Song of the Day 5/15: Bruce Springsteen, “Chimes of Freedom”
Bruce Springsteen was once hailed as a new Dylan. The comparison never fit – the young Dylan came to fame by writing the best songs to come out of the Great Folk Music Scare, while young Bruce mostly sang about getting out of New Jersey. But once Springsteen started writing about issues of social justice, he stuck to it, and he’s gotten more vocal as time has gone on.
Last night the E Street Band opened a European tour in music-mad Manchester, England, and throughout the concert Springsteen gave the crowd an earful of anti-MAGA sentiment. About halfway through the show, before the band took up “My City of Ruins,” he had this to say:
There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.
In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.
In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers. They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society. They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom.
They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.
A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.
The America I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ Let’s pray.
To drive home his point, he closed his six-song encore set by covering a protest song he hasn’t played in concert since 1988. Dylan himself last played it live in 2012.
The original appeared on “Another Side of Bob Dylan” in 1964, and was one of the four Dylan compositions on the debut album by the Byrds to get their trademark jangly, harmony-rich treatment. It was never released as a single but became a concert staple. It was a highlight of the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967.
