Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen: doing Dylan's work

“Lookin' for a Leader”
by Neil Young

Lookin' for a leader
To bring our country home
Re-unite the red white and blue
Before it turns to stone

Lookin' for somebody
Young enough to take it on
Clean up the corruption
And make the country strong

Walkin' among our people
There's someone who's straight and strong
To lead us from desolation
And a broken world gone wrong

Someone walks among us
And I hope he hears the call
And maybe it's a woman
Or a black man after all

Yeah maybe it's Obama
But he thinks that he's too young
Maybe it's Colin Powell
To right what he's done wrong

America has a leader
But he's not in the house
He's walking here among us
And we've got to seek him out

Yeah we've got our election
But corruption has a chance
We got to have a clean win
To regain confidence

America is beautiful
But she has an ugly side
We're lookin' for a leader
In this country far and wide
We're lookin' for a leader
With the great spirit on his side

Someone walks among us
And I hope he hears the call
And maybe it's a woman
Or a black man after all


"World Wide Suicide"
by Pearl Jam

I felt the earth on Monday. It moved
beneath my feet.
In the form of a morning paper,
Laid out for me to see.

Saw his face in a corner picture,
I recognized the name.
Could not stop staring at the, Face
I'd never see again.

It's a shame to awake in a world of pain
What does it mean when a war has taken over
It's the same everyday in a hell manmade
What can be saved, and who
will be left to hold her?

The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.
The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.

Medals on a wooden mantle,
Next to a handsome face.
That the president took for granted,
Writing checks that others pay.

And in all the madness,
thought becomes numb and naive.
So much to talk about, nothing for to say.

It's the same everyday and the wave won't break
Tell you to pray, while the devils on their shoulder
Laying claim to the take that our soldiers save
Does not equate, and the truth's already out there

The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.
The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.

Looking in the eyes of the fallen
You got to know there's another, another,
another, another, another way

It's a shame to awake in a world of pain
What does it mean when a war has taken over
It's the same everyday and the wave won't break
Tell you to pray, while the devils on their shoulder

The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.
The whole world, World over.
It's a world wide suicide.


“We shall overcome”
by Robert Kuttner

NEW ORLEANS -- 'THIS IS our first gig," said Bruce Springsteen. ''I hope it goes OK."

With that, The Boss and his 18-piece Seeger Sessions Band opened their set with a rocking rendition of ''Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep." As an act of solidarity with this doubly ravaged city, Springsteen began his homage to Pete Seeger tour here, at ground zero of everything ruinous about the people who now run our country.

The 37th annual Jazz and Heritage Festival was playing to a smaller, whiter crowd than usual in half-abandoned New Orleans. It would be hard to imagine a more poignant or uplifting marriage of musician, impulse, venue, and moment.

Lately, musicians as diverse as Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Green Day, Paul Simon, and Ani di Franco have followed the same impulse. This is surely the time and the place.

Commentators solemnly billed Hurricane Katrina as the flood that laid bare awkward truths of class and race in America. It did -- for a vivid week, and then we turned away.

By a fine accident of timing, I came here for a conference on what Katrina revealed -- and found plenty of surprises. Downtown and the tourist French Quarter, which got priority federal attention, look as if Katrina had never happened. But the outlying scale of devastation is far more extensive, and the federal default of government more staggering, than one could imagine.

Of 485,000 people who lived here before Katrina, only about 165,000 remain. New Orleans had high rates of black home ownership. But tens of thousands of homeowners are trapped in a horrific Catch-22 because of cascading federal failures.

In huge swaths of the city, basic public services are unrestored, so people can't return to viable houses. Mountains of stinking rubbish -- once the stuff of homes and lives -- lie uncollected on front yards. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, decided to clear inhabited areas first. It just never returned to pick up the rest.

Tens of thousands of homes could be renovated and reoccupied. But instead of making emergency rehab grants or loans, FEMA spends $90,000 per trailer, often parked in front yards, while black mold relentlessly ruins structurally sound houses.

FEMA was slow to revise federal flood insurance guidelines. Without federal flood coverage, no private insurance flows and people can't get bank loans. So extensive salvageable areas remain unoccupied. Meanwhile, the 2006 hurricane season arrives June 1, but the levees are restored only to withstand a mild category 2 storm.

Filling some of the vacuum left by the Bush default, heroic work is being done by volunteers, from Habitat for Humanity, ACORN, and several churches and trade unions. Many live in a tent city -- which FEMA now plans to tear down June 1.

Springsteen toured all this, appalled. He composed two new stanzas to the 1929 song, ''How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" including, ''[Bush] gave a little pep talk, said I'm with you, then he took a walk." Springsteen elicited loud cheers when he deplored the government's ''criminal irresponsibility." A small plane circled, towing an ''Impeach Bush" banner.

New Orleans heroically pulled itself together to bring off this Fest. Held on a racetrack grounds, the fair has nine simultaneous performance spaces going all day, a crafts section, kids' tent, and a food midway where New Orleans's finest chefs serve such specialties as artichoke and oyster soup and gourmet jambalaya ladled from murky oil drums at $5 a bowl.

As the field dried out from a drenching rain, I gloriously wandered from Willis Prudhomme and the Zydeco Express to the gospel tent to a medley of everything from brass bands, Dixieland funeral music, back to more zydeco, to blues.

By 5:30, when Springsteen strode onto the main stage, following New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint, the sun was shining. Like Seeger's, the Springsteen repertoire included not just political songs such as ''Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," but the whimsical bits of Americana that Seeger loved, like ''(Get Out of the Way,) Old Dan Tucker." And when Springsteen began ''We Shall Overcome," the crowd, both the '60s generation and youngsters who had seen it only on TV joined uplifted hands, swayed, and sang along, without irony.

If anyone can reintroduce songs of protest to a new mass audience, making that much-reworked tradition fresh, it is the sunny, exuberant Springsteen. Folk music was, of course, the original popular culture. Sometimes, the borrowings of commercial pop from folk music are cheesy and opportunistic (say, the Byrds' version of Seeger). Other times, the result is a powerful, authentic synthesis, as in the work of Ry Cooder, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon at their best, New Orleans's own Randy Newman, who wrote the original flood anthem three decades ago, ''Louisiana: They're trying to wash us away," and now Springsteen.

Like protest music, you never know when protest itself will recur. As Springsteen packed up and our conference began, millions not ''Born In The USA" were assembling across America to declare their dignity as working people and human beings. They also sang.

America today is depressing, but music adds energy and spirit to the protest imperative. Song is an inherently collective ritual that reminds us that we are not alone. You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

(Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Boston Globe.)