Though the former was fictional, “Johnny 99” and “Nebraska” were very much two of a kind. Indeed, Springsteen paired them together when seeking to explain what he was reaching for on Nebraska: “It’s the inner thing that makes a song real to you. Whether it’s…something like ‘Nebraska’ or ‘Johnny 99’, you kinda just gotta know what that feels like, somewhere.” He was still trying to figure out, “How does it feel?” Hence a November ’84 intro to “Johnny 99,” “I went down to the bank that was about to foreclose on the mortgage of the house…and he tried to tell me that he knew how I felt…I said ‘Well, you walk around that desk and you sit in this chair and you walk in those shoes for a while.’”
The rest of the songs now came with remarkable alacrity—even for such a prolific songwriter. As he admitted, “I wrote almost all the Nebraska songs in about two months. Which is really fast for me.” And he was consciously applying a technique he’d already adopted in performance on “Factory” and “The River”—songs he claimed earlier that year he was “singing through this other character. So I slowed down the tempos…not too much, but just enough so I could really dig into the songs and connect with the characters.” Well, he certainly “slowed down the tempos” on most of these new songs, to wrist-slashingly slow.
The exception to this rule was “Born In The USA,” which gained tempo with each shift away from “Vietnam Blues” and toward its anthemic destination. Five exploratory versions fill the pre-Nebraska demo tape (bootlegged as Fistful of Dollars). Initially in the same bluesy mode as “Vietnam Blues,” the song describes how this American-born protagonist ended up being shipped to Vietnam—“I got in a roadhouse jam/ They gave me the choice: the barracks or the jailhouse/ With my country I did stand.”
But by the next take—thirty seconds over Saigon—everything has changed. As a despairingly driven riff replaces this deltaesque dirge, he finally has an opening: “Got in a little hometown jam…so they put a rifle in my hand/ Born, baby, in the USA/ I believe in the American way.” That sardonic last line would have made Guthrie proud. But—like the one element he transferred to “Shut Out The Light” (“in the dark forest…”)—it wouldn’t survive the honing process.
He already had more than enough songs for a much-needed return-to-form. But there was one other song that seemed to require sustained work before it was ready for the Portastudio, having begun life under the title “The Answer.” Eventually recorded as “The Losin’ Kind,” this “one night of sin” was another mini-movie in song, living proof he wasn’t bluffing when he said, “When I write the song, I write it to be the movie—not to make a movie, to be a movie.”
It would become the only cut from the Nebraska tape to remain unreleased, its greatest crime being too many ideas for one song. The compressed narrative—“It was around 3 A.M. we went out to this empty little roadside bar/ It was there the cash register was open, it was there I hit that guy too hard”—was exactly what he had been reaching for on “Johnny 99.” In “Losin’ Kind,” though, like any good film noir, all the action occurs in one night. He meets a girl, they get drunk, take off together, pull over at another bar, rob the till, club the barman, take off, crash the car, get rescued/arrested by a state trooper, who on the original pre-Nebraska demo delivers the immortal line, “What did you think you were doin’, son?” The song answered the patrolman by telling the loser’s story. But in the end, Springsteen preferred the slighter “Highway Patrolman,” even though that song required a degree of exposition to make listeners empathize with its particular antihero.
If an adult narrator tauter than a tightrope was the main voice on the final collection, a painstaking Springsteen also occasionally adopted the all-seeing innocence of a child to provide an alternative angle but a similar moral. Again he was thinking along cinematic lines: “I was thinking in a way of To Kill A Mockingbird, because in that movie there was a child’s eye view. And Night Of The Hunter also had that…when the little girl was running through the woods.” And so on a couple of the lesser cuts—“Mansion On The Hill” and “Used Cars”—he constructed “stories that came directly out of my experience with my family.” The two viewpoints—adult and child—were still inextricably entwined: “[Nebraska] sounds a lot like me…I don’t mean in the particular details of the stories, but the emotional feeling feels a lot like my childhood felt to me.” It was a twist that again came directly from his reading of Flannery O’Connor, a connection he went out of his way to publicly acknowledge, partly to show how much broader his influences had become:
Bruce Springsteen: There was something in those stories of [O’Connor’s] that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about…She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn’t be getting it. It was always at the core of every one of her stories—the way that she’d left that hole there, that hole that’s inside everybody. There was some dark thing—a component of spirituality—that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own. She knew original sin—she knew how to give it the flesh of a story…I’d come out of a period of my own writing where I’d been writing big, sometimes operatic, and occasionally rhetorical things. I was interested in finding another way to write about those subjects, about people, and another way to address what was going on around me and in the country—a more scaled-down, more personal, more restrained way of getting…ideas across. So [this was] right prior to the record Nebraska. [1997]
How ironic, then, that the one thing which should divide O’Connor from this acolyte was her devout Catholicism. However much she might be oppressed by a “meanness” in this world—and she uses the term in both of her best-known short stories, “The River” and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”—the promise of salvation remained a given. But Springsteen held his hands up and said, “The Nebraska stuff was…kinda about a spiritual crisis, in which man is left lost. It’s like he has nothing left to tie him into society anymore…When you get to the point where nothing makes sense…[and] you just feel that alone thing, that loneness—that’s the beginning of the end.”
His rejection of the southern Catholic author’s moral universe made Nebraska a far darker experience than even the bleakest O’Connor short story. And still he told the media, “There was always hope…it’s [just] seeing the cards the way they’re dealt. If it’s real, it’s never depressing.” Perhaps he was remembering how Darkness had played in the wider world. Such “realism” would inform everything from this point forward—the search for transcendence was permanently on hold (or at least in abeyance until he told Mojo in 2006, “We live in a tragic world, but there’s grace all around you”). Now it was just a case of holding on and enjoying the ride:
Bruce Springsteen: If I was trying to capture anything on those [early eighties] records, it was a sense of a less morally certain universe…I was interested in trying to paint it as I saw it. With your own weaknesses and the places where you fail and get caught up in The Big Muddy. I was interested in taking a less heroic stance…Despite my protestations over the years in some of my [early] lyrics, there was a heroic posture to a lot of the music I created…and as you get older you realize how hard it is to do the right thing…[But] that moral certainty is attractive in a world that’s so fundamentally confusing…Most of popular culture is based on childhood fairy tales…Even though some part inside of us yearns for a morally certain world, that world doesn’t exist. That’s not the real world. And at some point you’ve got to make that realization, make your choices, and do the best that you can. [1992]
The other iconic twentieth-century American artists he namechecked on Nebraska’s behalf—John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson—had more in common with their fellow songwriter as regards their ambivalent relationship to their supposed saviour. In Johnson’s case, it was a relationship he failed to resolve before the devil knocked on his door and told him it was time to go. Comparing oneself to these two i
conic bluesmen set an awfully high bar, but set it Springsteen did. If, as he claimed in Songs, he was influenced by their records because they “sounded so good with the lights out,” how did he envisage making such an album with the E Street Band? Because when he started putting the Nebraska tape together—in late December 1981—it was still “merely” a demo for an E Street album, a way of ensuring they didn’t disappear down the same tunnel of drudgery for a fourth time:
Bruce Springsteen: I got tired of spending every single penny I had making records…When I came back from The River tour, it was the first time I had a little money in the bank, and I said, “This time I’m not gonna go in and break myself again.” Because…if you were scrubbing away in the studio learning your craft, it was on your dime, my friend…And I was spending a lot of time learning what to do in the studio. An enormous amount: The River record went on for a year or two. So I told my roadie, go out and get me some little tape player…and I can tell if I have anything before I waste time and money in the studio with the band. So he came back with a little 4–track TEAC [Portastudio]. [2010]
What has never been satisfactorily resolved is just how long these fabled home “sessions” lasted. Springsteen, in the above interview, recalled that “there were maybe two or three takes of each…I mixed it through a Gibson Echoplex, which is the sound of the echo on that record…onto another boom box. So the final mix came off the boom box you would take to the beach…I sat down, and in about three days I sang all the songs from Nebraska. I [already] had them written.” Dave Marsh, in his hagiographic Glory Days, implies it all came together in a single day—January 3, 1982 (the day it was put together); an assumption he may have taken from a usually-reliable source. In his November 1982 Musician review of the album, Paul Nelson describes “one man, just sitting at home in front of a four-track cassette machine on the night of January 3, 1982, [who] felt he had to tell these stories…one take per tune.”
It was information Nelson could only have gotten from one of two sources. He or they wanted him to print this myth. Whereas the “roadie” Springsteen sent out to buy that TEAC Portastudio, Mike Batlan—on hand throughout—specifically told journalist David McGee, “Springsteen began organizing his work for Nebraska during the first week of December 1982—that’s when [I] was directed to buy the four-track…Actual recording began on the 17 or 18 December and ended around January 3.”
Batlan’s seems the more credible scenario, given that TEAC’s Portastudio was never the most user-friendly of tools, and “bouncing” between tracks—to overdub an additional instrument or double-track a vocal—on a 4–track cassette running at 3¾ ips raised a whole set of issues. Even leaving aside such technical difficulties, to record and mix fourteen tracks in three days would be going some, especially when it involved some thirty-nine takes.* What he sent to Jon Landau sometime in January was a fifteen-song tape—the fourteen demos, as well as seven alternate takes and five alternate mixes, prefaced by a version of “Johnny Bye Bye” which has long been assumed to be some lost outtake, but was probably a live take from Meadowlands. Accompanying the tape were three pages of notes.
In these notes Springsteen suggested “Atlantic City” “should probably be done with whole band + really rockin’ out;” “Born In The USA” should also “be done very hard rockin’;” and that “Downbound Train” was an “uptempo rocker [which] for full effect needs band.” But he was already expressing doubts about “Losin’ Kind”—“I like the verses but I can’t seem to find a better punch line”—and “The Child Bride”—“kind of a work in progress or more like without progress. I worked a real long time on this song and could never quite get it right.” Neither track would make the final cut. (In the latter’s case, he simply lopped off the last two verses and recast it as “Working On The Highway,” in the process sacrificing one of the best verses from a highly productive writing season: “There’s nights I can’t sleep, no matter how hard I try/ So from my window I watch the moonlight fall on the far hillside/ I imagine I put on my jacket, go down to this little roadside bar/ Pick a stranger and spin around the dance floor to a Mexican guitar.”)
The cassette sequence had evidently been thought out in advance. Just “Child Bride” changed places from the original 14–track cassette, and only “Highway Patrolman” (originally called “Deputy”) would be moved when the LP was sequenced in late May. On both Landau’s full copy—discounting the “live” “Johnny Bye Bye”—and the released LP, “Nebraska” opened proceedings, though Springsteen felt the song “may need editing.” He thus set the overall tone before engaging the listener with a more commercial track, the accessible “Atlantic City.”
“Atlantic City” had begun life nine months ago as part of “Fist Full of Dollars,” but he had struggled to resolve this well-crafted song even as he began demoing (hence, his inclusion of three different takes with slightly different lyrics in the copy he made for Landau, and the two alternates on the “album master” in June). But he certainly knew who he had in his sights—the underworld figures who had taken “this old beach resort, one of those places that’s fallen on hard times…[and] legalize[d] gambling…Now all they’ve got is big golden casinos next block away from the slums, and a mafia that fights for control.” The resignation in the singer’s voice is there for all to hear when he sings to his gal, “Put your make up on, fix your hair up pretty/ And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.”
“Reason To Believe,” which seemed to end the “album” on a note of hope, had no such vocal resignation, Springsteen bequeathing it a gutsy, devil-may-care delivery. Yet the singer questions the faith of each character, and in concert would sometimes preface the song with a statement suggesting he thought these believers were blundering in the dark, looking for a candle: “This is about blind faith. Like, if your girlfriend comes home in the middle of the night and her clothes are all messed up; you see somebody pulling away from in front of your house, and you ask her where she’s been, she says she’s been with her girlfriends, you say, ‘Okay.’ That’s blind faith…Or when the president says he’s gonna do something about arms-control, that’s blind faith too.” *
From the nihilism of “Nebraska” to this no less desperate vignette was but a walk around the block of Reagan’s America. The song asks of these folk—the man who can’t accept he killed a dog, the woman pining for a long-gone lover, the parent of a dead baby, the jilted groom—what is it that gets you up in the morning? Springsteen gave no answers, not even a moralizing coda. And yet, he was still insisting, “Maybe you’ve got to downsize some of your expectations…just in growing up, in accepting adulthood. My characters, I think that’s what they do. They say, ‘Man, I had some shit thrown at me, but here I still am.’”
That Springsteen himself had reached a point where he had lost any reason to believe was clear from other things he said, particularly when introducing it live: “Sometimes people need something to believe in so bad that they’ll believe in anything that comes along—just so that they got some reason to believe.” He later admitted this reflected his own mindset at this time: “From ‘Badlands’ through to ‘Reason To Believe,’ that’s kind of an investigation of that place…that point—well, that was the bottom.”
When he finished compiling the tape, both the “expanded” version he made for Landau and the one he carried around in his back pocket (and also copied for band-members), he was pleasantly surprised to find a consistency of tone and a near-seamless segue of styles that gave this demo tape a cohesiveness absent from the last E Street collection. Could it be that if you picked the right songs, the sequence would take care of itself?:
Bruce Springsteen: [Nebraska] was something people weren’t expecting, and it turned everything I’d done to that point on its head…I went for an emotional flatness that I felt was a part of the way those stories would get told…/…This junky equipment unintentionally [made] this very lo-fi, spooky [record]. I mean, I knew the mood I was going after, but a lot of it was just an accident. [2
007/2010]
Landau was not so sure it was a demo tape. “Right from the beginning,” he was “somewhat skeptical…that some of this [Nebraska] material was gonna function better with a full rhythm-type thing…When you hear the Nebraska songs done even with a modest arrangement, in the [live] show…Bruce has to push harder…But on Nebraska, he’s almost singing to himself.” [GD] Springsteen, though, had a thousand reasons to believe. Never had this band failed him. And when he resumed work with the guys, just three weeks later, they did not fail him now.
These sessions were not, however, starting the potentially torturous process of turning said demos into album tracks. They were recording songs Springsteen could donate to Donna Summer, and Gary US Bonds (who was about to embark on his second E Street Album, On The Line). The song they initially recorded for Summer Landau insisted was too damn good and instructed his employer to go write her something else. He would keep “Cover Me” safe at home. Springsteen’s response was to write “Protection,” which was still wasted on Summer (though she actually makes a very good fist of it). The original version, cut with the E Street Band at the Hit Factory on February 23, has a touch of “Roulette” about it. It even shares that song’s sense of paranoia: “The phone rings in the middle of the night/ And when I pick it up, you won’t answer/ A knock on the door, I rush down the stairs/ When I open up, there’s no one there.” It proved that the E Streeters, even after a four-month break, could still cut up rough.
But rather than taking them straight into the studio to start work on an electrified Nebraska, Springsteen thought he needed another set of demos, now that he’d got the hang of TEAC’s new toy. Somewhat predictably, the net result was another dozen songs he had no need of, and which merely served to muddy these already-black waters. Naturally, there were also more rough-cut gems left lying on the riverbank, come April.
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 31