In 1996, I saw Bruce Springsteen on the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, when he took the stage for two hours with only an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. He was pretty good when the songs were fast-- I remember the lusty "Red Headed Woman" being a stand-out-- but whenever the tempos flagged, the show became deadly dull. When he interrupted the show to recount his favorite passage in The Grapes of Wrath, I actually fell asleep-- despite being in the almighty presence of the man I considered at the time to be my hero. This is the Springsteen flip side that is rarely considered when artists from the Killers to the Arcade Fire cite him as an influence: There's anthemic Bruce of Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A, whose music seems to embody everything that rock and roll can and should be, but then there's serious storyteller Bruce of The Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust, whose devotion to Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie is so personal that it often comes across as exclusionary.
While his colleagues go for the might and majesty of anthemic Bruce, Jon Berrnson is somewhat bolder: while he may not be directly citing the Boss as a source, his third album fronting Ray's Vast Basement seems squarely in the vein of Tom Joad, right down to its last period detail. Starvation Under Orange Trees was, according to the liners, inspired by Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and commissioned by the Actors Theatre of San Francisco. This is a concept album as literary endeavor, which doesn't just mean the lyrics are smart, but rather that they evoke a time, place, and culture specifically and artfully. Fortunately, Berrnson doesn't try to retell that story through song, which would be largely unbearable. Starvation is not a piece of Dustbowl realism like Steinbeck's novel, nor Americana fantasia like HBO's defunct Carnivále-- nor, for that matter, anything resembling the AbEx of its curiously anachronistic cover. Instead, he and the band explore Depression culture on a larger scale: "Work Song" and "California's Gone" follow itinerants westward to labor in orange groves, and "The Story of Lee" recounts the trials of a Chinese immigrant. On the closing "Annalisa", a boxcar-jumper longs for the love he left behind, and the spirited "Cotton Black" is a boxing tale that could have been inspired by George Bellows' pugilist paintings.
With a large cast of musicians that includes Michael Zapruder and Decemberists bass player Nate Query, Bernson anchors these songs in some of the same folk sounds that inspire storyteller Springsteen, but dresses them up in Sufjan-style orchestration. And yet, Berrnson actually incorporates very little period music into these songs, aside from scraps of ragtime on "Danny's Party" and blasts of trumpet on "Cotton Black". Starvation is overly modern, from the watery bossa nova beat of "Palace Flophouse" to the brushed snare on "Ocean Notes" that sounds like a loop. The trembling atmosphere of "Work Song" and "Tall Bob Smoke" are too cinematic, their gravity a kind of soundtrack shorthand that seems empty without a visual, but the backing vocals on "The Story of Lee" and "Not Just Mine" are mic'ed to sound like they're emanating either from a beat-up radio or from the firmament directly-- a nice atmospheric touch that suggests a dramatic chorus watching over these characters. Starvation achieves the brainy scope of a good novel, but to what end? Too firmly rooted in contemporary musical styles, none of these songs have much to say about the present-day. There's no activist spark here, just an academic scrutiny that rarely extends beyond the stage or the page.
