Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska
I always hated Bruce Springsteen growing up. Twenty years ago, down the shore at any beach in the state, you would have to navigate a sea of drunken, Budweiser T- shirted dudes singing Born To Run out of tune when you were trying to get to the french fry stand. I just assumed these oafs were somehow Springsteen’s fault.
But then I moved out of the mighty Jersey, out of the country altogether, and stayed away for seven years. While I was gone I began to miss everything about home: the bad attitudes, the bad driving, the various stinks, and so on. This is proof that absence does make the heart grow fonder. So one day I picked up Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” album at a record sale in Reykjavik, Iceland and as I played it I realized that what I was hearing was a Jersey life put to music.
“Nebraska” is a good if misleading title for this album. It evokes the kind of cold and desolate vibe you get in pretty much each song and it refers to the lead track, a song about Charles Starkweather and his spree through the heartland shooting up folks with his teenybopper girlfriend. But make no mistake, this is a New Jersey album.
Myths, to paraphrase from Wikipedia (‘cuz that’s as scholarly as we get here at the FSS), are stories told to explain a people to themselves. By this definition, “Nebraska” is a mythological album. The songs are character sketches of children, policemen, long-time losers, psychos and average- joes; the make-up of anywhere in America. But all told against the unmistakable backdrop of the Garden State, the Turnpike, the refineries and wetlands that make this state what it is. If you grew up in New Jerusalem you can’t help but identify with the feeling conveyed in a song like Open All Night describing a drive down the highway at night with a stop at a diner. You can see the disaster approaching as certain as death in the song Atlantic City when the tale’s protagonist is betting that life will improve in Atlantic City. Atlantic City improves nothing but cirrhosis and failure. “Nebraska” is a series of short stories which capture the reality of growing up, growing old and flipping the fuck out in a particular place. Each song, sometimes each line, is imbued with this states identity; the peculiar feeling you get here of being almost close to somewhere but not quite, the decided working-class vibe, the strange sense of being marooned on independent islands linked by a sea of highways. These songs are poignant for anyone from anywhere. But for New Jerseyites, these are stories of home.
Bruce was getting pretty big after he released “The River” in 1980. He could’ve released something big and friendly-sounding for his follow-up and made it bigger faster. He didn’t. Instead, he put out this creepy album made on a four-track in his house all on his lonesome, without any Born To Run WHOA-OHHhs and no Clarence Clemons banter. Why the hell did he do that? Maybe he just felt like telling stories about New Jersey.
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