"A meanness in this world..."

So I asked my friend and fellow substacker Serge Bielanko if me and him should/could write dueling essays on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Serge used to be in a Philly-based band called Marah. Serge has played with Bruce and the E Street Band (Giants Stadium), and Bruce has played with Serge and Marah (Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, NJ). Bruce guested on a Marah song called “Float Away” back in 2002.

In other words, I made Serge an offer he could not refuse.

As to what these essays would touch upon? Well, we didn’t discuss that part. So I have no idea what he’s gonna get up to, and he has no idea what I’m putting down. But that’s kinda how we roll.

Serge’s essay can be found here.

Here’s mine.

********************************************************************************

They wanted to know why I did what I did
Sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world

—Bruce Springsteen

Over 40 years later, when I hear these lines, sung in that young dead-eyed voice, I can’t help but think that Springsteen sensed the oncoming storms. All the promises were being broken. No longer could we expect to live better than our parents. It was going to be a struggle to simply maintain. Safety nets were being dismantled. Cruelty was becoming almost casual. We’d just sent a Hollywood actor to the White House.

Charles Starkweather killed in the 1950s but make no mistake, no song encapsulated its own decade more than Nebraska’s title track. It might be the only song recorded in the 1980s that doesn’t sound dated, which is quite a feat for something recorded in a shag-carpeted bedroom onto a cassette tape and mixed down to a boom box.

And all this from the guy who just had a top 5 radio hit with the poppy Hungry Heart. But then again…

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back

….is not the sort of couplet you’d expect from a guy eager to crack the top 40. Or get married for that matter. Clearly Springsteen was not content with what was swirling around him. Once the euphoria of his nearly 4 hour shows wore off, he was back to sitting alone in hotel rooms. He didn’t socialize with his band. One of his girlfriends at the time said that he expected her to be around when he needed her, and to get lost when he didn’t. When he came off tour he remembered that he was, literally, homeless. So he rented a small house on a reservoir a few miles from where he grew up. He drove around the neighborhood on trash days to pick up discarded furniture to fill the house with. (He would never follow the advice of his most famous song, death trap be damned) By his own account he rarely went out. He lived the same musician hours. Up until the wee hours. Sleeping through the days. One late night he caught a Terence Malick film on a local access channel. It’s quite possible that in the entire state of New Jersey he was the only person watching Badlands that night. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek’s twisted love affair, and its horrifying consequences, must have been like a furnace finally lighting on a cold night. He finally had the metaphor he’d been searching for.

Which is pretty fucked up when you think about it, especially since Springsteen didn’t write a song about Charles Starkweather, but a song AS Charles Starkweather. In his voice. Starkweather was one of our nation’s most notorious spree-killers…..a bow-legged bully with an IQ in the 70s who liked nothing better than to be told that he vaguely resembled James Dean. Sheen’s on-screen portrayal surely gives Starkweather more panache than he deserved, but is pitch-perfect in its depiction of a true rebel without a cause. “The more I looked at people, the more I hated them”, Starkweather once said, which is about as uncomplicated as one can get. His murder spree kick-started the end of the Happy Days 50s in the same way Altamont doused the hippie glow of the 60s. Starkweather died in the electric chair, suggesting the 15 year old girl he brought along for the ride should be sitting on his lap.

In other words, this music wasn’t gonna get played on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40.

Especially being surrounded, as it was, by tales of blown-up mobsters, recently laid off auto workers who snap and shoot night clerks, and a sheriff who nudges his no damn good brother across state lines so he can escape justice. E-Street band drummer Max Weinberg noted that during this time period nobody in the band even knew where Springsteen lived. That may have been a blessing. The Nebraska record ended with a song so terrifyingly bleak that it might have called for an intervention. In it, Bruce can only laugh at man’s willingness to even get out of fucking bed in the morning.

It struck me kinda funny, seemed kinda funny sir to me
Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe

To use the immortal words of Henry Hill in Goodfellas….”this was the bad time.”

*****

Of course, it’s all about presentation.

Most of the songs for his upcoming mega-platinum Born in the USA record were written at the same time, and it’s easy to miss their bleakness amidst the whomping drums and cheesy 80s synth riffs. It’s pretty hard to mis-interpret lyrics like…

Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
End up like a dog that's been beat too much
'Til you spend half your life just to cover it up, now

….but we and the White House somehow managed, pumping our fists in a patriotic fervor, and pushing back all that bad 80s hair with red white and blue bandanas. Bruce later regretted that he didn’t release this song in its original Nebraska version, which sounds like it’s being sung by a man with a hellhound on his trail. Even a dunce like Reagan would have gotten this message.

Hell, even Glory Days is depressing as shit, as if Bruce was determined to write a version of Reason to Believe that everybody could dance to.

Bruce’s manager Jon Landau recalled hearing the songs for the first time and being worried on a personal level. Mental illness is no joke, and Bruce’s family, most prominently his father, was laced with it. If you listened to Nebraska with that mindset, you might want to get the guy out of the house and back with the band too.

But for now Bruce was content to make soft noises.

*****

Turns out one of rock and roll’s best frontmen and bandleaders didn’t need a band at all. These skeletal recordings (only Atlantic City uses more than 3 chords, it has 4) come across as a lo-fi punk rock record. The guy who spent 6 months in the studio cutting a single song (Born to Run) recorded the majority of this record in a single dark night of the soul. His timing is sometimes off. He fumbles the guitar pick. His voice wobbles. There’s some bum harp notes. The story goes that he tried re-recording the tracks in an actual studio later on, but grudgingly admitted that “the better it sounded, the worse it sounded”. So one of the most notorious control freaks in rock and roll, the guy who sang the sax solo to Jungleland to Clarence Clemens….one line at a time, for 16 hours straight, and then heard the finished product and promptly flung the acetate into the pool, finally said, “fuck it” and stopped chasing perfection. In doing so he became a legend.

The title track is as good as the Malick film. Highway Patrolman is such a sturdy narrative that it was turned first into a Hollywood film, then a novel, and then a 5 part Croatian television series. Johnny 99 was as good as anything The Clash ever dreamed of. Reason to Believe might be the best blues song ever written by a white dude. Atlantic City crystalizes the devastation of Reaganomics better than any veteran beltway pundit. For all the songs Springsteen has written about his father, nothing comes close to the heartbreak and shame of Used Cars. And even after 1000 listens, State Trooper’s two chords can still bring chills. The entire record is a 40 minute master’s level class on narrative songwriting.

Bruce made great music before this, and he would make great music after it. But even he sensed that this was the one that would still be played and talked about 100 years from now. He had tapped into something almost primal. What happens when you have debts no honest man can pay? What happens when economic apartheid plucks you out of the crowd? Nebraska remains the state of a very divided union.

*****

“ALL music is folk music” said Louis Armstrong. “I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song”

“Rock and roll is folk music, pretty much, because it’s for folks”. So said Dan Zanes from the band The Del Fuegos back in 1985. Dan’s younger brother and bandmate Warren would just this year release a book about……Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

So is this folk music? It’s largely a guitar/voice record. That should suffice, right?

But as I mentioned earlier, I think it’s more of a punk record than anything else. Its DIY vibe. Its cast of outcasts. Its simplicity. A straight “folk” record (like the future Seeger Sessions) you could market. Nobody knew what to do with Nebraska. Bruce didn’t do promo interviews for it. He didn’t tour. One video was made as a sop to the MTV folks…a video Bruce had nothing to do with it, and didn’t appear in. The fans onboarded by Hungry Heart stayed away in droves, as did rock radio.

If this record had been made by somebody other than Springsteen, it might still be buried in some public radio storage room.

But he made it. And the record he released 2 years later sold 15 million copies and made him the biggest white American pop star since Elvis Presley.

Nebraska, once viewed as potential career suicide, was retroactively looked upon as an unimpeachable act of artistic integrity.

Which might be a tad overblown. This was/is the sort of Bruce lionization that drives non-Bruce fans crazy. I’m not sure he planned any of this. Sometimes songs just sound good as they are. Not everybody needs to be Phil Spector 24/7. Soft noises can pack a wallop too.

*****

Nebraska changed everything for me. It changed the way I listened to music. It changed the way I played music. And it changed the way I wrote music. The last record I made, back in 2020, was largely recorded in my basement, on a Tascam machine very similar to the one Bruce used 40 years ago. That’s no accident.

Nebraska also reminds me how isolated we still are from each other, all these years later. Its characters still exist everywhere and nowhere, faced with impossible moral choices in a land where individuals are valued less than numbers on a balance sheet.

It’s a record for loners, made by one.

Decades later Springsteen wrote a song called Land of Hope and Dreams…

Well, this train carries saints and sinners
This train carries losers and winners
This train carries whores and gamblers
This train carries lost souls

Nebraska was the train.

In a bit…

—tf

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