Jungleland, Bruce Springsteen (1975)

James Taylor yesterday, Springsteen today. I guess I'm writing about the artists who are participating in the Obama inaugural events!

Here's the thing about Bruce Springsteen. I wasn't that avid a fan. But the first time I heard Jungleland, I think I had an out of body experience, especially at the end with the primal scream. There may be other songs like it out there, but I can't think of one.

I haven't written about this before because it's been hard to imagine putting into words how this song affected - and still affects - me. Fortunately, I've just found an essay that Greil Marcus wrote for Rolling Stone at the time, about the Born to Run album in its entirety, that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject.

Marcus talks about how it's not necessary to know all of the lyrics of a song to understand what it's about. He's absolutely on the money when he says that, about this song or any other, for that matter. I am sure that for years I didn't know most of the lyrics of Jungleland and probably still don't (although I'm looking at them now in some liner notes from The Essential Bruce Springsteen).

But I am devastated every time I hear it, blown away by the futility in the story being told, the horror of a life force wasted and pretty much no one caring - a story that plays out every day in jungles of one kind or another all over the world. All of that is conveyed in the music alone, in Clarence Clemons' doleful sax solo, in Roy Bittan's heavenly piano, and in Bruce's utterly unbearable howl at the end. It's not unlike going to an opera that's performed in Italian and has no surtitles (or you just don't look at them), yet the emotions you have in response to what you're witnessing are exactly the ones you should be having.

Marcus notes that, at the same time, the Born to Run songs are "exhilarating." Why that should be the case is hard to fathom. Certainly this song has nothing but tragedy written all over it. But the musicianship on Jungleland is so astonishing that it quite simply is experienced as a small miracle. A phenomenal degree of care was taken in its creation (in The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen by Rob Kirkpatrick, it's stated that Bruce spent the better part of a day with Clemons going over every note of the solo, for example.)

So we're getting blood, sweat and tears, not just in the story but in the backstory. It's a 9-1/2 minute opera and it is as close to perfection as anything in rock history gets.

Louisiana 1927, Randy Newman (1975)

Louisiana ... Louisiana ... they're trying to wash us away, they're trying to wash us away ...

As inconceivable as it is, New Orleans and the surrounding area is again in the eye of a storm that threatens destruction of such magnitude that almost 2 million people have been evacuated to avoid a repeat of the unspeakable catastrophe Hurricane Katrina left in its wake.

Our hearts are in our throats for people whose choices come down to, as one resident put it, "Do you leave it and worry about it, or do you stay and worry about living?" (According to today's paper, this person picked option 1, taking one of the last buses out of town.)

The last time this happened, Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927 became the unofficial anthem of those fellow citizens who were ravaged by Mother Nature and poor civil engineering - left to their own devices by every public official who could have lifted a finger and didn't. It appears that won't be the case this time; we won't watch in horror as the government "... sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes," as Barack Obama observed in his acceptance speech Thursday night. Amazing what can happen when indifference is replaced with competence, or at the very least, determination to do the right thing.

Newman's mother was from the city, and he found himself researching its history, including the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River that followed months of heavy rain - and the disgraceful, racist handling of that relief effort. I didn't know this song in 1975, only becoming aware of it when New Orleans native Aaron Neville recorded his deeply affecting version for the 1991 Warm Your Heart album and performed it live after he was driven from his home 15 years later by Katrina and another disgraceful, racist relief effort.

As pointed out in a New York Times article from earlier this year, Louisiana has become a folk song in that it has been adapted by other artists to make it more relevant to current events. References to President Coolidge changed to Bush, Evangeline morphed into Lower Nine, river became levee, and Newman's original acerbic lyric "cracker" is sometimes Creole, farmer or people ... However it's tweaked, it is vintage Randy Newman - simple, mournful, packing a huge punch.

Godspeed to all who are facing the trials and tribulations of the upheaval, and to all who decided to stay.

Diamonds & Rust, Joan Baez (1975)

The publicity machine was working overtime this week for "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties," the new memoir by Suze Rotolo, the young girl featured on the cover of the 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

In several interviews, Rotolo mentioned or was asked about the woman who succeeded her in Dylan's affections, Joan Baez, and that reminded me of Diamonds & Rust, one of the fiercest and most unsentimental, and yet hauntingly beautiful, songs ever written or sung about the aftermath of a big love that is never really extinguished despite every attempt to do so. At a certain point in my life, these words so closely mirrored my own emotions it was frightening.

One of our generation's most steadfast campaigners for human rights and social justice, Baez gained fame as a folk singer with a three-octave range who largely interpreted others' work, but this was a stunning exception. I don't think there's any doubt that the song is about Dylan, with whom she had a symbiotic on-again, off-again relationship in the early 60s.

When they met in Greenwich Village, her career was already a few steps ahead of his. At the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, Baez famously invited Dylan to take the stage with her, and they sang With God On Our Side, the first of many duets they would perform until their paths diverged as had happened with Rotolo at an earlier stage. There's some interesting discussion about all of this in Martin Scorcese's Dylan documentary, No Direction Home. I can't recommend it highly enough.

I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that the Diamonds & Rust LP was the source of my discovery of John Prine, whose devastatingly sad Hello In There Joan covered for the album. Her version is not on YouTube but his is, so voilà - it's only right that this be your introduction to it anyway, despite the loveliness of Baez' version.