Believe it or not, sometimes this is the sound that the producer/artist is
looking for. In some cases, it is a color added to the music and has no
relationship to good harmonica playing.
I know it. That is discouraging enough. Imagine a producer asking someone
who can't play piano to play piano all the way through a recording - "But I
don't know the first thing about playing piano" - "No no, that's the sound
I want." Ain't gonna happen.
Scotty Moore had a business making soundalike records in Nashville in the
70's. He hired me to play harp on a soundalike of the John Denver hit
"Back Home Again", which has some amateurish harp on it, which I had to
copy. (That's the only reason Scotty wanted me to play badly, it wasn't
for piquant effect.)
It was so hard that I did a lousy job. That is, a few years later I worked
for a company in NY that had just bought the catalog that included the
soundalikes. For no known reason I put one of the albums on the
turntable. The first song was Back Home Again. It sounded a little off to
me, but when the harp fills came on I said to myself "Whoever that is, the
bastard sure has nice tone. That is NOT the original recording --- hold
on! --- that's me!" Wish I had gotten a copy of that.
But this Springsteen thing is worse, because the bad harmonica is a loud
pad throughout the entire recording.
Ugly, like extremely bad abstract art, like having chimpanzees build a two
story building, like sending a befuddled angry drunk on a diplomatic
mission, like hiring me to be your exercise guru after a heart attack.
The other tracks I heard from the album sounded wonderful.