Bruce Springsteen Shouts Out ‘Nebraska.’ Couldn’t Agree More.
I know a number of Bruce Springsteen fans who look at his Nebraska album the way a French cheesemaker might look at Velveeta. Like, “Why is this even here?”
So as someone who feels the opposite and has always loved Nebraska, I was gratified this past Sunday when Springsteen told interviewer Jim Axelrod on CBS Sunday Morning that if he could pick the album by which people would remember him 50 years from now, it would be Nebraska.
Springsteen explained how, when he wrote the songs that became Nebraska, he had just turned 30 and had come to some disturbing conclusions about his life. Yes, he was the rock ’n’ roll star he had been driven to become. But he didn’t have a family or a real home.
As laid out in the new book Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by Warren Zanes, he responded with a writing whirlwind that drew on this restless sense of unease and discontent.
It’s no surprise that Nebraska came out pretty dark, and further darkened by the fact that the released version had none of the concert-friendly rock anthems to which Springsteen fans were accustomed. Instead it had been stripped down to Bruce’s voice, acoustic guitar and not a lot more.
It’s a raw record, reminiscent of chilling country, blues and folk songs from decades past.
The title song and leadoff track is written from the perspective of Charles Starkweather, who along with his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate murdered 11 people on a rampage from Nebraska to Wyoming in late 1957 and early 1958. Springsteen reportedly knew the case best from the movie Badlands, but since he’d already written a (magnificent) unrelated song by that name, he first titled the new one “Starkweather” before it was changed to “Nebraska” for the album.
The character’s narration is disturbingly dispassionate, taking its tone from the real-life Starkweather’s final written message in which he said he wasn’t really sorry because he and Fugate “have some fun.”
Springsteen was asked in an interview a few years back whether he tried to find a note of hope in all the stories his songs told.
“As a rule, yeah,” he said, then paused. “But then a song like ‘Nebraska,’ I don’t know what hope you can take from it except maybe that someone’s still around to tell the story.”
An intriguing footnote to “Nebraska” is its similarity to an earlier song about a serial killer, Kinky Friedman’s “Ballad of Charles Whitman.” Whitman, a Marine and Eagle Scout, killed 14 people with a sniper rifle from the clock tower on the University of Texas campus on Aug. 1, 1966.
The cases are different and Friedman’s tone can veer toward dark humor, but the final lines of each song are eerily similar.
Springsteen: “If you ask why I did what I did / Sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”
Friedman: “Most folks couldn’t figure just why he did it / And them that could would not admit it / There’s still a lot of Eagle Scouts around.”
After the title track come four songs that for me elevated Springsteen to the top level of modern songwriters. I know many of his ’70s fans think he reached that level many albums and concerts earlier, and that’s fine, because taste is taste. But the first five tracks on Nebraska still resonate for me the way “Jungleland” or “Thunder Road” or “Backstreets” strike the chord for so many of those earlier fans.
Anyhow, those next four Nebraska tracks are, in order, “Atlantic City,” “Mansion on the Hill,” “Johnny 99” and “Highway Patrolman.”
“Mansion” feels personal and reflective, a very different song than Hank Williams’s “Mansion on the Hill” though rooted in the same premise about the chasm between those who are born with more and those who are born with less. It’s a song full of small details, at which Springsteen shone, and its placement on the record never seemed accidental. It’s the respite between four songs of violence and death. It’s a breather that’s not filler.
“Atlantic City” and “Johnny 99” are the tales of desperate men who turn to crime. Neither excuses the crime. Both explain it, pointedly through a great line that Springsteen puts into both songs: “I got debts no honest man can pay.”
Both songs are packed with words, a Springsteen signature for years, and the torrent works. Not many lines set a scene better than “Down in the part of town where if you hit a red light you don’t stop . . . .”
In “Atlantic City,” desperation is pointing toward a dead end. In “Johnny 99,” we’ve reached it.
On his star-making “Born In the U.S.A.” tour, Springsteen often did “Atlantic City” and “Johnny 99” with the full band, and they were killers. So are the acoustic versions. Not every Springsteen song holds up repeatedly in both incarnations — you don’t need to hear “Born To Run” acoustic over and over — but these two do.
“Highway Patrolman” lays out one of the oldest dilemmas of the human race: finding the balance between supporting family and standing up for what’s right.
The narrator, Joe Roberts, took the high road and became a cop. His brother Frankie, very likely damaged by his time in Vietnam, became a criminal. Inevitably their paths cross, and after Joe has chased Frankie halfway across Upper Michigan as Frankie flees a crime scene, Joe pulls over and lets Frankie slip into Canada.
“Man turns his back on his family,” Joe sings, “To me he ain’t no good.” Tony Soprano would agree. It’s complicated.
The last five songs on Nebraska grab me a little less, though “Reason To Believe” goes back to that thing about finding a ray of light in a bleak landscape. But few songs kick off any album as powerfully as those first five.
There’s more fascinating backstory to Nebraska, all laid out in Zanes’s book, including the way most of the songs that surfaced on Born in the USA came from the Nebraska writing sessions.
Therein lies one of the great ironies of Springsteen’s career. Where fans treated the Born in the USA album and especially its monster tour as one long celebration, with the band roaring and fists pumping in the air, a lot of those songs had the same restless, discontented undertone as the songs that came out on Nebraska — which was shunned by many of those same fans as being too downbeat and no fun.
“Born In the USA” and “Glory Days,” perhaps the best-known single hits from Born in the USA, have both spent much of their lives being widely hailed as joyous odes, which they are not.
Call it the power of presentation over content, and it raises the theoretical question of how Nebraska would be regarded had it been released with the full-band versions that Springsteen also recorded and then decided to set aside.
It was said years ago that Columbia wasn’t crazy about releasing the acoustic Nebraska, correctly sensing it would not maintain the sales and popularity momentum Springsteen had built with Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, or even “Hungry Heart,” his first significant success on top-40 radio.
Word was Springsteen agreed that if Columbia released Nebraska, he would come back with a full band record that would be much more fan- and radio-friendly. Whether or not there was ever such an understanding, two years later Born in the USA and its kickoff single “Dancing in the Dark” were just that.
Aside the songs themselves, Nebraska represented another major statement for Springsteen: He would make the records he wanted, not the records that music biz analytics or even his fans might favor. In that sense, it paved the way for The Ghost of Tom Joad, Sessions, Western Stars and Only the Strong Survive.
For sales, none of those has come close to his rock ’n’ roll records.
Born in the USA has sold some 30 million copies worldwide. Born to Run and The River hover around 7 million, The Rising around 3.5 million.
Nebraska, over 40 years, has sold around 1.5 million. While that isn’t shabby, clearly it has never become a widespread fan favorite. For one thing, most fans likely put on Springsteen music to crank up the volume, sing along and feel good. Nebraska doesn’t have that effect.
But those off-rock records remain an important part of what Springsteen has wanted to say, and it’s also worth remembering that there are subsets within Springsteen’s universe of fans. Some think he’s never surpassed his early free-spirited rock ’n’ roll and its jubilant manifestation on stage. Others love the Born in the USA era. Smaller groups enjoy other records. Like Nebraska.
Those of us who do were pleased to hear that while Bruce obviously loves all his music, he hears Nebraska as something it was particularly important to say.
(To hear Jim Axelrod’s segment with Bruce Springsteen, go to https://www.cbsnews.com/sunday-morning/. The show is 90 minutes and the Springsteen interview comes at about the one-hour mark. There are a bunch of other good segments, too.)
