Item: Live In Dublin
Rating: 7
Author: rollingstone

7.0/ 10

“Last year' s Seeger Sessions was cut in just three days with a twelve-piece band that hadn't played together before. This Dublin stop, taped at the tail end of a seven-month tour, finds Bruce and the band going at the same material with a raw gusto that connects American traditions: mountain string bands, whorehouse Dixieland […]”

Last year' s Seeger Sessions was cut in just three days with a twelve-piece band that hadn't played together before. This Dublin stop, taped at the tail end of a seven-month tour, finds Bruce and the band going at the same material with a raw gusto that connects American traditions: mountain string bands, whorehouse Dixieland jazz, juke-joint rockabilly, Western swing and E Street soul. Across two CDs drawn from three concerts, Springsteen rips up old folk songs and revises nine slices of his back catalog — "Blinded by the Light" is yoked to Gypsy violin (strange, not wondrous); "Highway Patrolman" is fleshed out as a country weeper (fantastic, maybe definitive). At home, the Sessions Band had trouble selling out Asbury Park. Overseas, they were greeted as heroes, and this is the proof of their heroism.