Review - Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

In 1982, Bruce Springsteen released as his sixth album: a collection of home demos made with just his voice, guitar and harmonica. The songs in this collection would be stark recollections about life on the other side of the American Dream. This album was a harsh and unflinching look at American life through the eyes of outlaws, poor folk, estranged families, and other unseemly characters. This study will examine the picture of America through the pieces on Springsteen's Nebraska. Each of the songs will be discussed at length in terms of narrative and character development. Springsteen's own commentary on the work will also be explored. We will also discuss the American landscape that framed this powerful work.

In late 1957 and 1958, a lower-class young man named Charlie Starkweather committed murders in Nebraska and fled to Wyoming with his teenage girlfriend Caril Fugate. The news would outrage the nation and later inspire films, songs and commentary. Starkweather's antics would earn him the electric chair and a spot in American folklore as a symbol the young man down-on-his-luck who achieves notoriety. These incidents, and many more like them, have occurred in over the years in America outraging our citizens and gradually making them more fearful to live in their own communities. It is in this bleak yet hopeful black-and-white picture that we find ourselves in Springsteen's Nebraska.

Bruce Springsteen was riding high on a string of acclaimed albums in the late 1970s. As a songwriter, he has always been acutely aware of the struggles of the working class heroes and villains in America. Characters that are on both sides of the American Dream always color his songs. After his album The River (1980), Springsteen began drafting a set of songs about outlaws, lawmen, downtrodden families, and other such characters. Springsteen had grown tired of the tedious recording process and had wanted to find a way to keep the creative process fresh and organic. He had also been reading Flannery O'Connor, and had seen Terrence Malik's film Badlands (an adaptation of the Starkweather story). Springsteen urged his guitar technician, Mike Batlan, to purchase a small tape recorder for making demos with overdubbing. Batlan went to the local music store and bought a 4-track Teac® cassette recorder that was a portable studio for multi-track tape recording new at the time. In his home near Colts Neck, New Jersey in 1981, Springsteen laid down demo tracks for these songs using only his voice, acoustic guitar and harmonica. Later on, he tried to flesh the songs out with his backup band, The E Street Band, but the full-band tracks did not possess the same energy and spirit as the acoustic demos. So when asked by his record company for the master tapes of the sessions, Springsteen gave them the cassette tape he recorded in his home. The result was Nebraska.

The album is a collection of songs that were rough-around-the-edges but nonetheless very poigiant and engaging. It was Springsteen's intention to create a set of songs that were like Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, or Woody Guthrie - "songs that sounded so good with the lights turned off" (Springsteen 138). The songs are also steeped in the narrative tradition and literary characterizations of Steinbeck and Flannery O'Connor. Every song on the album tells the story of characters that are downcast, either themselves or family members are on the wrong side of the law. The songs are very raw and unpolished, but instead of hindering the overall effectiveness of the work, the simplicity greatly enhances the collection. The listener is engaged as the songs turn into portraits that are more colorful than any artwork. Much like the black and white photo of a country road through a windshield on its cover, Nebraska is a stark portrait of America by those looking up from the bottom. Springsteen tells of the album and its relation to his upbringing in his Songs text:

The songs on Nebraska connected to my childhood more than any record I'd made. The tone of the music was directly linked to what I remembered of my early youth. We lived with my grandparents until I was six. Thinking through these songs, I went back and recalled what that time felt like, particularly my grandmother's house. There was something about the walls, the lack of decoration, the almost painful plainness.

The centerpiece of our living room was a single photo of my father's older sister who died at the age of five in a bicycle accident around the corner by the local gas station. Her ethereal presence from this 1920s portrait gave the room a feeling of being lost in time. (Springsteen 137)

"Nebraska." The piece opens with a chilling harmonica riff that is as barren as the landscape on the album's cover. In this song, Springsteen assumes the point of view of Charlie Starkweather as the song is in the first person. Here, Charlie is speaking from his own experiences as he roamed the state of Nebraska to the badlands of Wyoming with his young girlfriend killing six people in late 1957 into early 1958. The dialogue of the song is very conversational in tone and not in an even meter like a polished song would be. The song starts as Charlie meets future girlfriend and accomplice Caril - "I saw her standin' on her front lawn just twirlin' her baton." From here the ride starts, as Springsteen details the duo's ride through Nebraska and Wyoming. Curiously, throughout the song he addresses the listener as "sir," giving the song an air of detached sentimentality. Starkweather was noted for his emotional detachment in his crimes, and Springsteen captures that spirit in his narrative here. By the end of the song, Starkweather/Springsteen is ready to go to the electric chair. He is not particularly sorry for his deeds, as Starkweather also was in real life.

At the close of the song, the harmonica riff re-enters here like a wayward wind blowing dust across a rural Nebraska road, calling to mind the picture of the road on the album's cover.

"Atlantic City" is the only hit single from Nebraska. The song is somewhat related thematically to a prior Springsteen hit, "Born To Run," in which a down-on-his-luck young man wants to break out of society. The song is set around gangster activity around in Atlantic City, down to Philadelphia and surrounding areas. The narrator finds himself in the midst of a relationship and tries to make the best out of a bad situation amid all that is going on. He is tired of his life and wants a better one for himself and his girlfriend. Throughout these songs the feeling is that one is in the same room with each character from each piece tells their story. "Atlantic City" in particular is that way. A skewed sense of morality drives the narrator; he thinks that what he is doing is right, but perhaps fails to see that his decision could have consequences. The song frames the desperation that pervades each piece on the album. The narrator finds himself squarely on the line between good and evil, trying desperately to make choices in the midst of his circumstance.

The third track of the album "Mansion On The Hill," is a different style of portrait. The songs characters are lawful, but lower class citizens. As a child, the narrator and his family drive by a large mansion that is perched atop a hill. The representation of the American Dream might seem out of reach to certain segments of society. Yet the Dream can prove to be hollow once it is attained. A sense of melancholy pervades the song. It is not very terrifying like "Nebraska," but is as engaging. The word "sir" re-enters in this song as in "Nebraska." However, here the use conveys a sense of dignity, where in the previous song the word was used more aloofly. The narrator seems somehow enthralled by the mansion on the hill, but is also embittered that it represents a symbol of a life he knows he will never attain. The song resembles a memory or an old family picture that might reside in a relative's living room, much like what Springsteen mentions in his preface. "Mansion On The Hill" is the memory of a reality from childhood past. By the end of the song, the narrator sees the mansion against the light of a full moon; illuminating it. The narrator knows he may never "see" (live in) the mansion, but has come to terms with the ideal and the dream of it.

"Johnny 99" is an energetic tune, a desperate piece about a man who finds himself on the receiving end of law. "Ralph" is laid off from his factory job, and as a matter of happenstance, gets inebriated trying to cope with his misfortune and ends up shooting a store clerk. The city government promptly arrests him and throws the book at him, now christened "Johnny 99." The judge, a certain Mean John Brown, does not take the allegations lightly and hands down a stern sentence. Springsteen assumes the role of Johnny 99 in the last half of the song, and offers up this telling confessional:

Now judge I had debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holdin' my mortgage and they were takin' my house away
Now I ain't sayin' that makes me an innocent man
But it was more `n all this that put that gun in my hand

Well your honor I do believe I'd be better off dead
So if you can take a man's life for the thoughts that's in his head
Then sit back in that chair and think it over judge one more time
And let `em shave off my hair and put me on that execution line

Whether outlaws are truly born versus created by their circumstances has been an age-old debate. As Johnny 99, Springsteen makes one last plea for the common man who just so happened to suffer through an unfortunate set of circumstances; caused in part by his decision-making. Situations like these blur the line between justification and desperation, as the song points out. Justification is something that looks much different when one is on the wrong side of the law. This is a common thread often in Nebraska and in the idea of the American outlaw.

Whether intentional or not, "Highway Patrolman" is in many ways the centerpiece to this collection of songs. The piece is the longest of the album, clocking in at five minutes and forty seconds. The song is about a certain"Joe Roberts" who works as a state highway patrol officer. He worked as a farmer to get a deferrment from Vietnam while his brother Frank served in the war. Roberts settles down with a wife and into a job as a highway patrol officer, while his brother eventually drifted over the line onto the other side of the law. The central theme is the struggle between upholding the law and protecting your family. Springsteen sets the scene with a monotone vocal delievery over a droning chord progression. The narrator knows his brother gets in trouble frequently, but looks the other way ("but sometimes when it's your brother, sometimes you look the other way"). Here we see what is perhaps the crux of the album; the struggle of a family on both sides of the law. As the story progresses, Joe's brother Frank gets in trouble by beating up a man in a local tavern late one night. Frank decides to make a run for it, once his brother Joe gets the call on his shortwave radio. He goes to the bar, where a man lies unconscious and a witness says it was Frank who did it. Joe catches his brother driving outside of town and gives chase, but decides to go only as far as the county line;

It was out at the crossroads, down round Willow bank
Seen a Buick with Ohio plates behind the wheel was Frank
But I chased him through them county roads till a sign said Canadian border five miles from here
I pulled over the side of the highway and watched his taillights disappear

"State Trooper" follows and is a very haunting tale. The narrator is a man trying to either escape a crime of some kind or his inner demons. Framed by a hypnotic and insistent guitar riff, the song relentlessly chugs on giving the feeling of driving alone on a highway at night. The persistence of the night, loneliness and his conscience slowly drives the narrator to the brink of insanity. He begs a state trooper not to stop him, but an actual state trooper never actually appears in the song.

Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a pretty wife

the only thing that I got's been both'rin' me my whole life
Mister state trooper, please don't stop me
Please don't stop me, please don't stop me

Here Springsteen deals so effectively with the internal struggle of a man's conscience. Throughout the song, he never reveals the dilemma that the narrator faces. Almost like Steven Spielberg in the film Jaws, Springsteen uses angles and other devices to build the tension without ever revealing too much information. The song builds to a frantic crescendo as he nears the edge of insanity. The listener is dragged along for the ride. It is not a stretch for the imagination to follow along and imagine oneself on the road alone at night. As one goes through such a scenario, the mind begins to play tricks on itself. Springsteen as the narrator writes about this paranoia perfectly. Is the man guilty of a crime, or is his mind losing the battle against his conscience? The listener cannot help but feel the urgency in the narrative.

Springsteen takes an up-tempo turn with "Open All Night". This song is about a man who works the late hours at a gas station and drives at night to get home. There seems to be a Chuck Berry influence here with the rollicking rhythms and inventive wordplay of the song. The song is loaded with symbolism as our narrator bemoans his situation as his boss makes him work the late shift at his job, which causes him to have to drive all night back to see "his baby." Springsteen has always been known for his rallying cries of the common man. At the end of the song offers another:

Your eyes get itchy in the wee wee hours sun's just a red ball risin' over them refinery towers
Radio's jammed up with gospel stations lost souls callin' long distance salvation
Hey, mister deejay, woncha hear my last prayer hey, ho, rock'n'roll, deliver me from nowhere

Again, the line "deliver me from nowhere" from "State Trooper" occurs here. Whether a conscious inclusion or an editing oversight, the repetition serves two functions. First, it underscores Springsteen's central theme throughout the album of desperate people in desperate times. These people feel helpless like they are in the "middle-of-nowhere" -- physically, emotionally, spiritually. Second, the repetition of the line helps to unify the pieces of the album. After repeated hearings, the listener will, perhaps unconsciously, pick up on the association. Whether Springsteen meant this lyric to repeat across songs or not almost seems immaterial. It may be a "happy accident," but in retrospect adds weight to the song and the overall collection.

"Used Cars" uses a theme similar to "Mansion on the Hill." In "Used Cars," the narrator is young boy who is aware that he and his family live in a lower-class part of society. When he travels with his family to purchase a car, he sees that his mother and father cannot afford the car they want to purchase. The young boy makes a vow to himself.

Now, mister, the day the lottery I win I ain't ever gonna ride in no used car again.

"My Father's House" is an interesting moral commentary on family structures. The song is in straight-verse form again, and has a decidedly "old country" feel with the triple meter of the music and lyrics. Here, the narrator has a dream where he imagines himself as a child trying to get home before it gets dark. There is something in his childhood that bothers him and has somehow colored his present life. This is never fully revealed in the song, but is alluded to. The dream morphs into real life, when the narrator wakes and decides to drive out to the old house. Somehow, the narrator has not come to terms with whatever it is that he has struggled with these years, and after finding that "no one by that name lives here any more," he finds that his past might remain unresolved. This idea of family and an unresolved past plays into Springsteen's overall thrust for the album. As in "Mansion On The Hill" and "Used Cars," an individual does not have to be a criminal to feel on the wrong side of the law or of society in general. Economic status and family can make a person feel like an outsider. In the song, the unresolved feelings are given moral overtones with the last line. We never know exactly what "demons" the narrartor is facing, but they haunt his inner being.

My father's house shines hard and bright it stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling, so cold and alone
Shining 'cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned

The piece is resoundingly morose yet longing and hopeful. Springsteen here is speaking to that certain element of loneliness that perhaps existed in families of the bygone era. Rural American families are marked with traditions of fathers and sons who are close and distant at the same time throughout their lives. Words often go unspoken for years between generations of these families, and while there is great love and tradition, there is great emotional distance. This great distance is another echo of the barren landscape on the album's front cover.

"Reason To Believe" closes the album. The song details several different scenarios with humor and poignancy, all observed by Springsteen in the role of an outside narrator. The line frames each verse/scene "At the end of every hard-earned day, some people find some reason to believe." The first is a man on the side of the road looking at a dead dog, wondering how it got that way. The next scene is about two young lovers, Mary Lou and Johnny. The two get married, and later Johnny up and leaves his new wife. She waits for him to come back, believing he will against the likelihood of him not returning. The third verse details some scenes a local country church: a baptism and a funeral. The last verse details a country wedding down by the river (another recurring image for Springsteen throughout the years).

With all of life's trials, people in America still cling to hope that there is something better than their currently situation. Springsteen has taken us through ten sketches of American life. None of them are pretty, but together they provide a vivid reminder of how life can seem on the other side of American life. Once the listener goes through all ten tracks, each story makes sense as a part of the entire story Springsteen is telling in the dialogue. At the end, we have a more vivid mental picture of the culture that he is telling us about. The front cover looks as vivid and colorful as ever as a bookend to these stories.

Nebraska was not an enormous critical success for Springsteen, who had just had a major hit album with The River. In fact, Nebraska alienated many people, primarily his record company. Here was an album that sounded as bleak as its cover; and it had no marketing potential. But the material was so potent and so real, that it could carry the effort. To this day, Nebraska is one of the stellar moments of Springsteen's catalog, influencing many artists.