E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (39 page)

Having recently read a contemporary account of Charlie Starkweather’s murdering spree,
Caril
, and garnered some further background from the coauthor Ninette Beaver, a local reporter who covered the case, Springsteen’s interest had been piqued by Terrence Malick’s curiously amoral 1973 movie,
Badlands
. What led him there he couldn’t say. It just “seemed to be a mood…I was in at the time.” But if “Nebraska” never excused the malevolent misfit his murderous mindset, he did seem to consider the Starkweathers of this world an outward manifestation of a deeper societal malady, something he made plain to audiences on the
Born In The USA
tour when introducing the song thus: “I was reading in the papers about how television and all the media and stuff is bringing the whole world closer together. But it seems like in these times people [can] get isolated from their jobs; sometimes they [also] get isolated from friends and from their families, until you get that sense of powerlessness, and just explode.”

That he was mythologizing a particularly nasty specimen in Starkweather did not at this stage trouble him. Nor was he concerned by the clear historical liberties he was taking with what was, after all, a true story. (He had learned that lesson from Guthrie, f’sure.) And the most egregious of those liberties came on the song’s punch line. When “they wanted to know why I did what I did,” the mass murderer replied, “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” Needless to say, Starkweather never said anything of the sort. It is what another homicidal murderer said when about to murder a God-fearing old lady, this one the fictional creation of Flannery O’Connor in her seminal short story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.”

O’Connor’s character is only ever identified as The Misfit, and his explanation of where the world went wrong skewered Christ’s message in a way only a lapsed Catholic could have accepted as an explanation for why a good man might be hard to find: “Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead, and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by
killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.” The murderer in “Nebraska” applies a similarly warped worldview to the jurors who sentence him to death: “They declared me unfit to live, said into that great void my soul’d be hurled.” However, it was only Charlie—and his fictional brother-murderer, Frankie—who envisaged life after death as “that great void.” O’Connor fervently believed The Misfit would eventually be “lying in hell.”

For Springsteen to have reached a place where he felt he “wasn’t any good—right at the moment that record occurred,” openly identifying with those inner feelings of a callous murderer, suggests how little light now filtered through those blinds. Only later would he see the wider picture and acknowledge that a “sense of consequences” was as important in one’s life as in one’s songs. As he said the night he rekindled that “Nebraska” mindset onstage at the Christic Institute Benefit in November 1990, delivering his most powerful performance this side of a Portastudio, “When I did the
Nebraska
album, I really didn’t think anything about what its political implications were, until I read about it in the newspapers…But something I was feeling moved me to write all these songs, where people lose their connection to their friends and their families and their jobs and their countries, and their lives don’t make sense to them no more.”

This was the overarching theme he took from Starkweather and Teardrop, Gilmore and The Misfit, constructing an album for “every hung-up person in the whole wide universe;” peopled by folk who because they “struggle to find the language…of the soul…explode into violence or [implode into] indifference or numbness,” a view he only articulated after touring with the songs solo in 1995–96.
*

Not that Alan Vega’s influence was confined to his more Suicidal offerings. If Frankie Teardrop would inform
Nebraska
, so would Vega’s eponymous 1980 solo debut, with its demo-rockabilly sensibility, specifically the eight-minute “Bye Bye Bayou” which whoops and hollers like Jimmie Rodgers on a bed of nails. (In 2006, Bruce suggested, “If Elvis came back from the dead I think he would sound like Alan Vega—he gets a lot of emotional purity.”) Alan Vega certainly thought he’d heard
a ghost the day he visited his label and heard someone spinning Springsteen’s latest:

Springsteen openly admitted, in handwritten notes to the songs which he gave to Jon Landau that winter, that “State Trooper” was something he dreamed “up comin’ back from New York one night. I don’t know if it’s even really a song or not…It’s kinda weird.” (I refer readers to Steve Wynn’s cover version on the
Light of Day
Springsteen tribute 2–CD set for an even more Vega-like version.) In this unearthly concoction, he told the story of a man who professed to have “a clear conscience ’bout the things that I done,” without really explaining what these things might be. In the end, the driver asks someone to “listen to my last prayer…[and] deliver me from nowhere,” a rare expression of faith on a faithless record.

At least the other murder-ballad on the album returned its author to the land of fiction. “Johnny 99” was the first of the “desperado” songs written for
Nebraska
, predating even the title track. Johnny’s “explanation” for what drove him to his doom again pointed the finger at society—“It was more ’n all this that put that gun in my hand”—replaced an original couplet that had more of the country in its blood, crossing “Folsom Prison Blues” with
The Gunfighter
, “Step in my way and I’ll shoot you down/ Until the day that you understand.” (Anyone who doubts such a synthesis took place might want to refer to a 1996 observation on the subject, “Since the early eighties, my musical influences…[have gone] back in a way [to] Hank Williams and some of the blues guys and folk guys, but films and writers and novels have probably been the primary influences on my work.”)

Though Springsteen’s “Johnny 99” had no obvious real-life parallel, there was a probable literary source, the monumental
Executioner’s Song
, the story of Gary Gilmore and the two senseless murders that led to his state-sponsored execution, published the previous year to enormous fanfare and justified critical acclaim. Like Gilmore, Johnny asks to be executed, rather than face life without parole. Unlike Johnny, though, Gilmore did not seek
to excuse his crimes. (When asked what someone should say to his mother, Gary replied, “I guess that it’s all true.”) The penny-ante nature of the crime Johnny commits also replicated Gilmore’s, even if Springsteen deleted the actual incident after that initial home demo: “It’s only $200, that was all I was asking for/ Judge, just $200 and I would have been on my way out the door/ He reached ’neath the counter and I saw something shiny in his hand/ He spewed blood like a fountain and I dropped my gun and I ran.”

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:

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.”