The already-performed “Bye Bye Johnny” turned up on the same list of songs, along with another crime spree drama, “Losin’ Kind”; the lovers-on-the-run ballad “Child Bride”; a pent-up lust song, “Pink Cadillac”; and another portrait of economic and personal impoverishment called “Downbound Train.” Throughout, the same spiritual void yawned beneath the characters’ feet. “It’s the thin line between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes to black,” Bruce wrote of the album in his 1998 collection of lyrics, Songs. “When the things that connect you to your world—your job, your family, friends, your faith, the love and grace in your heart—fail you.”
• • •
Accustomed to recording home demos of his songs on an off-the-shelf boom box, Bruce decided to trade up to a professional-grade home taping setup. He sent his guitar tech, Mike Batlan, to get a Teac four-track recorder, figuring the extra tracks would allow him to add an extra guitar part, overdub a harmony vocal, add percussion, or whatever flavoring he thought might help the band get a sense of how he wanted the finished tracks to sound. Whatever mixing he needed to do could be performed on a high-grade but still off-the-shelf Panasonic beat box, which was just good enough to handle the at-home demo work he had in mind.
A technically demanding songwriter would have sprung for a more reliable mixing unit, especially since this particular beat box had been through some rough months. Earlier that fall Bruce had brought it along on a boat journey that he and Garry Tallent were taking on the Navesink River. They were rocking and rolling their way up the river until the water turned rough. “This wave came over the bow, hit the beat box, and shut it down,” Bruce says. He hauled the dead machine back to Colts Neck, put it on his couch,7 and forgot all about it until a week or so later, when he was watching television in the middle of the night. “Suddenly, pchhhk-chhhk-kapow! I hear this sound, and it scared me, man. What the hell is that!?! Then a few more explosions, and bang! The thing came blasting back on.” When it worked again the next morning, Bruce put the box back into his pile of active electronic gear, and when he called in Batlan to help him record his new batch of songs, they both assumed that the resurrected Panasonic was ready to work.
Batlan reported for duty early on the afternoon of January 3, 1982, and followed Bruce up to his bedroom, where he’d set up the Teac and a couple of microphones on a desk. Neither of them knew exactly how the equipment worked. But with the factory instruction booklets at hand, Bruce took up his guitar, waited for Batlan to point the microphones in the right direction, and performed the vocal and guitar tracks for “Nebraska.” When Batlan rewound the tape and played it back, they were both pleasantly surprised to hear the song sounding just as Bruce had played it moments before. “We were like, ‘Hey! It works!’” Bruce says. “It was completely haphazard and spur of the moment. But it was a nice thing, you know.”
Working deep into the night, Bruce and Batlan recorded fifteen songs, with most of the basic tracking finished within four or six takes each. Overdubs were minimal, and after two or three days of mixing (“The sunken beatbox mix,” Bruce calls it), they dubbed it down onto a cassette tape Bruce had picked up at a drugstore. With the process complete, Bruce slipped the cassette into his jacket pocket and carried it off to deliver it, along with a pages-long memo describing the songs’ content and inspirations, to Landau’s New York office.
Impressed by the power of the songs’ minimalist narratives—and also by the yelping desperation in the performances—the producer-manager became all the more eager to escort Bruce back into the recording studio. So even if the overwhelming gloom in the recordings made him worry a bit about his friend’s emotional state, the manager was confident that his artist had discovered a new horizon in his creative path. When Landau drove to Colts Neck to talk over the songs, he proposed recording most of them with small, folklike arrangements: acoustic guitars, stand-up bass, drums played with brushes. Nothing, he said, should stand between the hushed intimacy in Bruce’s voice and the listener’s ear. And yet enough of the songs invited a bigger, full-band sound, so Landau reserved the Power Station’s gym-sized studio A, and Bruce called everyone in to start recording a few days later.
The first day in the studio didn’t produce anything worth keeping. But when they got together the next afternoon, Bruce played the demo of “Born in the U.S.A.,” then listened while Roy Bittan fiddled around on his just-purchased Yamaha synthesizer. When the keyboardist came up with a repetitive, high-pitched chord pattern that struck his ears as sounding just enough like Southeast Asian music to evoke the exotic jungle feel of Vietnam and Max Weinberg joined in with his pounding drums line, Bruce grabbed his electric guitar and counted off a first take. Recast as a pile-driving rocker, “U.S.A.” blossomed in new shades of fury. Captured live in the studio, it required only a handful of takes to be declared finished. And also, to chief engineer Toby Scott and producers Landau and Chuck Plotkin, like something they’d never quite heard before. Scott: “We played it back, Chuck and Jon and I, and I said, ‘This doesn’t sound like the Bruce Springsteen of The River, but it sounds really good.’ Just that live feel, with the drums going boom-crash, boom-crash. So we went on, and everything worked real quickly.”
From there Bruce and the band went on a tear, recording finished (or all but finished) tracks drawn from the pages of his latest notebook of ideas, lyrics, and songs. After three weeks they had more than a dozen songs in the can, including “Born in the U.S.A.” “Glory Days,” “Cover Me,” “Darlington County,” “Working on the Highway” (evolved from “Child Bride”), a sizzling, funny take of “Pink Cadillac,” and an early version of “My Hometown.” They took a break after that initial rush, and when they reconvened a few weeks later, Bruce took out his cassette tape and said he wanted to shift gears for a while. They spent a few days working out arrangements to the taped songs in the music room at Bittan’s house, but when they got back into the studio and tried to cut full-band versions of “Johnny 99,” “Mansion on the Hill,” “My Father’s House,” “Open All Night,” and a few others, the feel was wrong. The intimacy in the original demo tape, along with the creeping gloom and mystery, had vanished. Part of the problem, Plotkin says, came out of the recording studio’s tendency to conventionalize sounds, capturing them with pristine clarity. “But you don’t want the Nebraska songs to be sweet and clean sounding,” he says. “That’s not what those songs are trying to convey.”
The magic in the demo cassette, they realized, came out of its sonic flaws. The ghostly sound, the whimper in Bruce’s vocals, the imprecise rhythms, and the remnants of river muck that brought out the desolation in the characters’ stories. Soon it became obvious that the record Bruce needed to make of those songs was already rattling in his jacket pocket. “He turned to me and said, ‘Tobe, can we master a record off of this thing?’ and pulled out the tape,” Scott says. “Then he tossed it at me. Literally.” Taking it away to transform the demos into a releasable product, Scott realized how deeply flawed Bruce’s and Batlan’s attempts at recording had been. Bruce had never bothered to clean the heads of the recording console—a routine habit for engineers working with professional electronics. Neither man knew what the variable-speed knob on the console did, so they didn’t notice that it had been set accidentally to run faster than normal. When Bruce finally did clue in and turned the knob to its normal, slower setting, the recordings all sounded sluggish. “Problems ensued,” Scott says. Months’ worth of problems, as it turned out. “I remember thinking the record would never get onto the disc,” Plotkin recalls. “I was sitting around in a hotel room crying, it was so frustrating.”
When the monthslong mastering process ended, Bruce and Landau brought their proposed next record to Walter Yetnikoff and Al Teller, the presidents of the CBS record group and Columbia, respectively, and were relieved to get upbeat receptions from both. Certainly Nebraska wouldn’t be the global smash The River had been. But, as Yetnikoff proclaimed, the stark beauty of the musi
c, along with what it represented in Bruce’s artistic development, required that it be released and promoted. His colleague agreed. “Being a huge Bruce fan, I loved the record,” says Teller. “But it was a small record, and would never be big.” Teller said to Landau that as long as they were willing to accept sales of less than a million copies—and an advertising campaign that didn’t hype the record as if it were destined to be the next The River—he had no problem with it being Bruce’s new album. As Teller acknowledges, he and Columbia/CBS no longer had the authority to reject Bruce’s albums anyway. “All they had to do contract-wise was to submit a technically workable collection of ten to thirteen songs. Quality, content, and everything else was no longer a factor.”
Released for the Christmas market in the fall of 1982, Nebraska emerged to a series of understated ads, the usual raves from the critic sector, and confusion from casual and serious fans alike. What happened to the Bruce who stomped and strutted across the spotlit stage? Where was the spirited kid who abandoned the loser towns and set out for the promised land? Who refused to surrender until the badlands—and all the authority figures who kept it churning—understood that they couldn’t grind him into the dirt? Those declarations had never come for free: the darkness in Bruce’s soul had always underscored his dreams of glory. But Nebraska offered nothing but darkness, from the plaintive howls prefacing the title track to the recurring crime sprees, arrests, trials, and life-ending prison sentences. The album pointedly lacked even a gesture toward salvation. Glance across the lyrics printed on the record’s dust cover and run your eyes across the text. The concluding lines of virtually every song described the same spirit-crushing vision of life: “There’s just a meanness in this world.” “Let ’em shave off my hair and put me on that execution line.” “I met this guy, and I’m gonna do a little favor for him.” “Hey ho, rock ’n’ roll, deliver me from nowhere.” “Shining ’cross the dark highway where our sins lie unatoned.” The promotional video for “Atlantic City,” Bruce’s first contribution to the new but already crucial MTV, was every bit as bleak, a washed-out black-and-white exploration of a beach city sinking beneath the lights and glitter just beneath the gambling industry’s promises of wealth and glamour.
Still, Nebraska found its audience, a significant percentage of whom had either ignored Bruce altogether or dismissed him as a hype-driven lightweight. “I didn’t know there was music like that, that was as impactful and as heavy as Nebraska was,” says Tom Morello, a hard-edged eighteen-year-old punk rocker already on his way to becoming the leader of the sonic-destructo-punk band Rage Against the Machine. “The alienation that I felt was for the first time expressed in music, and then I became a huge superfan.”8
• • •
With Nebraska finished, Bruce tried to return his attention to the full-band album they had started—and seemingly made a lot of progress toward finishing—in the winter and spring of 1982. But there were always more songs to record, more ideas to toss into the mix, more reasons to keep throwing the sledge against the stone until the earth cracked open and God’s wisdom beamed out. And yet, Bruce’s thoughts swirled, pulling him back to the same scenes he’d tried to exorcise with the Nebraska songs. Unable to free himself of the past, he packed a bag, threw it in the trunk of his car, and collected his longtime pal Matty Delia9 for a cross-country road trip to the new house he’d bought in Beverly Hills. The journey went fine, but their arrival only reignited the panic that had pushed Bruce away from New Jersey. “I wanted to get right back in the car and keep on going,” he told Dave Marsh in the mid-1980s. “I couldn’t even sit still.”
The fact that he was behaving just like Doug Springsteen, who often hit the road in attempts to restore his sense of order, did little to ease Bruce’s dismay. “He definitely had a major psychological crisis right about that time,” Marsh says. “I could’ve been clearer in the book,10 but wasn’t because I wasn’t comfortable with it at the time. But I felt comfortable with his depths to say the guy in ‘Nebraska’ isn’t Charlie Starkweather. It’s him.”
Still, Bruce underplays the significance of the moment, insisting that tales of him running right back to his car and flooring it back to the East Coast are overblown. “I might have wanted to,” he says. “I had bought a little house in LA and stayed there working on some music for a while. But I didn’t drive right back.” Instead he had Mike Batlan install a professional-grade home studio in his new house, located right off Sunset Boulevard, near the Beverly Hills Hotel. Working with his new gear, he spent the next five months in Los Angeles, writing and recording alone.
Even now, Bruce has a difficult time talking about what inspired his journey, or what caught up with him when he arrived in Los Angeles. Friends use words like “suicidal,” but he speaks more generally. “Things can come from way down in the well. It’s in your DNA, in the way your body cycles. You’re going along fine and then, boom, it hits you.” A pause. “So I found a psychiatrist within days of getting to Los Angeles, then when I got back east I found another guy in New York City.”
Moving through 1983 with an evolving, if not entirely unified, sense of his vision and work, Bruce continued to write and record more songs. Working in his home studio, Bruce played and sang every part himself, expanding on the solo recording he’d launched with the Nebraska demo sessions a year earlier. The songs shared the unadorned structure and gloomy themes Bruce had explored on the earlier solo album, but with flickers of light that at least gestured toward the possibility of redemption. When James Lucas, the ex-convict narrator in “Richfield Whistle,” gets caught stealing from his boss, the man refuses to send him back to prison, letting him go with a shake of his head and a sad sigh. “If you needed some extra money, Jim, all you had to do was ask.” Lucas walks into a liquor store intending to rob the register, but the clerk’s warm greeting (“Can I help you find something, friend?”) stops him on the spot and sends him back into his wife’s arms. Other songs trend darker, but “County Fair” goes in precisely the opposite direction, describing an ordinary summer party as a kind of heavenly vision, with all the neighbors dancing beneath the stars to “James Young and the Immortal Ones / Two guitars, baby, bass and drums / And they’re rockin’ out at the country fair.”
Working at home, alone save for the presence of Mike Batlan, Bruce savored the independence the new technology gave him. He enjoyed playing all the parts for himself, and what he couldn’t play—such as anything beyond the most basic drum pattern—could be handled by the state-of-the-art drum machine he now owned. And using that much technology no longer felt like a punt, since the machine’s metronomic beats suited the feel he was after. As the songs became nearly finished recordings, close to releasable, Bruce considered staving off the band album again. Or perhaps scattering just a few band tracks across an album dominated by his solo, home-recorded songs. But still, he couldn’t imagine breaking up the band. When the time came for him to rock out at the county fair, he knew he wanted his guys with him. If only because he still had one more mountain to climb, and that was not something he could do alone.
So as the new work took shape and the clouds thinned above Bruce’s head, the approach of 1984—the target date for a new album—brought a realization that the time had come to take the step he’d contemplated ever since Elvis, the Beatles, and every other rocker he loved had sparked a light behind his eyes: “A lot of currents came together. And at the point I got there, I was that guy. That’s where I found myself. You can kid yourself that you’re not, but then what have you been doing?”
NINETEEN
THE BLUE-COLLAR TROUBADOUR
ALREADY AWARE OF THE CONNECTION between his onstage athleticism and the exultation that coursed through him when he was at the height of his shows, Bruce started looking for new ways to achieve the same endorphin-rich glow. At first he bought a bicycle and took it on long rides, following his nose down roads he’d never explored, often ending up calling home from ten or twenty miles away to tell Obie Dziedzic where
she could pick him up. When a friend introduced him to a trainer who specialized in full-body workouts, Bruce signed on and found his way to the gym where the guy worked. The moment he stepped into a weight room it was like coming home.
“I was a big fan of meaningless, repetitive behavior,” Bruce says. “And what’s more meaningless than lifting a heavy object and then putting it down in the same place that you found it? There are probably other psychological reasons behind it, but otherwise it was a perfect match for me. The Sisyphean aspect of it just completely suited my personality.” The swelling muscles in his shoulders, chest, arms, and abdomen suited Bruce’s vanity just as well, and with a regular running habit building up his wind and legs, Bruce took on a new glow and stature.1
Away from the gym, Bruce made a habit of visiting Club Xanadu, a modern dance club thumping away in the same Kingsley Street address where the Student Prince had once stood. Run by former Asbury Jukes trumpet player Tony Pallagrosi, Xanadu featured live acts on some nights, and house DJs who entwined early hip-hop beats with electronica, rock riffs, and the season’s pop hits on other nights. Entranced by the hypnotic feel of the music, Bruce camped out at the bar and watched the new generation of Asbury Park music fans gyrate to the 120-beats-per-minute rhythms.
The club’s star bartenders, Paul Smith and Buddy Gac, had their own followers, due largely to their endless good cheer and extravagant displays of energy. Dressed to impress, from their tight athletic shorts to the cut-off sleeves of their army shirts and the matching bandannas wrapped around their foreheads, Gac and Smith turned heads by hurling their cocktail shakers back and forth to the music. When the action on the dance floor got especially hot, they climbed up onto the bar to dance. Nothing fancy, but Gac did have this side-to-side boogie unique enough to raise eyebrows when another guy in a headband appropriated it on MTV in mid-1984.
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