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.