt; "Springsteen" is a Dutch name, but his father was mostly Irish. His mother Adele's maiden name was Zirilli -- Irish/Italian marriages where what passed for multiculturalism in the mid-twentieth century -- and it's his Zirilli side that that decisively shaped his persona. That may be why one influence that hovers over many of the songs in this collection is Dion (as in DiMucci), who enjoyed a string of hits in the late fifties with the Belmonts and as a solo act in the early sixties with songs like "Runaround Sue" and "The Wanderer." The Promise evokes another Jersey Boy, Frankie Valli, whose work with the Four Seasons is discernible in tracks such as "Gotta Get that Feeling," even if Springsteen is smart enough not to even try emulating Valli's unforgettable falsetto.

This vein in Springsteen's body of work did not entirely disappear with Darkness on the Edge of Town. He gave some of these songs away. "Talk to Me" became a signature tune for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, who carried this metropolitan torch into the eighties. Patti Smith had a Top Ten single with "Because the Night" in 1978, as did the Pointer Sisters with "Fire," which Springsteen himself released as a single a decade later. "Rendezvous" became a staple of his live shows, much beloved by Boss cognoscenti. So it's a real pleasure to see this material resurface in this collection.

Though none of it appears on The Promise, some of the material from this phase of Springsteen's career did enter his canon, principally on The River (1980), an album far more emotionally and musically variegated than Darkness on the Edge of Town, and for that reason a more satisfying experience (and a good place for a Springsteen novice to begin). In the documentary on the making of Darkness recently broadcast on HBO and included in some versions of the package, there is footage of Springsteen performing "Sherry Darling," which ended up on The River, with bandmate and buddy Steve Van Zandt -- born Steven Lento, and known by millions of Sopranos fans as Silvio Dante, the character he played in that series. With its boisterous crowd noise and hand-clapping in the background, redolent of life on a Brooklyn stoop, "Sherry Darling" encapsulates this moment in Springsteen's musical life.

In recent years Springsteen has been seen as an American icon in the Woody Guthrie tradition, in large measure because he's positioned himself that way, typified by his 2006 album The Seeger Sessions, and a carefully sculpted public image as a liberal godfather in the Age of Obama. The Promise reminds us of the vast sprawl in his lifetime of music-making, and of Springsteen's legitimate claim to the Ellis Island branch of American identity.  If Springsteen's body of work is a meal, The Promise is a cannoli.

Playing in the Shadows of the Boss

The Gaslight Anthem roars to life with American Slang

Even though I have an iPod  (mostly for classroom use, so I can illustrate a point with a song while teaching), I'm one of those geezers who still buys and listens to CDs. That's largely because my dinosaur Honda Accord -- which is about the only place in my life where I still have room for music -- has a CD player, and because I'm of that generation for whom buying and collecting sound artifacts still exerts a residual pull on my imagination. Having performed the requisite demographic identification here, I'll now say that for me, the summer of 2010 will be the summer of The Gaslight Anthem. The band's latest album, American Slang, is a pure shot of adrenaline that will, among other things, keep you surging on the highway, or maybe just awake at a traffic light.

I'm particularly enamored of the title track of American Slang. It begins with a few measures of throbbing drums and bass that sets up a five-note riff that drives the melody in the best pop tradition -- a tradition in this case of the guitar-based, post-punk variety.  Lead singer Brian Fallon sounds like a wounded animal, bleeding but ferally alive. As far as I can tell, he's unlucky in love, but he ties his romantic grief to the zeitgeist in a not-quite cryptic way:

Look at the damage
the fortunes came for richer men
while we're left with the gallows
waiting for us liars to come down and hang

In the chorus, the protagonist say he "called for my father/but my father had died," literally and figuratively alluding to a loss of faith. This reference, and the one alluding to liars, suggests a Catholic sense of sin.

But it's the music more than the lyrics that bring "American Slang" to life. The band roars behind Fallon, who overdubs harmonies that are both shouted and almost impossible to decipher during the chorus, giving the song a sense of thrilling desperation.

One of the songs on the album is called "The Spirit of Jazz," and I've heard/read Fallon describe the role of the blues in shaping the band's sound. This is surely true as far as it goes, but it may be an anxiety of influence at work here that leads the Gaslight Anthem, a New Jersey band, to displace its most obvious influences, which include Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and, of course, Bruce Springsteen. Indeed, in spirit, "American Slang" is a grittier version of Springsteen's "Backstreets" -- which may sound like a back-handed compliment, but it isn't. "Backstreets," from Born to Run, had a kind of romantic grandeur about it that Springsteen wisely left behind before it curdled into parody; American Slang has a rougher, working-class edge that the Springsteen of Darkness on the Edge of Town never fully developed but which the Gaslight Anthem has been apparently mining for some years now, edging closer to commercial pay dirt. Or, at any rate, what passes for pay dirt in a music industry that has disintegrated into bits. Had it come along earlier, the band might have had a major label recording contract (they're signed to the small punk label SideOneDummy), or they may have disappeared into the mist of a thousand bar bands. This is the hand they've been dealt, and they're playing it for all it's worth. God bless 'em -- I'm sure happy to be along for the ride.

Albums, singles and the two cent jukebox

Making a record of a blog's 100 days

When he released In the Wee Small Hours in the Morning in March of 1955, Frank Sinatra was in the middle of rebuilding a shipwrecked career that had foundered on the shoals of shifting public taste, and a controversial private life in which his divorce from his wife to marry to Hollywood starlet Ava Gardner was merely one transgression of prevailing social mores. But Wee Small Hours was more than a marketing gimmick by a desperate celebrity; it was in fact an ambitious artistic statement by a musician who shrewdly exploited an emerging musical order.

The key to that musical order was technological. For Sinatra, it would be built on the new technology of the 33 rotations-per-minute (rpm) vinyl record, which had better fidelity than the old 78 records. The smaller 45 rpm record was also a new format that would prove to be commercially and culturally viable, one that Elvis Presley would soon ride to stardom. But Sinatra focused on the 33 rpm because it allowed him to record a suite of songs -- the metaphor of choice was "album," as in a collection of photographs collected in a book -- in which the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts.

In the Wee Small Hours would inaugurate a decade of exceptional artistic creativity on Sinatra's part, built on the premise of albums with a thematic orientation. Come Fly with Me (1957) was a suite of songs about travel; Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), by contrast, was a melancholy collection focusing on a sense of romantic loss. When, in the aftermath of its initial cultural explosion, rock & roll music developed a sense of self-conscious tradition and growing evidence of artistic sophistication, musicians like the Beach Boys and Beatles began down the path parallel to that of Sinatra (there's dismayingly little evidence that either community of listeners was aware of the others, much less that of jazz musicians like Miles Davis, who were working from a similar rubric). The 33 rpm album became the culturally dominant, and commercially most profitable, format for music by the late 1960s, and remained regnant until the early 1980s. Albums would often spawn hit singles -- viewed as important marketing tools for selling albums -- but at the height of its influence, heavyweight acts like Led Zeppelin would not deign to release them.

A series of technological changes eroded, without entirely displacing, the centrality of the album in pop music. The advent of the compact disc began to change the equation, in part because it was possible to program the sequence of songs as a listener, as opposed to the artist, wished. Another important factor in shifting the cultural balance away from the album and back toward the single was the arrival of MTV in 1981. In the short term, music video actually turned hit albums by artists like Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen into strings of hits. But in the long run it enshrined the individual song, which, after all, was the focus of any given video. The coup de grace in the triumph of the song over the album was the Moving Picture Experts Group-1 Audio Layer 3 (mp3) file, which entered the bloodstream of the the Internet in the 1990s. While late 20th century adolescents once tended to have "vertical" musical tastes whose locus was sets of songs by a stable of performers, early 21st century adolescents tend to "horizontal" ones consisting of smatterings of songs by a very broad range of artists housed in their iPods.

Now, I'm not a musician, and never nursed any hopes of becoming one. But this musical history, and my deep immersion in it, played a decisive role in my conception of myself as a writer. My ambitions were always set on writing books, which I analogized as "albums," as opposed to becoming a journalist who produced pieces that corresponded to songs. Of course, I understood that successful writers did both, and in fact did a fair amount of journalism in high school, college, and graduate school. But there was never any doubt where my head and my heart would feel most at home.

After a long apprenticeship, I began writing my first book in 1990, and was continually working on one for the next 19 years (I've published a total of ten, which includes to edited anthologies). It was only earlier this year, when I ran into some resistance in the attempt to produce an eleventh -- which, in and of itself, is almost meaningless, as I've never found it particularly easy to get a book into print -- that I suddenly became aware of an imploding literary landscape. This of course was a long time coming, though the recent economic downturn seems to have accelerated the process sharply. These external considerations forced into awareness something I could previously only barely admit to myself: that I was (am) tired. Bruce Springsteen once wrote that two of the most profound days in his life were those when he picked up a guitar and learned he could put it down. For the first time, I was beginning to comprehend the latter.

That's why I've started this blog. It remains very much an experiment. I'm aware that the blogosphere is littered with the detritus of projects that foundered after a few posts, and on any given day alternate between feeling oppressed by trying to keep it up and alarmed by a fear of running out of things to say. I'm also aware of just how tiny a dot this enterprise is within my chosen galaxy of history and teaching. But on my better days -- or the better moments on a given day -- I find a new sense of possibility by thinking of myself as someone who produces singles rather than albums. Actually, the analogy with singles works much better than with newspaper or magazine journalism, since the work of the latter is part of a larger package of writing that may or may not be sought or read, while a blog post has a discrete and measurable (albeit imprecise) readership and is released by means which in effect constitues my own record label. More importantly, I relish the thought that my old posts in effect constitute a catalog that a clutch of "listeners" may seek out or stumble into later -- much later. I've had what for me counts as a "hit" or two (not coincidentally, they're about Springsteen). There's always the hope -- however remote or unlikely, and yet certainly sustaining -- that like the Beatles entering the recording studio in 1964, I too could produce something in a matter of hours which will still be giving pleasure to an invisible audience decades later. If I'm kidding myself on this and other aspects of such a quixotic enterprise, I can only say that it's largely kept me out of trouble, spiritual and otherwise.

That's my two cents for today, the one hundredth since the start of this blog. Thanks for listening!

"Outlaw Pete": Springsteen Makes a Western

Among the many virtues in Bruce Springsteen’s music is a rich sense of history. And like many of those virtues, that sense of history has emerged organically over the course of his career. Springsteen’s first albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, were marked by a powerful sense of immediacy; to a great extent, they’re records of the present tense. Beginning with the release of Born to Run, a consciousness of history – principally in the form of a growing awareness of past failure, and a desperate desire to avoid similar mistakes – begins to suffuse the consciousness of his characters. This consciousness is deeply personal, typically expressed, for example, in generational tensions between fathers and sons. That’s what I mean by “organic.”

By about 1980, Springsteen’s sense of history begins to get broader. It emerges in a series of forms, ranging from his decision to perform songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (reading 1980 Joe Klein’s biography of Guthrie as the suggestion of his manager, Jon Landau, seems to have been a watershed experience) to recording original songs like “Wreck on the Highway,” avowedly patterned on the style of country & western singer Roy Acuff. His 1982 album Nebraska is saturated with a sense of the 1930s (his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad even more so), and even deeply personal songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” connect the private struggles of their protagonist to much larger historical ones. This trajectory is a striking, and impressive testament to an artist’s power to grow and integrate everyday life into a broader human drama.

One of the less remarked upon aspects of Springsteen’s body of work is his fascination with the West. This is, of course, counterintuitive – Springsteen is nothing if not the voice of New Jersey, an embodiment of urban, ethnic, working-class values and culture typically associated with the Northeast Corridor. But the western signposts are there, as early as “Rosalita,” which climaxes with a vision of triumphant lovers savoring their victory over paternal repression in a café near San Diego. That’s a fleeting reference. But beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town – think of the “rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert” of “The Promised Land” – the West becomes a vivid and indispensable setting for a number of songs. Springsteen being Springsteen, he’s not always content simply to invoke or use such settings in conventional ways. So, for example, the gorgeous yearning that marks his 1995 song “Across the Border,” redolent with music, instrumentation, and language of the Southwest, is purposely ambiguous which side of the border its protagonists long to go. Springsteen’s mythic tendencies are often marked by creative friction with the concrete details and ironic realities of everyday life.

“Outlaw Pete,” the leadoff track on Springsteen’s new album, Working on a Dream, represents the next turn of the wheel in a way that’s somehow predictable, surprising, and inevitable all at once. Superficially, the song, like the album as a whole, is something of a throwback, a return to the dense, lush, melodic pop songs that were once Springsteen’s stock-in-trade. At eight minutes long, it’s also the first time in decades that’s he’s recorded a mini-epic on the scale of “Incident on 57th St.” or “Jungleland.” For thirty years now, the overall trend in Springsteen’s work has been toward more sparse, even minimalist songs that approach spoken-language records, though the approach here was first broached on Magic in 2007. It’s almost jarring to hear his eager embrace of melodic hooks and multi-track harmonies.

It’s also almost jarring in that “Outlaw Pete” so willfully introduces us to a protagonist who seems like a cartoon figure from an imitation John Ford movie, who “at six months old” had “done three months in jail” and “robbed a bank in his diapers and little baby feet.” Pete’s signature question, “Can you hear me?” seems like a childish insistence for attention. Some might be amused by such a description; others might dismayed, even irritated by its triviality. One could be forgiven for perceiving that Springsteen is slipping into superficiality in his advancing age, perhaps trying to recapture the sense of popular appeal that once seems so effortlessly his.

But appearances are deceiving. More specifically, our perception of Outlaw Pete is deceiving. After hearing the seemingly requisite description of a horse-stealing, heart-breaking scoundrel – rendered in an amused voice that suggests the narrator views him as a figure closer to a rakishly charming Jesse James than a hard, frightening, Liberty Valance – the story turns on a dime (the music, which shifts to a declining phrase of repeating notes, indicates this) as Pete gets a vision of his own death that prompts him to marry a Navajo and settle down with a newborn daughter on a reservation. Yet in some sense the story is only getting started. A vindictive lawman – another staple of western mythology – is determined to bring Pete down and precipitates a confrontation. “Pete you think you have changed but you have not,” Dan tells him, in so doing posing the existential question at the heart of the song, which is to what degree we have agency over our characters and thus our fate. In the showdown that follows Pete is nominally the victor, yet Dan literally gets the last word in observing before his death that “we cannot undo these things that we’ve done.” The question “Can you hear me?” is turned on its head, as Dan speaks to Pete instead of Pete speaking to the world.

Pete, now a fugitive from the law, makes an ambiguous disappearance from the story. Is it to be understood that his encounter with Dan demonstrates the fixed nature of his personality and the impossibility of any lasting mortal redemption? Or is it an act of abnegation that protects his wife and daughter from the wickedness that surrounds him? The final verses of the song depict Dan’s daughter braiding Pete’s buckskin chaps in her hair – original sin and grace at once – with the question “Can you hear me?” now completely reversed, as we listeners seek the vanished Pete. Like Alan Ladd in Shane or John Wayne in any number of westerns, Pete catalyzes action that leads to resolution, but pushes him beyond the frame.

Like a great many works of art, “Outlaw Pete” asks many more questions than it answers. But there are at least two things it does clarify. The first is the ongoing vitality of western mythology (now nicely updated with a multicultural accent) as a vehicle for exploring the complexities of American life. The second is the ongoing vitality of Springsteen himself, 36 years into an enormously broad and deep body of work, to reinvent himself through reviewing and revising our cultural traditions. He hears us, and we see ourselves.