“Born in the U.S.A”

The title track of the chart-topping follow-up to Nebraska, it would be “Born in the U.S.A.” which would launch Bruce Springsteen into the upper stratosphere of artists across the globe. Originally written during the Nebraska sessions, it was an anomaly from the start. As Jon Landau put it, “It was a real odd thing, and it was not like anything else on the Nebraska album. And it was not like any other thing I’ve ever heard from Bruce---it sounded alien” (Marsh 343). This cryptic description of the early version of the song would prove to be prophetic as it would go on to become the top nomination for the most popular, and the most misunderstood, Springsteen song of all time.

When looked at from a basic lyrical level it is not difficult to see why “Born in the U.S.A.” doesn’t fit on Nebraska: on an album of intensely dark and personal songs from the minds of twisted, isolated, individuals, it would stand out as a song of bitter protest, and although the album certainly follows many American folk traditions, it does not lend itself to traditional protest songs (Marsh 343). As a result of this the song was shelved until Bruce and the E-street Band could grab a hold of it and, in what is still one of the most legendary recording sessions of all time, just ask Max Weinberg, create the enigmatic masterpiece that it is today. Ironically, it would be this shelved protest song turned electrified anthem that would cause Bruce to suffer a fate similar to an artist with whom he was becoming acquainted during the time of recording Nebraska, Woody Guthrie.

With the sudden propulsion to super-star status Bruce Springsteen began to lose control of his public image. The anthemic quality of the track and it’s heraldic chorus, combined with it’s endorsement by Ronald Reagan, pushed it into the upper echelon of patriotic songs, right along songs like Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” Sadly, this is one instance where Springsteen and Guthrie’s songwriting intentions share a large plot of common ground. Like “Born in the U.S.A.” Guthrie’s song of an intelligent, questioning, patriotism was edited and appropriated by the government, turning it into just another mindless, obedient, 4^th of July anthem. Despite, or perhaps to spite, the governments attempt to corrupt them, in recent years Springsteen has made a strong attempt at reclaiming and reinvigorating the songs by playing them live, in the case of “Born in the U.S.A.” in both traditional and folk arrangements.

Williams, Hiram King, a.k.a. Hank Williams

One of the most influential musicians in American history, the story of Hank Williams’ rise and fall along with his tragic death at the age of twenty-nine has become one of the most famous in country music. One of the most interesting aspects of Williams’ career is the way the duality of his music reflected the two different Hanks within himself. Williams, whose death by heart failure has been attributed to a combination of alcohol and un-prescribed painkillers, started drinking (un-bonded whiskey or moonshine)in his early teens and battled the temptation of moonshine and whiskey for most of his short life. This alcohol addiction would eventually come to define the two sides of Williams’ personality: the temperate, hard-working, and pious Hiram Williams, or later Luke the Drifter, and the very hard-drinking, unreliable, often violent, Drifting Cowboy. These two sides of Hank are quite apparent in his works, in songs like “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” and “Lonesome Highway” he sings of partying late into the night and of the many long, dark, hours he has spent on the road. Compare this to his more remorseful religious recordings, many down under the pseudonym of Luke the Drifter, such as “I Saw the Light.” Combined with this is the fact that Williams wouldn’t even perform his religious songs in a setting where he believed whiskey was being consumed, whether or not he could even see people drinking. This duality created an intense conflict within Williams that often forced him to abuse and push away those who cared for him and were around him on a regular basis. As a result of this Hank Williams lived the life of a lone, drifting, cowboy, playing and writing music to cope with his personal isolation as best as he could between bouts of extreme inebriation. Finally, Hank would die alone, stretched out on the cool black leather of the back seat of his chauffeured Cadillac.

On the album Nebraska one can see the heavy influence of Hank Williams on Springsteen’s writing, both musically and lyrically. The first to be addressed is the way in which the sound of Nebraska reflects or emulates the sound of many Hank Williams songs and records. Particularly, Springsteen does an incredible job of capturing the vacant, lonesome, and humble sound which is so abundant in Williams’ work. Songs like “Nebraska” and “Highway Patrolman” both draw heavily on the lonesome Hank Williams sound. The sound of the harmonica on “Nebraska” has the tearful voice of Williams’ steel slide, while the saddened voice and subtle harmonica in “Highway Patrolman” is reminiscent of Williams’ singing and the fiddle playing on songs like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

Not only did Springsteen appropriate much of Hank Williams’ style and tone, but he also made direct connections with the themes and peoples who populate Williams’ lyrics. One such appropriation comes on the track “Mansion on the Hill,” which shares its title with a Hank Williams song of the same name.

As a general reference I used:

Williams, Roger M. Sing a Sad Song, The Life of Hank Williams, University of Illinois

Press, Urbana, 1981.

Taxi Driver

Martin Scorsese’s film, Taxi Driver (1976), was both influenced by Springsteen and acted as an influence on Bruce as well. The film is a powerful chronicle of a man who served for several years as a marine in Vietnam and has returned to America in the early 1970’s finding it very difficult to assimilate himself into normal society. Robert DeNiro’s incredible performance as Travis Bickle and Scorsese’s intense directing style both elevate Paul Schrader’s brilliant and multi-layered screenplay. The character of Bickle was a combination of Schrader’s personal experience living in New York, his fondness for the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, and studying the diaries of Arthur Bremer, the man who tried to assassinate Governor George Wallace.
The film begins with Travis Bickle seeking a job driving a taxi because he is unable to sleep. During the night he rides around in buses and on the subway. He decides to work as a cabby because he figures he might as well get paid for it. Travis tells the man hiring them that he is willing to work “anytime, anywhere”. When he isn’t working, he sits in small porno theaters or works on his diaries in his room. His life first changes when he sees Betsy, played by Cybil Shepherd, and he describes her as an “angel”. He concentrates all his energies on winning her over, but this plan fails when she is disgusted by the movies he likes to watch. His failure with women sends him into a downward spiral and he becomes more psychotic as the movie progresses. When a twelve-year-old prostitute, played by Jodie Foster, gets into his taxi one day and then is pulled out by her pimp, he then becomes obsessed with rescuing her. Travis also becomes fascinated by a Democratic candidate for president, but I will stop the plot summary there because I don’t want to ruin this unbelievably powerful movie for anybody who hasn’t seen it.
There are several connections between Taxi Driver and Springsteen. During the period Bruce was working on Nebraska, Schrader contacted him to see if he would be interested in contributing the music for a script he’s just completed. Schrader’s script was titled “Born in the USA”, but Springsteen hadn’t looked at until later when he was intending to write a song about Vietnam. Also, DeNiro improvised the famous “Are you talkin’ to me?” speech based on what Springsteen would say at then end of one of his marathon concerts of the mid 1970’s. Also, Jodie Foster’s character is a direct homage: her name is Iris Steenman.
Schrader conceived the taxi cab in the film as a kind of moving coffin, just as the cars in Nebraska are often traps and instruments of isolation. The taxi driver is around a lot of people, either in the backseat or outside the car, but there is little connection. The character of Travis Bickle is like the protagonist of Johnny 99 because he has gone over the edge. Through the course of the film, we watch his descent into madness. In a way similar to Badlands, Bickle’s voice-over chronicles this descent. The film seems to make the point that the fact that he served in Vietnam, and witnessed all the horrors that took place there, are a direct cause for his increasing more psychotic behavior.

Father Songs

Father Songs Bruce’s complicated relationship with his father is examined in many of his songs, and he made it a topic of many of his introductory monologues at concerts, monologues that acquired, Marsh claims, “an almost compulsive character” during the final days of the tour for The River just before he went to the house in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey to record what would become Nebraska (301). The album contains three songs where the narrator mentions his father in the first person: “My Father’s House,” in which Bruce recounts a recurring dream whose theme is the relationship; “Mansion on the Hill,” a complex look and social and political issues, and “Used Cars,” a description of childhood isolation and hopelessness.

Bruce started singing about his relationship with his father with “a mixture of love and hate” early in his career with a cover of the Animals’ 1965 hit, “It’s My Life,” accompanied with a long monologue about his adolescent rage at his father (25). Both Marsh and Guterman notice the perfection of this song for expressing an almost “universal story for what happened between fathers and sons in the Sixties” (Marsh 26), but with “Adam Raised a Cain” Bruce complicated this youthful rage with a sense of helplessness; the narrator realizes that despite his knowledge of his father hopeless life, he cannot escape, either. “But you will inherit the sins, you inherit the flames,” he sings, in a statement of generational frustration.

With the release of The River, we can see a shift in Bruce’s outlook, to a maturing, but still problematic, father-son relationship. “Independence Day,” even though it was written at the time of his previous album Darkness at the Edge of Town, represents “the next chapter in the story” of the character Marsh calls “The Hero” (188). It is a song full of regret for missed opportunities, and a farewell to one’s father that leaves us with the knowledge that there will always be important things left unsaid between father and son, issues unresolved, and “Nothing we can say can change anything now.” “Independence Day” is a song written by a twenty-eight year old man who realizes that his love for his father is broken, and is beginning to realize that it may remain broken forever, with the son “still struggling to resolve the hopelessness of their lives together” (Marsh 300).

“My Father’s House” goes still further in the process of maturation, but it is a process that once again, may never be resolved or completed.. In keeping with the desolate, hopeless tone of Nebraska, the song tells us of a dream that fulfills a wish for security and safety, for resolution, but the narrator realizes when he awakens that that resolution is gone, taken away by time and possibly, death. The narrator, alone, desolate, haunted by his father’s absence, comes to the final realization of isolation and emptiness, and by the end of the song there is no hope for resolution. The song describes the psychological process leading up to a takeoff point, a point that, for many of the characters in Nebraska, goes nowhere but to a senseless, violent death (“State Trooper,” “Nebraska”) or to a hopeless cycle of poverty (“Mansion on the Hill,” “Open All Night”).

Badlands

In Two Hearts, Dave Marsh says that Bruce saw Terrence Malick’s 1974 film on television and was so affected by it that he contacted the author of the book on which the film was based. They talked and Badlands became the title of the first song on Darkness on the Edge of Town and, four years later, the subject of the first (and title) song on Nebraska. (335-6) The first two verses of the song, Nebraska, are taken directly from the opening of the film. Holly, played by Sissy Spacek, is twirling her baton on her front lawn when Kit, played by Martin Sheen, approaches her and asks if she wants to take a walk with him. Kit tells her that he works as a garbage man and she is not very impressed. Still, they start seeing more of each other until Holly’s father warns Kit that he had better stay away from her. This confrontation ends with Kit shooting and killing the father and this, in turn, forces the couple to go out on the open road. Kit ends up murdering several more people, often unnecessarily and without much provocation, as they progress from South Dakota to Montana. Holly’s voiceover is used throughout the film both to summarize their deadly adventures and to explain her thoughts about Kit and his behavior. Early in the film she tells us, “Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end up in the Badlands of Montana.” As the film progresses, it is readily apparent that Holly is merely along for the ride and that Kit is making all the decisions and committing all of the murders.
There are several lines in Badlands that could be related to themes found in Springsteen’s work and especially to the album Nebraska. In the first scene in the film, Holly tells us (via the voiceover) that her mother died when she was very young and that her father “could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house”. She is almost an outsider in her own home just as Springsteen, as a child, had a father who greatly resented his lifestyle and, especially his ‘goddamned’ guitar. Holly and her father moved from Texas to South Dakota so that he could “begin a new life away from the scene of all his memories”. But like the characters in Nebraska are unable to run away from their problems, Holly’s father ends up dead shortly after their move. When Kit and Holly first meet, he explains, “Well, nobody asked what I thought. They just hung it on me.” This line could be spoken by a Springsteen character on a number of albums. Soon after, Kit learns that he has been fired from his job and that this bit of news has “been in all the headlines”. The irony is thick because, by the conclusion of the film, Kit will be a kind of national celebrity. Holly falls for Kit, at least in part, because “he looked just like James Dean”. At one point, he tells her that he is going to work as a “cowboy” but in reality, he is going to be employed with a menial job at a feedlot. Travis Bickle is likewise called a “cowboy” by another character in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, but both Travis and Kit are not really the cowboys that they secretly idolize and wish they were.
Holly is fifteen when she loses her virginity to Kit, who is ten years older. Afterwards, she asks him, “Is that all there is to it?” Clearly, she is disappointed and there is no real connection between the two of them just as there is no connection among the characters of Nebraska. Sex with her doesn’t mean much to Kit, either. He wants them to smash their hands with a rock so they can remember that it even happened. Even together, they are isolated. However, like the narrator of the song, Nebraska, they “had us some fun”. Kit records his voice (in what is actually a fake suicide note) saying “I can’t deny we’ve had fun though. That’s more than I can say for some.” Holly is often confused about what she truly feels. At one point, she says that “it was better to spend a week with someone who loved me for what I was than years of loneliness”. She wonders about fate and coincidence: “I thought where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me or killed anybody?” She can also be quite perceptive like some of Springsteen’s characters can be at certain times: “It all goes to show how you can know a person and not really know him at the same time.”
Many of the characters in Nebraska use terms like “Sir” and “Mister” which show that they, at the very least, try to use good manners. In Badlands, Kit takes this to the extreme. As he makes another recording on a Dictaphone, the murderer advises people to “listen to your parents and teachers” and to “try and keep an open mind”. Later, Kit and Holly dance in the middle of an empty plain listening to Nat King Cole sing, “The dream has ended/for true love dies.” The end for this runaway couple is near. When Kit is finally caught by the police, he marks the spot with a pile of rocks. One of the cops is surprised that “he ain’t no bigger than I am” and Kit explains that he “always wanted to be a criminal…just not this big of one”.

John Ford

On the inner sleeve of Nebraska, there is a picture of Bruce Springsteen in the hallway of a house as seen through a doorway. This is, at least in part, an homage to a film for which Springsteen professed profound admiration throughout his career, namely John Ford’s Western, The Searchers (1956). In the film, Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) is a constantly isolated character. Ford shows this pictorially by framing Ethan alone and outside in doorways with the empty plains behind him while the rest of the characters are inside the house. Dave Marsh calls John Ford, “the greatest poet of the American cinema” and in films such as The Searchers and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Ford defined what it meant to be an American. Marsh argues that both Ford and Springsteen were alike in the way they acted as a “representative and disseminator of a version of the American Dream”. (Marsh 368)
Ford won four awards for directing, but none for his Westerns. Still, when introducing himself or answering interviewers’ questions, he always claimed that he “made Westerns”. John Ford and John Wayne made many films together, including several classic Westerns. But The Searchers is widely considered the greatest Western of all time and also one of the greatest films in any genre. Marsh writes (referring to Born in the USA), “Bruce’s image of standing in a doorway, trying to decide whether to walk through, again threw him into the realm of John Ford’s The Searchers.”
“In that film, John Wayne spends five years tracking his young niece, who has been kidnapped by Indian raiders who massacred the rest of her family. Wayne doesn’t play an uncomplicated good guy; he is an unreconstructed Confederate soldier, he is a racist, and there are indications that he may be a highwayman. Although he initially intends to rescue his niece, he decides to kill her when he finds that she’s been taken as a wife by the Indian chief. But when he finally does catch up to her, after a long ride across the desert, he sweeps her up in his arms and brings her home.” (Marsh 414)
In the first scene of the film, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne’s character) arrives at the home of his brother and his brother’s wife after many years of wandering by himself in the wilderness of the desert. Ford shows us through the use of spare, stark images that Ethan and his sister-in-law are truly in love with each other. This process is similar to the way that Springsteen is able to tell stories and express the emotions and thoughts of his characters with only a few simple words. Just as Nebraska is thought of as Springsteen’s darkest album (up to that point), The Searchers could be considered the darkest film John Ford ever made, and it is certainly his darkest Western. It’s central figure, Ethan Edwards, is a complex man with many hidden and unconscious motives for his actions.
The character of Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath is less complicated but more heroic, at least in a traditional sense. Ford did win an Oscar for this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, but this film is not nearly as complex or modern in its sensibility as The Searchers. It is not now considered one of his very best films, although it has several memorable scenes and powerful dialogue. Springsteen would later pay explicit homage to The Grapes of Wrath on the album, The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995). This film focuses on a large family’s journey from Oklahoma to California with the hopes of finding the means of earning a living during the Depression. But the Okies were unwelcome in California because they threatened the jobs of the locals. They were constantly harassed by the state and its police force, especially when they tried to form unions and ask for decent wages which would at least allow them to eat. The character of Tom Joad speaks and acts, not only in defense of his family, but for all the oppressed, as we see in his famous speech to his mother.
In the years before Nebraska, Jon Landau introduced Bruce to certain novels, films, and even “to the very idea of art”. He also showed him “what he was missing” with regard to The Grapes of Wrath when Bruce was at first resistant to the film on television. (Marsh 306) During the Nebraska period, Springsteen was feeling “his need to be alone was becoming something tougher, more pernicious: loneliness”. He would eventually compare this to a scene in the Ford film where “an Okie farmer tries to hold off eviction with a shotgun, only to be told that the men he wants to shoot are faceless, hidden away in boardrooms hundreds of miles away. I felt the same way [Tom Joad] did.” said Bruce, “Where do I point the gun?” (Marsh 338)

Stolen Car

And I'm driving a stolen car
On a pitch black night
And I'm telling myself I'm gonna be alright
But I ride by night and I travel in fear
That in this darkness I will disappear

--“Stolen Car” The River

Although many Springsteen songs deal with cars, there are few that deal with stolen cars, the main exceptions being “Stolen Car” from The River and “State Trooper” from Nebraska. In both of these songs the narrators are driven by their desperation to commit the unlawful act of stealing a car, the difference is how far their despair has driven them. In “Stolen Cars” the narrator takes to the night to avoid his dieing marriage, and, like the narrator of “State Trooper” he wants to get caught, although his is a conscious desire, the difference, or the turning point for the character comes as he admits in “Stolen Car” that he is afraid of being swallowed by the darkness. In “State Trooper” not only has the narrator lost himself in the dark, he has been consumed by the desperate loneliness which permeates his journey on the turnpike.

Another song which is directly affected by the driver of a stolen car is “Highway Patrolman,” also from Nebraska. In this instance the stolen car is driven by the highway patrolman’s lowly brother.

Woody Guthrie

Guthrie, Woodrow Wilson Born in 1912, Woody Guthrie traveled the same roads from Oklahoma to California and beyond many American workers and rural people traveled during the Depression and Dust Bowl era of the 1920’s and 30’s. A committed socialist (a sticker on his guitar read, “This Machine Kills Fascists”), he was associated with but never a member of what biographer Joe Klein calls the “largely irrelevant and often laughable” Communist party (119). In the late 1930’s, he was a radio folk singer well known in California to the thousands of displaced Okies in Los Angeles. In early 1940, he appeared at a benefit concert sponsored by his friend, actor Will Geer, in New York. At the concert was Alan Lomax who was Assistant Director of Folk Music at the Library of Congress and who, after hearing Woody, convinced him to record for the Library’s collection and became a kind of agent for Woody (Klein 148). Woody also later recorded a set of songs, including “This Land is Your Land,” for Moe Asch, who put together the American Anthology of Folk Music for American Folkways (Klein 275). Around the time Guthrie met Lomax, the archivist had an assistant, Pete Seeger (then in his early twenties) who later became Guthrie’s traveling companion and mentee (Klein 280). Guthrie’s career was affected by many influences, not a few of which were his own wanderlust personality and his gradual decline from Huntington’s Disease. After serving in World War II as a sailor, Guthrie returned home, where his writing, songwriting, and radio career was cut short by both his medical decline and the anticommunist oppression of the late forties and fifties. He was placed in a hospital facility in 1956 and died eleven years later in 1967.

Bruce was not consciously influenced by Guthrie’s folk music until Jon Landau gave him a copy of Joe Klein’s biography on the day after Ronald Reagan was elected on November 5, 1980 (Marsh 276). He became intrigued by Woody’s very interesting life and noticed the economic similarities (and the differences) between the Depression and the Reagan era, and started regularly playing “This Land is Your Land” at shows, with a little introduction abut the song and its relevance (Marsh 277 and Guterman 130). For the purposes of this presentation, however, I wish to point out two aspects that both Bruce and Woody have in common (besides our presumptive use of their first names) that show how the social milieu affects their artistic trajectory and our appreciation of that art.

Woody Guthrie was “discovered” by Alan Lomax at the benefit concert after a reasonably successful radio career in Los Angeles because Lomax was searching for a person to fill an ideological and aesthetic construct: ideological, in that socialist cultural critics were looking for an authentic voice of the working people to emerge from working people instead of from socialist institutions; aesthetic, in that academic musicologists were looking for an authentic folk tradition that was both popularly appreciated and adhered to the historical conventions of American folk music (Klein 143-50). Guthrie seemed to fill both bills as a socially conscious, “unwitting classicist” folk musician; plus, Lomax noted, he was funny onstage and had the most impressive repertoire of songs Lomax had ever seen (149). That the promise of folk music in general and Woody Guthrie in particular to achieve the socialist ideal in America didn’t completely come to pass was a function of history and society rather than any issue with Woody or his music, and due in no small part to Woody’s contributions, folk music did survive the challenges of the mid-twentieth century.

When Bruce Springsteen went to the fateful audition with John Hammond in 1972, Hammond was on a mission similar, if more market-oriented, to Alan Lomax’s: after bringing Bob Dylan to Columbia, Hammond was looking—as much as a member of a “pop music aristocracy” would look—for a softer, more commercial, more accessible version of folk-rock, a James Taylor—Jackson Browne type of solo act (Marsh 53). Bruce’s insistence that he and the E Street Band were a rock and roll band and would stay that way “stunned” the record executives (56). What emerged out of the New Jersey Shore was not a soft-rock folksinger but a working-class rock and roll band.

Bruce and Woody’s artistic output, also, became subject to the social and commercial forces that appropriated their most popular songs and reinterpreted them for a more politically conservative appeal. Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” written in an angry response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” had two verses cut for public distribution that emphasized a unquestioning patriotism that Woody didn’t feel, and Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” was claimed by the Reagan administration as an expression of working-class patriotism—contrary to the words of the song and Bruce’s “nonconfrontational rejection” of President Reagan’s appropriation of the song (Marsh 431). Bruce joined the line of singers who have tried to rehabilitate “This Land Is Your Land,” such as Pete Seeger, when he included the song in the rotation for shows immediately preceding the making of Nebraska, and introducing the performances with a monologue about his interpretation of it, which Marsh has characterized as “smack dab in the middle” between Woody’s Marxist disillusionment and the dream fulfillment paean of Irving Berlin’s “God bless America” (279). Bruce interpreted “This Land” as “a question everybody has to ask themselves about the land they live in, everyday” (280).

Cover

The album cover for Nebraska was taken by photographer David Kennedy well before he and Springsteen met for what Marsh calls a “marathon photo session” that produced two other portraits of Springsteen that were used on the other sections of the album (Marsh 375-76). The front cover proposes a change for Springsteen’s work, not only because it is a bleak look at gray sky and land along an empty highway, but because its point of view has shifted from the perspective of a audience appreciating an artist—the usual portrait of Bruce—to an invitation to share the perspective of the artist, and if we take the analogy further, and listen to the words of the title track, we realize with horror that we are looking at the gray skies and bleak landscape through a rain-spattered windshield with Charlie Starkweather’s eyes. This interiorization of the viewer’s point of view mirrors Bruce’s goal in making the album: to explore the loss of the American Dream to American isolation, “what happens to people when they’re alienated from their friends and their community and their government and their job” (qtd. in Marsh 339-40) while, as Marsh notes, “responding to the changing context of his own life” (340). Until Nebraska, audiences had been invited to a show; with this album, the listener was invited to share a road trip to nowhere.

Place/Landscape

In Nebraska, Springsteen makes the move so necessary for good writers grounded, like he is, in a region; he expands his regionality by looking to the inner psyches that emerge out of a landscape of mind. Bruce has always been aware that, to use Mary Austin’s phrase, place must be “of the country rather than about it”; his songs set in New Jersey were not told from a outsider’s perspective, but certainly they were told by narrators who felt like outsiders (Austin 106). In order to maintain his commitment to place in the songs in Nebraska, Bruce looked into his, and our, common desires, shames, emotions, and social paradigms to express what he saw as an American landscape of limitless hopelessness. And this landscape, while concrete and real, is not merely one of the “lesser angels,” to use Eudora Welty’s term, of setting or stage(Welty ); landscape is not even the a set of “powerfully connected metaphors [which link] the voices of his characters to the ground on which they stood” as Bob Crane explains (Crane 342): Bruce Springsteen’s landscape is the infinitely real region of desolation that emerges out of our common condition, whether it is in Lincoln, Nebraska or Atlantic City, New Jersey. This idea is exemplified in “Nebraska” where the true-life narrator travels an American landscape of murderous alienation that while set in Nebraska and Wyoming, is familiar to all of us from San Ysidro to Blacksburg, Virginia. The paradigm change expressed in the album is also mirrored in the record’s cover, which, unlike the majority of Bruce’s albums, has no people on it, not even the Boss himself.

Catholic Imagery: Faith and Betrayal in Nebraska

Nebraska is an album about loss of faith and faith is a difficult institution to define, much less examine in detail. In spite of this, the songs on Nebraska are far from wordy ruminations on an esoteric topic. In fact, they represent a new economy of language in Springsteen's lyrics and a turning point in his song writing career. Bruce achieves this new spare sound thrugh the careful use of imagery, but especially through the use of Catholic imagery.

Bruce's previous albums were rich in Catholic imagery, most particularly in the images associated with the sacraments. In the Catholic tradition a sacrament is a rite that mediates divine grace. It is a ceremony which stands as an outward visible sign that conveys inward, spiritual grace. The sacraments are highly symbolic, theatrical and public. Any person who has grown up in the church will witness or participate in the four most practiced sacraments - baptism, communion, confession, matrimony - many times in the course of his or her life. The images and language present in these ceremonies for a "vocabulary of faith" for Bruce, a way for him to relate faith to the reality of daily life. By singing about water he can invoke the ideas behind baptism: rebirth, cleansing of sins. By singing about light, especially in relation to darkness, he recalls confession: spiritual darkness alleviated, driven away by grace and love. Singing about blood invokes communion: sacrifice and commitment.

In his early albums Bruce employs sacramental imagery in a manner consistent with the idea that religion and "faith provide people with identity, community" (Greely, p. 155), a sense of order and value in life. Each of these things is a promise of sorts and in Nebraska these promises are broken. Bruce's use of Catholic imagery both defines the promises that were made and highlights the bitterness of their betrayal.

"Highway Patrolman", the most verbose song on Nebraska, deals with a twofold betrayal: Franky Robert's betrayal of his brother and Joe Robert's betrayal of his identity as a lawman. The heartbreaking chorus

Me and Franky laughin' n' drinkin'
Nothing feels better than blood on blood
Taking turns dancin' with Maria
As the band played "Night of the Johnstown Flood"

uses the sacramental image of blood to illustrate the brotherly relationship before it was broken. "Blood on blood" indicates that these two men were committed to each other as brothers, as friends, as members of a functioning community where boys can share a dance with the same girl and there is no jealousy. Sharing a dance with Maria (reminicent of Mary?), shows the amount of trust and intimacy between the two brothers. Springsteen's use of this memory as Joe's refrain drives home how important that relationship was to him. At the end of the song Bruce repeats the two men, one girl in a bar scenario

There was a kid lookin' bad and bleedin' hard from the head, there was a
Girl cryin' at a table and it was Frank they said

The firs scene was almost idyllic but this second scenario shows the results of Franky's betrayal. The blood here is not sacramental blood - it is blood from violence, mistrust and selfishness. It is not shared blood, as the kid is "bleeding hard" and Franky is nowhere to be found. The only blood Joe and his brother share now is the literal blood that Frank spills and Joe is left to justify.

Light, symbolizing hope redemption and reunion found in confession (also known a reconciliation of the penitent), is one of the most frequent images in Nebraska. Springsteen uses it to striking, poignant effect in "Mansion on the Hill", and "My Father's House". Both songs deal with the betrayal of community. The mansion on the hill is the idealized vision of wealth and success. The distant vision of "all the lights that would shine" reminds the speaker in this song that he is not successful enough, that he is not the right kind of person to join in the "music playin' and people laughing all the time". He and his family are excluded from that community in spite of their hard work at the factory. In the closing lines of the song Bruce gives us the image of "a beautiful full moon rising above the mansion on the hill". The moon doesn't shine its light on the speaker or his home down in Linden Town. That light, symbolic of hope and opportunity, shines only on those who already have the good fortune to live in the mansion on the hill.

In "My Father's House" the community betrayed is the most primal community, that of one's own family. Here the speaker dreams of a reconciliation with his father, wants it so badly that he describes his father's house as "shining hard and bright". The light and promise coming off of this house is almost violent in its intensity, it's pull. "It stands like a beacon" for the speaker's desire for reconciliation with his father, redemption in his father's eyes and the hope that he could live in the source of that light. Again, the speaker is denied access to what he so desperately wants. The light and all the good it represents is seen only in the distance of a dream. When the speaker visits his father's house in real life it is peopled only by strangers and does not glow like he dreamed it would. The last lines of the song are the most chilling, as they leave the speaker and the listener outside, across the highway "where our sins lie unattoned". The darkness that encompasses the speaker has leaked out of the song and is spreading out to encompass anyone who hears his song.

Springsteen's sacramental images in Nebraska are familiar, just as familiar as the sacraments of baptism or communion are to any member of the church. They are, however unfamiliar as well because Bruce is no longer using them in quite the same way. In Nebraska Springsteen puts these images , especially light, out of reach of the characters in his songs. He forces the listener to consider that the goodness and order that these images represent might be unattainable.

Isolation

While reflecting on Nebraska years after its release Springsteen told Dave Marsh, "That whole Nebraska album was just that isolation thing and what it does to you... when you lose that sense of community, there's some spiritual breakdown that occurs. And when that occurs, you just get shot off somewhere where nothing seems to matter" (382).
Experiences of being alone form the backbone to the stories in the album. Beginning with mass murderer Charles Starkweather being sentenced to the electric chair, every song is filled with people who have been taken out of any healthy social context. Although "Atlantic City" begins with a man telling his girl to get dressed up for a trip, it ends with him out of work and telling his honey that he is going off to do a favor for "this guy" who he most likely met on the loser side. "Mansion of the Hill" gives us moments of community between a father and a son and a brother and a sister, even if those are communal moments of longing. But in the end, the narrator is left alone in Linden town as he watches two scenes, the real -life cars of the world he knows and the Mansion he will always be seperated from. "Johhny 99" tells us about Ralph, a man whose job was taken away. In about three minutes of music he is left to spend the next 99 years of his life alone, wishing instead for the execution line. Although the chorus of "Highway Patrolman" has Joe and Frank "laughing and drinking", the song ends with the brothers forever seperated because that same brotherly love keeps Joe from locking Frank up as he deserved. Community quickly breaks down into two men alone. Perhaps the most isolated character on the album is the eerie driver of "State Trooper" who is pleading with an authority figure to leave him alone who is not even present. He alludes to getting back to his baby, but in the end he has nobody to speak to, thus directing his "last prayer" to simply "somebody out there". The opening scene of "Used Cars" is that of a young boy watching his family drive away on a test run of the family's potential "brand-new used car". Why he is left out is unclear, but it is obvious that for this specific morning he is all alone. This may be why he longs for his own new car so that he can choose his own isolation on the road. The driver of "Open All Night" wants desperately to get back to his baby but he has been driving all night and still has three hours to go. This is not a normal commute. This is a trip of mind numbing lonliness. Far from a pleasant joy ride, "this turnpike is spooky at night when you're all alone." The narrator of "My Father's House" seeks relationship with his father but comes to find that he has isolated himself for too long and consequently now his "sins lie unatoned". "Reason to Believe" contains four seperate images that place the lonely period on Nebraska. A man stands outside his car poking a dead dog hoping it will "get up and run". A woman waits at the end of a dirt road for the man who left her to return. A baby being baptized quickly transfoms into an old man dead in "a whitwashed shotgun shack". By the river a groom is stood up by his wife-to-be, forced to "stand alone and watch the river run by so effortlessly". Of course, the most important charcter on this album that is dealing with being isolated is Springsteen. Without the band to distract him, he was left alone in Colts Neck, NJ with only his guitar, harmonica, TEAC four-track recorder, and doubt as to how, if at all, people find a way to make it in a world that trys to pull them apart.

Bizarro

Bizarro is a fictional character, a doppelganger of DC Comics’ Superman. Due to a somewhat disjointed continuity, several versions of Bizarro have appeared in DC comic books, all of them inversions of Superman with gray or chalk-white skin and a twisted sense of logic, which typically manifests itself as the superficial "opposite" of anything Superman would do or say, and the resultant speech pattern ("Me am going to kill you" would mean "I will save you" in Bizarro speech). Due to his imperfections, Bizarro is frequently a foe of Superman, but sometimes finds himself in the role of hero (in this case, an anti-hero).

The original Bizarro was created when Superman was exposed to a "duplicate ray." In accordance with the science fiction concepts of Superman stories of the era, Bizarro relocated to "the Bizarro world," a cubical planet called Htrae which operated under "Bizarro logic" (it was a crime to do anything good or right) and which Bizarro populated with inverted versions of Superman’s supporting cast and other DC heroes.

Bizarro and the Bizarro World have become somewhat well known in popular culture, and the term Bizarro is used as to describe anything that utilizes twisted logic or that is the opposite of something else. The television series Seinfeld, with its many Superman references and in-jokes, even devoted an episode to the Bizarro concept, "The Bizarro Jerry", with Elaine dating a mirror opposite of Jerry who had his own Bizarro versions of friends George, Kramer, and Newman. To complete the allusion, Kevin (the Bizarro Jerry character) even uses the peculiar way of speaking, ending the episode with "Me so happy; me want to cry" and has a statue of Bizarro in his apartment.

John Landau

Landau, John. Landau’s unusual manager/ artist relationship with Springsteen was never made more apparent than during the post-production decision-making process of Nebraska. Usually, in the shallow world of the music industry, a manager’s primary goal for his or her artist is achieving commercial success. Putting out an album like Nebraska in the 1980s, a time of arena rock and New Wave synth bands, was an artistic detour from the typical goals of high record sales and radio airplay. Dave Marsh, in describing Landau’s one of many roles in his relationship with Springsteen, along with his ability to “communicate with Bruce,” emphasizes, “Landau also has a gift for helping Bruce understand many of his own ideas” (388). No musical idea from Bruce, coming back from Colt Neck with his self-recorded demo tape, would have seemed stranger considering the success of The River; that is, stranger to anyone except Landau, who in his own words, “had some fairly developed ideas, when you get into that folk music area” (Marsh 342). Because of his interest in folk music, Landau could hear the intimacy and quiet vulnerability of the Nebraska songs. After much debate, ultimately, Landau was first to voice the opinion, “We can just put the demo out the way it is” (355). Even though Springsteen probably had already come to the same conclusion, this was exactly the kind of reassurance he needed to release the Nebraska demo with minimal treatment, in all its stark devastating beauty.

Anthology of American Folk Music

Anthology of American Folk Music was released in 1952 on Moe Asch’s Folkways Records. Harry Smith compiled and edited the wide variety of “old-time music,” “race music,” or folk music from his personal 78s record collection—ranging from popular recordings such as The Carter Family, to obscure tunes from the likes of The Cincinnati Jug Band and the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers. In regards to the selection of songs, Smith, according to Greil Marcus, “restricted himself to the commonly held music of traditional and marginalized American cultures as it was professionally recorded between about ‘1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932 when the Depression halted folk music sales” (11). By the 1920s, the radio had replaced the phonograph as the main form of home entertainment. “Because phonographs cost less and didn’t require electricity,” writes Neil Rosenberg, “they could be sold more easily to working-class consumers” (35). As a result, record companies began to produce series of “old-time music,” songs such as “Got the Farm Land Blues” by the Carolina Tar Heels, were recorded by working-class musicians and were meant to appeal to working-class taste.
The influence of Smith’s Anthology on the music of Bruce Springsteen begins with Nebraska, though not as obvious as the more “overtly social-minded statement” of 1995s the ghost of tom joad, or the more direct musical folk lineage of the 1998, 2006 We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. What the Nebraska songs share with Smith’s, besides the stark instrumentation of a singer backed by a lone acoustic guitar, has more to do with a certain tone or mood of stillness. Dave Marsh writes, “the Nebraska demos had the quality of stillness associated with the great Library of Congress folk recordings of the 1930s and 1940s” (348). With the exception of the rockabilly infused “Open All Night,” the tempo of the songs on Nebraska are much more subdued compared to the foot-stomping, hip-slapping folk music on Smith’s Anthology. Though he sees little similarities in “the character’s motives,” Rob Kirkpatrick, referring to an interpretation by Bryan Garman, writes, “‘Johnny 99’ combines the narratives of Julius Daniel’s ‘Ninety Nine Year Blues’ (1927) and Carter Family’s ‘John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man’ (1930)—both from the Folkways Anthology that Springsteen had been delving into at the time” (86). What Springsteen drew upon from songs such as Julius Daniel’s and Mississippi John Hurt’s “Frankie,” were tales of common people situated on the edge of society; at times committing violent acts of revenge and retribution; and yet, even when standing before a judge, they remain defiant and unremorseful, similar to the voice of Starkweather in Springsteen’s “Nebraska.”

Flannery O'Connor: Ms. Meanness

That Springsteen was heavily influenced by the stories of Southern Irish Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) is no secret. To anyone familiar with her fiction, that the tone of Nebraska is so utterly dark as a result is no surprise.
Springsteen cites her direct influence on the album three seperate times (Marsh, 335; Songs, 136; Percy/ ed. Skinner Sawyer, 307). In each statement he lucidly points out different dimensions of her writing that in large part accounted for the stripped down, dark, and cruel fillaments that make up this seemingly 'outta left field' album. However, upon closer inspection, it may be that the "lower-class Catholic guilt" (Marsh, 335) that fueled O'Connor's fiction sparked within Bruce the need to reevaluate some of the more positive imagery that gained him popularity with Born To Run andthus allowing himself to go deeper into the darkness he experimented with in a song like "The River", the exact location (and title of the story) where O'Connor depicts a five year old boy to drown himself in a misguided attempt at transcendance.

The lack of understanding inherent in childhood is the first of four major connections that can be made between these two writers. Bruce claimed that, "the songs on Nebrasksa are connected to my childhood more than any other record I'd made" and "I often wrote from a child's point of view" (Songs, 136-137). Although O'Connor never writes in the first person with a child narrating as Springsteen does in "Used Cars", she does explore what it means to be a child in a world that does not lend itself to much coherent understanding, even for adults.
In her first novel Wise Blood (1949) a young boy named Enoch Emery lives in a world of confusion along side a vicious and nihilistic man named Haze Motes. All Enoch does know is that his blood is the answer to unknown questions, but other than that, "He was not a foolhardy boy who took chances on the meanings of things. For the time, he knew that what he didn't know was what mattered" (73). Enoch's lack of understanding can be somewhat humorous at times, especially set against the knowledgable cruelty of Haze. However, in O'Connor's story "The River", five year old Harry mistakes the riverside preacher's metaphorical language of baptism as a literal route of escape from his neglectful parents. He drowns in the river as he attempts to swim to the Kingdom of God but, "since he was moving quickly he knew he was getting somewhere" (52).
Although "Mansion on the Hill" and "My Father's House" are the products of the memory or dream of a child, it is in "Used Cars" where Springsteen allows a child to sing. Through this technique the listener/reader is given the clearest glimpse into what it means to see a dark world with the faith of a child. *** anything else would be my song entry... ? *****

In Songs, Sprinsgteen said he "wanted the blood on [Nebraska] to feel destined and fateful" (138). The concept that blood is somehow tied up with destiny or even such a scarry word as Providence comes directly out of Wise Blood. Enoch is convinced that the world holds great possibilities for him. "He knew something was going to happen to him. His blood stopped beating" (55), but he "never nagged his blood to tell him anything until it was ready" waiting for it to "shout some order at him" (75). In truth, Enoch is just a plain and lonely boy following around the worst guide looking for answers that don't exist in Any blood.
The only song that references blood on the album is "Highway Patrolman". Blood first appears as a positive image of brotherly communion as Joe and Frank laugh and drink because "nothin' feels better than blood on blood". It is a strange phrase to describe brotherly affection, as if they are inextricably tied to the actions of the other. The next time we see blood in the song it is coming from the head of a kid Frank had injured. It is the spilling of this blood that leads to the inevitable closure of the fateful line "Frankie ain't no good" that separates Joe from his brother and his intergrity. Like so many characters on the album, Joe is left in need of cleansing, but the last note is played with Joe utterly alone.

Being products of the Catholic Tradition, both O'Connor and Springsteen were keenly aware that there was one man's blood that was supposed to be able to clean or atone for the sickness all humanity was born with. In his interview with Percy Springsteen said of O'Connor, "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 orginal sin- she knew how to give it the flesh of a story" (307). What could be a darker side of spirituality than the theological confession that you are damned from birth for the poor produce choice of the first bipeds? Perhaps the only thing that dims the lights in that eternally condemning room is that the one door out invloves the blood of a Jewish peasant killed two millenia ago to wash that stain away. Neither of these writers were oblivious to this theological dilema, and they used the abstract construct to view the conditions of characters toiling in a world that makes you feel your being punished for the sin's of some unknown other.
In her story "A Good Man is Hard To Find", O'Connor gives us a character called the Misfit. Much like characters we see in the album, the Misfit is a criminal who believes he was doomed from the start. He tells an old woman before he kills her, "I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take the tire off his car, because sooner or later you're gonna forget what it was you done and just be punished for it" (27). In the construct of original sin this is good logic. All embryos have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. If that is the world you are born into than a Misfit is all there is to be. Haze Motes echoes this sentiment as he preaches the "Church Without Christ" saying, "There's no person a whoremonger who wasn't something worse first. That's not sin nor blasphemy. The sin came before them" (Wise Blood, 45).
Nebraska is littered with characters in bad situations outside of their control. The world appears to be against them from the start and many respond violently in the face of their apparant futility. In "Atlantic City" the narrator tries to do things by the book but he admits that despite his efforts he still has "debts that no honest man can pay." He can't find a job on the wrong side of winning and losing. His toils are a social representation of the spiritual condition original sin puts all of us in, tired of being born into the losing end. In "Johhny 99" we see the same perdicament. Ralph can't find a job so he turns to crime. He acknowledges to the judge that he also has unpayable debts which is why he thinks it would be better to die than struggle in vain. In his honest courtroom speech he eloquently and briefly sums up the feeling that outside forces are pulling him down as he says "it was more 'n' all this that put that gun in my hand." "My Father's House" illuminates the sadder side of the problem. Instead of resorting to crime in an unfair world, this character sincerely seeks out restoration but finds that none is offered now that he is forever separated from his father. At the end he is left "on that dark highway where our sins lie unatoned." Neither Springsteen or O'Connor were satisfied in their writing to use a deus ex machina resolution like the Catholic version of the Atonement. That leaves them with characters riddled with pain and lacking any tangible comfort.

Again in his interview with Percy Springsteen cites another facet of O'Connor's influence on the album saying her her stories were, "a big, big revelation. "She had got to some part of meanness that she never spelled out... It was always at the core of everyone of her stories - the way she left that hole there, that whole that's inside of everybody" (307). Springsteen's evaluation is accurate as O'Connor's collection of short stories A Good Man is Hard to Find opens with the title story where the Misfit and his boys kill an entire family that they come across on the road. It ends with the Misfit shooting an old woman three times in the chest, but before this he tells her, "Nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best you can - by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness" (28). In "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" Mr. Shiflet marries a poor old woman's retarded daughter so that he can steal the family car. Of course he could have simply drove off alone, but instead he chooses to marry the girl, take her to a diner, then leave her lost and alone. In "The Artificial Nigger" a grandfather takes his young grandson into the big city for the first time. Once there he gets them lost, exhausting the boy. When the boy falls asleep the grandfather hides to teach him some obscure and cruel lesson. He wakes in a panic and runs, colliding with an old woman. The boy turns to his grandfather who was trailing the scene and the grandfather denies he knows the boy. A scenario with more meanness than those three is hard to imagine. Enter Charles Starkweather.
Springsteen chose to open his musical collection of short stories with a title cut as well in which he almost directly appropriates the Misfit's words. The song ends with the murderer saying without any remorse "well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world." Starkweather was mean to say the least. After being arrested for killing ten people he told his first psychiatrist that killing people was like smashing bugs. He later told a second psychiatrist that he wished he had a bomb to kill the first. Springsteen said he considered the song to be the center of the album and it ceratainly sets the stage for a mean show.
After shooting a night clerk Ralph (Johhny 99) is sentenced by Mean Joe Brown who gives him 99 years in jail. Ralph's life is taken from him in an instant, and in this mean world "the sentence fit the crime". It is an endless circle of mistreatment. Ralph's material life is taken from him and he responds by taking an innocent strangers entire life. It takes only a Mean Judge to complete the loop.

Larry McCaffery

The Nabokov of Bruce Springsteen scholars.

Robert Johnson: The Devil is in the Details

In Nebraska Bruce Springsteen found a new voice and his music took on a different feel. It wasn't just the stripped down sound or the lean lyrics of the songs - there was a more adult, complex and dark view expressed by the characters in the the album, a startling lack of the optimism which many critics counted as one of Bruce's trademarks. These songs are not statements of faith and vitality. The songs in Nebraska are laments of faith lost, opportunity promised but never given, and betrayal. Nebraska felt different because Bruce had the blues.

During the period when Bruce was writing the songs that would appear on Nebraska he was listening to the sort of music that laid the foundations for rock n' roll: American folk and country music and Delta blues singers like Robert Johnson. Johnson was a singer and guitarist who became legendary for his emotional commitment to the music and infamous for his alleged deal with the Devil wherein he sold his sould in exchange for a masterful skill on the guitar. Robert Johnson's music exemplifies the heart of the blues, but also pushes the common themes of isolation, failure, betrayal and familiarity with the devil to their limits. It was this gonzo determination to "get deep down in this connection" (Johnson, "Terraplane Blues") between all that is good and all that is evil in the human spirit that moved Bruce and steered the thematic shift in Nebraska.

Blues songs exist in the past and in themoment; they are songs about the prices to be paid for the promises men "tried and failed to keep" (Marcus, Mystery Train, p. 21). There is little attempt to explain why these promises are broken, why these expectations are betrayed. The Blues accepts that "there is a meanness in this word" (Springsteen, "Nebraska") and that meanness is personified by the Devil. Robert Johnson's songs are true to that definition, but notible for the intimacy and immediatcy in his images of the Devil. In "Me and the Devil Blues" Johnson sings:

Early in the morning
When you knocked upon my door
I said, Hello, Satan
I believe it's time to go

Satan and the evil he represents is no shadowy idea to Johnson - he is a physical reality, someone who accompanies him each morning when he leaves his house, someone who knows where he lives, someone who he can't avoid.

This sort of concrete, mundane familiarity with evil is present in Nebraska as well. In a chillingly emotionless voice Bruce sings:

I saw her standing on her front lawn, just twirling her her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir and then innocent people died

In two lines Bruce sets the tone for the entire album by juxtaposing the nostalgically sweet image of a baton-twirling girl, the youthful freedom of a ride with your sweetheart and the slaughter of nearly a dozen innocent people. Springsteen's allusion to an actual killing spree, the Starkweather murders, highlights the reality of the Evil about which he sings. It is terrifying to think that this world and the people in it are familiar with such a "meanness", but it is undeniably true.

Bruce has repleatedly said that Nebraska is his most personal album. Whatever larger implications that statement may have, it does point to the enormous influence that Robert Johnson's music had over Bruce's writing at the time. Listening to Johnson's blues provided Bruce with a new perspective on how to examine the problem of broken promises and dreams betrayed. Previously, rock n' roll had provided him with the exuberant sound and imagery to make promises and describe dreams, but Bruce needed the intimate vocabulary of the blues to begin to explore the darker aspects of himself as an artist and an individual.

Blues

1 : low spirits : melancholy, "suffering a case of the blues"
2 : a song often of lamentation characterized by usually 12-bar phrases, 3-line stanzas in which the words of the second line usually repeat those of the first.

I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling
down like hail
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down
like hail
And the days keep on 'minding me
There's a hellhound on my trail

"Hellhound on My Trail", Robert Johnson

Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation

Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation Springsteen by 1981 had come to his position the Vietnam War (in which he did not serve because of a 4-F status) and its veterans after reading Kovics’ Born on the Fourth of July and remembering his friend drummer Bart Hanes (Marsh 309). Jon Landau found VVA and its president, Bob Muller for Springsteen, who hit it off with Mueller and ended up doing a benefit for VVA on august 20, 1981. Marsh quotes Muller to claim that “without Bruce and that evening, we would not have made it” (in Marsh, 310). Marsh emphasizes how Springsteen changed the VVA; Guterson emphasizes how doing that concert, and experiencing Vietnam Veterans, changed Bruce (130). Muller claims to this day that Springsteen was instrumental in keeping the organization, now the Veterans for America Foundation, alive and also claims to be the “cool rockin ‘ daddy” in “Born in the USA” (VFA).