Nebrasklopedia

Nebrasklopedia
In light of the nature of this album and this class, we have decided to structure our presentation a little differently. Since this is, ostensibly, a class on postmodernism, we looked to the work of our nearest and dearest Postmodern expert, Larry McCaffery, for inspiration. Among his many publications we found Federman: A to X-X-X-X, A Recyclopedic Narrative (McCaffery et al, 1998). This volume is an encyclopedia of sorts, but focused on one author, Raymond Federman. As with a regular encyclopedia there are multiple entries which appear in alphabetical order. Each entry is narrowly focused on a single topic, however, if the text of one entry happens to touch on the topic of another entry the key word is in bold font. When a reader encounters a bold font word, she or he may jump to the entry listed under that word and begin reading on a new topic. He or she may also choose to ignore this possibility and continue to read the original entry in its entirety. This format frees the reader from the confines of traditional left-to-tight, A-to-Z methods of conveying information.

If you take a look at the handout, you will see that we appropriated the Recyclopedia format. This is, after all, a class in postmodernism; something had to be appropriated at one point or another.

The Nebrasklopedia exists on the pages in front of you, but we are not content to leave it at that. Tonight you have tickets to a live, one-night-only concert by Pete, Wayne, Jim, Travis, Zac and myself. We are not a band, but we do intend to give you a performance. We have each authored entries in the Nebrasklopedia and tonight we are going to jam with them, just like Bruce, Clarence and little Stevie do at a show. We are going to fit these pieces of information together to form a melody, a harmony, a beat and hopefully a better understanding of what Nebraska is all abut. Like any good live show, this performance is going to be loose. We will need you, the audience, to be actively listening because we are going to be passing the melody around a lot. Each time one of the band starts to speak that person will be performing an entry listed in the handout. The bandmember may not make it all the way through that entry before hittinga word that is the topic of another band member's entry. At that point, the point of intersection, of harmony between ideas, the second band member will take over, beginning to perform the next topic. The entries we present should relate to each other just like songs on an album. The connection won't always be quickly apparent, but if you listen carefully, you will be sure to find it.

"Put on your stockings baby, the night's getting cold"

“Nebraska”

In Songs, Springsteen defines “Nebraska” as “the record’s center” (138). The song encapsulates the tone and themes of the entire album: it’s the story of a man isolated and pushed to the edge of society, to the point where “the thin line between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes to black, when the things that connect you to your world—your job, your family, friends, your faith, the love and grace in your heart—fail you” (138-139). The song is a dramatic monologue sung “in a horrifyingly blank first-person voice” (Marsh 336), and was inspired by the story of Charles Starkweather’s 1957 murder spree. Rob Kirkpatrick writes, “Springsteen was so fascinated by Badlands,” Terrence Malick’s film adaptation of Starkweather’s story, “that he was moved to call journalist Ninette Beaver, the author of Caril, a nonfiction book on the Starkweather murders, to learn more about the case” (86). The first two lines, “I saw her standin’ on her front lawn/ just twirlin’ her baton,” are taken almost directly from Malick’s film. In the film, Holly/ Caril, played by Sissy Spacek, is twirling her baton in the street; and this image of innocence, in both the lyrics as well as the scene, provides a dramatic contrast to the senseless murders committed by Starkweather.
After a mournful harmonica intro, Springsteen’s dream-like guitar and the lack of emotion in his character’s voice echoes Malick’s portrayal of Holly and Kit/ Starkweather in their disturbing lack of affect and their sense of detachment to their horrific actions. The quiet, almost peaceful mood of the song is paradoxical, considering its subject matter. In a 1998 interview with Will Percy, Springsteen explains: “In most of the recent songs, I tell violent stories very quietly. You’re hearing characters’ thoughts—what they’re thinking after all the events that have shaped their situation have transpired” (308). Springsteen’s Starkweather shows no remorse as he politely addresses the Sheriff as “sir,” stating:
I can’t say that I’m sorry for the things
that we done
At least for a little while, sir, me and
her we had some fun
The use of “sir” shows that, at one time, Starkweather was an assimilated member of society, and this makes his actions, the meaningless murder of innocent victims, that much harder to explain. Just before his execution, he asks:
Sheriff, when the man pulls that
switch, sir, and snaps my poor head
back
You make sure my pretty baby is sittin’
right there on my lap
Critics often interpret the last two lines as Starkweather asking Caril to be there when he dies, and they are probably correct. Physically, however, with the volts of electricity coursing through both their bodies, this scenario is unlikely. Emotionally, in keeping with the theme of isolation, this would make Starkweather’s last request contradictory to his nature, and would be a sign of some last spark of humanity, also unlikely. A more compelling image, would be Starkweather asking for the “sawed off .410” that was on his lap in the second stanza, like a warrior going to his grave with his preferred weapon. The song ends with representatives of Authority asking why he killed those people, and all he has to say is, “well, sir, guess there’s just a/ meanness in this world.” It is as if he sees his actions as fulfilling a role, providing the “meanness” that is already a part of an uncaring, violent world.

Atlantic City

Atlantic City is an important song because it has close connections with some songs from earlier albums as well as other songs on Nebraska. It’s importance is further underlined by the fact that it was the only song (at the time) from the album that was made into a music video. Atlantic City begins with references to the Mafia; the “Chicken Man” was the nickname of a mafia boss named Philip Testa who was blown up along with his house in early 1981. The terms “boardwalk” (for instance, see the importance of the boardwalk in Elia Kazan’s film, On the Waterfront) and “racket boys” also conjure images of the Mafia. The “trouble” from “out of state” most likely refers to the encroachment of the Mob from Philadelphia into the territory of New Jersey. Atlantic City was known for its large amount of gambling and so it would prove profitable for the Mafia, especially for Testa who was known to avoid profiteering through drugs or alcohol. The first-person narrator of this song isn’t introduced until the third stanza (and after the first chorus). He says that he began by working and saving money but, like the desperate subject of Johnny 99, he needed to turn to crime because he “had debts that no honest man could pay”. This narrator is also like the central figure in Meeting Across the River from Born to Run. Both believe that they need to turn to crime to support themselves (and their women). Both have a certain illegal activity planned, but the specifics, whether they be dealing drugs or knocking somebody off, are not made clear in either song. There is also a connection with Prove It All Night from Darkness On the Edge of town. In the chorus of Atlantic City, the narrator tells the female figure, “put your makeup on and fix your hair up pretty” for their upcoming meeting. In Prove It All Night, the narrator tells her, “tie your hair back in a long, white bow” for their meeting “behind the dynamo”. Both narrators believe it is important for their respective women to look good and they want to be able to support this by acquiring money, whether it be through hard work or a quick score. In Atlantic City, he is unable to get any more money from the Central Trust and the irony of the word “trust” being the thing that is failing him probably doesn’t escape this narrator and certainly not Springsteen himself. All this guy can afford for his girl are “two tickets on that Coast City bus” to the beach where he sees the “sands turnin’ to gold”. The first two lines of the chorus, “Everything dies baby that’s a fact” and “But maybe everything that dies someday comes back” are deliberately ambiguous. Is he talking about a belief in literal reincarnation? Perhaps he is referring to his personal situation in the sense that he is going to be making some quick money soon if the plan is successful. One thing that has died, he says, is their “luck”. But he’s not giving up on her, “with you forever I’ll stay”. He shows his concern for her, “put on your stocking’s cause the nights getting cold”. In the final stanza, the unnamed narrator refers to “winners and losers”; his intention is to become a “winner” by earning money through some kind of illegal act. He sees “winners and losers” and nothing in between the two, only a “line”. He is crossing that "line" that separates straight from criminal activity in order to become a “winner” in his mind, and, he hopes, in the eyes of his girl.

Mansion on the Hill

“Mansion on the Hill” The third song on the first side of the album is a reworking of a Hank Williams 1947 song of the same name (Garman 88). It is a set of three images: one general overview, an introduction to the setting addressed to “sir,” to whom the narrator gives the description, two memories from childhood of the mansion, and a conclusion set in the narrative present. The mansion, set above the “factories and the fields” is surrounded by “gates of hardened steel” while children still play along the road outside. The children in both memories and in the narrative present propose the generational continuity that make this song a description of a sociohistorical process in addition to a personal memoir. The two memories from childhood are set apart by gender and by generation. The first tells of trips taken by the narrator and his father through a “silent and still” town to watch the mansion at night, from a “back road on the highway side”; the feel of this memory is of frustration and anger, set in the cars, roads, and towns of industrialization. The second memory is with the narrator’s sister, as they peer up at the mansion, secretly watching the lights, laughter, and music from a cornfield down below. This memory seems kinder, with a more natural, childlike wonder and camaraderie. The final summary sets the mansion in socioeconomic terms; as the narrator watches “cars rushing home from the mill” a full moon rises over the mansion, accentuating the sense of the recurring, endless cycle of childhood into adulthood, into a system separated by both geography and class.

In contrast to Hank Williams’s romantic allegory of class separation, where the narrator is in his “cabin” in the valley and his lover is “alone with her pride” in her “loveless mansion,” Springsteen’s allegory is more complex and more alienated. Garman and Guterson both note that the song emerged out of his growing sense of social consciousness especially, notes Guterson, after his appearance on August 20, 1981 at a benefit for the Vietnam Veterans of America, which Guterson claims “changed Springsteen and his music”, noting that Springsteen immediately started performing more covers in his concerts, including Woody Guthrie tunes such as “This Land is Your Land” (Guterrman 130). It appears as if Springsteen, influenced by the working-class music of Williams, was inspired by Guthrie’s social consciousness and contemporary events to create a complex web of intergenerational, genderized, and sociohistorically relevant experiences and observations in this retelling of class alienation.

The song’s placement, after “Nebraska” and “Atlantic City”, lends itself to the oft-interpreted (Garman 88-90, Marsh 366-68) class-struggle reading; after two songs that deal with realistic events told in a dramatic monologue from an adult’s perspective, monologues that describe specific nihilistic occasions, the third song gives the listener a look at the childhood roots of this hopelessness, in a kind of narrative overview, a dramatic monologue that functions as an Introduction to the social milieu of the lost American Dream. Marsh claims the song is set in an actual place near Freehold, and notes the interplay of professional, political, and personal crisis at work in the song (371).

Highway Patrolman

In Runaway American Dream, Jimmy Guterman calls the narrator of this song the “hero of the record”. He also calls Joe Roberts the only character on Nebraska that you would be “comfortable inviting over for dinner. (136) But is Joe Roberts really a “hero”? And if so, is he really the “only hero”? In the first line of the song, Joe (average Joe?) says that he works for “the state” before he says that he is, more specifically, a police “sergeant”. Combined with the subdued, monotone style of Springsteen’s delivery, this word choice suggests that he has been, in some sense, defeated when he was forced to take this job. He later confirms this when he says that he had originally settled down on a farm to make a living for himself and his wife, Maria. Joe seems proud that he does an “honest job” but we later learn that he lets his brother Frankie run afoul of the law without punishment. He justifies this to himself in the chorus by stating that “family” is not only the most important thing in his life, but that this is the way it should be for everyone. But this attitude is not really in line with being “honest”. Joe certainly appears to be more stable than many of the other characters in Nebraska, but this does not necessarily make him heroic. He is clearly uneducated or, at least, he hasn’t learned proper grammar. He refers to “Me and Franky” and says “ever since we was young kids”. He’s not very perceptive either. The only thing he can really say about his brother is that “Franky ain’t no good”. He then echoes this by saying, more generally, that a man who “turns his back on his family ’ain’t no good’”. I don’t think Springsteen was merely running out of words here. Guterman calls Joe a “very good policeman” but I’m not sure how he acquires this information. All the lyrics tell us is that he gives his brother special treatment and nothing else about his performance on the job.
I think Guterman is correct when he says that Joe sees Franky as a “shadow representing what he could have been”. Joe married the girl (Maria) that they presumably both loved and avoided being sent off to Vietnam. Like Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, when Franky returns from Vietnam he will have even more trouble fitting into regular society and following its rules and customs. The chorus of Highway Patrolman is Joe’s memory of the brothers in happier times, especially in the image of the two dancing together with Maria. The song he specifically remembers is called “Night of the Johnstown Flood” but I don’t believe there was a prior song with this exact title. There were songs, however, about the infamous Johnstown Flood, in which over three thousand people died. This disaster was a prime example of the promotion of individual and corporate greed at the great expense of the common worker. This sentiment is echoed in the song when Joe refers to being “robbed” by the powers that be when wheat prices drop and he is no longer able to support himself and his family.

Johnny 99

“Johnny 99.” During Ronald Regan’s campaign speech in New Jersey, he declared, “‘America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about’”(Gilmore 273). Reagan’s laughable attempt to co-opt the popularity of local hero, Bruce Springsteen, was probably the brainchild of one of his political advisors, someone who had only paid attention to the rousing chorus of “Born in the U.S.A.,” oblivious to the protagonist unemployment or the despair in the line, “Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go/ Born in the U.S.A.” It would be difficult to imagine a more unlikely association than conservative Reaganomics—supply-side economics, resulting in lower taxes for the rich, and increased defense spending—and Springsteen’s career-long message that things are far from all right in the land of plenty. Springsteen’s response to Reagan’s statement was not immediate, and to his more liberal fans, not as dramatic as they might have hoped for. According to Marsh, in concert, fittingly using the stage for his rebuttal, he told the crowd, “The President was mentioning my name the other day, and I kinda got to wondering what his favorite album musta been. I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.” And he played a scorching ‘Johnny 99’”(486-487).
Instead of the “Nebraska” harmonica intro, Springsteen begins the song with a quiet wail that has the sound of impotent resignation and sorrow; and it’s influence can be traced to Woody Guthrie and the hurt song, a genre that Bryan Garman summarizes as songs that “express the collective pain, suffering, and injustice working people have historically suffered, and articulate their hopes and dreams for a less oppressive future” (222). “Johnny 99” also shares a similarity in theme and tone to lowdown blues prison songs—such as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Prison Cell Blues,” found on the Anthology of American Folk Music, or Blind Willie McTell’s “Death Cell Blues.” The opening wail or moan mimics the lyrical phrasing of Blind Lemon and Blind Willie, and the sense of resignation of “Johnny 99,” in the line, “Well your honor I do believe I’d be better off dead,” echoes the Blind Willie’s “Ain’t but one thing could release me/ and that’s ole Father Time.”
“Johnny 99,” like “Nebraska” and “Death Cell Blues,” is another prison monologue, and it is yet another story of a man pushed to the edge by circumstances beyond his control. It is the story of Ralph who earns the nickname Johnny 99 after he is convicted for the killing of a night clerk. In “Nebraska,” the only justification Starkweather gives for killing “ten innocent people” is that “there’s just a meanness in this world”; “Johnny 99,” however, provides enough background information that suggest a possible cause and effect for Ralph’s crime. In the first stanza we are told that he loses his job because the auto plant closes; because he can not get a job he gets drunk, finds himself in that void where anything can happen, and shoots the night clerk. It is up to the listener, not to justify the crime, because even Ralph says he is not innocent, but to realize the implications of Ralph’s statement to the judge, “But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand.” Mikal Gilmore quotes Springsteen as he discusses Nebraska and the plight of the worker in America during the 1980s,“And if people are sick and hurting and lost, I guess it falls on everybody to address those problems in some fashion. Because injustice, and the price of that injustice, falls on everyone’s heads. The economic injustice falls on everybody’s head and steals everyone’s freedom” (271). Unlike the poets in the song “Jungleland” who “try to make an honest stand/ But they wind up wounded,” Ralph/ Johnny 99, like the narrator of “Atlantic City,” who has been “lookin’ for a job but it’s hard to find,” does not live in a world that affords people the opportunity to “make an honest stand.”

State Trooper, the Lone Ranger’s bizarro twin.

Like a dark-brimmed rider coming into town with his back lit and his face shrouded by a crimson sunset “State Trooper,” the story of a tragically flawed transient of the night, is a mysterious spectacle. Situated in a musical landscape of two muted chords, the metronomic quality of the strumming lends itself to the inexorable rhythm of intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust. Set immediately on the New Jersey Turnpike by the driver/narrator, the lyrics are structured like narrative excerpts from an extended journey. The lyrical structure and musical style along with the lyrical content on this track support a reading which allows for an examination of the expanses and emanations of sound surrounding and punctuating the lyrics along with the words which populate the song.

The song begins simply with the strumming which will accompany the singing throughout, the car is already running and moving. It is almost like the rhythm was always already going, and will never stop going, at what point in the journey the song begins one cannot be sure. Similarly, the voice of the narrator comes out of nowhere to situate his tale of isolation amidst the blacktop and bleakness of the turnpike, the only illumination coming from the lights of industry and the set of bulbs he is steering.

After setting the scene, the first pair of verses define the conflicting nature of the aspirations and lifestyle that push the narrator onward. The first evidence is of his pseudo-vigilante nature comes as he relates that he is unremorsefully driving a stolen car, and that more crimes, which he has undoubtedly justified, may lie somewhere behind him. Shortly after this the narrator begins the chorus, the first of many pleas to the yet-unseen state trooper. Staying silent, he holds off for a time, nothing but the sound of the drive continues until the narrator begins again, further on down the road. The second verse, presents a side of the narrator which has given life to the inevitably approaching trooper. By the sound of the voice it seems he may even be a bit envious of the human connections, the wife and kids, which the trooper may have. The narrator is not only a bit jealous, the thoughts of family force him to confront his present reality, and he is reminded again of his solitary status and he is disturbed to the point of pleading again to the trooper.

After the drive has moved on some distance further, possibly hours down the road, the mind of the narrator, teetering on the edge of a demented cabin fever, turns for guidance to the vestige of society most available to his senses: the radio relay towers, monuments of modern communication. In the first line of the verse’s opening couplet the narrator admits his lack of reliance on his own judgment, and thus invites us to do the same. In the second line, he finishes the sentence by announcing that in his state-of-mind he must rely on the towers to get to his anonymous “baby.” Following this he turns again to the radio, this time to the waves and the radio shows that inhabit them. Here again the recurring theme of society denying the narrator that which he desires, deserves even, is played out as he heedlessly spins the dial looking for action, for a lively companion, not just the hollow talk of disembodied radio voices. At this point once again the narrator calls out to the state trooper, but as he finishes his plea his frustration overcomes him and he reacts with a sharp yelp of anger followed by a prolonged wail of blues-ridden anguish.

As he begins his final utterances the narrator pleads first to that which he is furthest from: humanity, a humanity which is as distant from him as a god. Finishing the final verse he mimics his namesake, confirming his outcast status, and calls out to his steed, directing him only to “deliver me from nowhere.” As the track concludes the narrator is overcome by emotion again, this time with even greater force his voice stabs the sky before settling into a forlorn, defiant, howl.

* * *

Used Cars

Because Springsteen openly described this album as his most personal (Marsh, 382) it seems reasonable to read this song at least in part autobiographically. Often during his monologues at concerts he would reference his family's run of bad luck with used cars as he was growing up. As he wrote this song, however, the success of The River would have put a lifelong end to any stress related to cars ever again for Springsteen. But in line with the mood that runs through the entire album he puts himself back into his childhood to observe what the effect of lower middle class conditions are on families, a needed lens in 1981 when the country was experiencing its largest unemployment numbers since the Great Depression.
The song opens with a subtly startling scene of isolation. The boy narrator is standing in a used car lot watching his father, mother, and sister drive out of the lot to test the vehicle. It is clearly not an issue of space as his little sister sits in the front seat and his mother sitsin the back "All alone". While his sister gets to sit shotgun and eat an ice cream cone, this boy is alone to internalize what this all means. Springsteen makes no secret of the fact that he often was isolated as a child, voluntarily and otherwise, and this little boy encapsulates just that insulated feeling. It looks as if he stands there as collateral, the most dispensible part of the family.
When they return to the lot the boy continues to hone in on what appear to be meaningless details like his mother playing with her wedding ring and the salesman's fixation with his father's hands. We can imagine the latter pair as being rugged and worn, the hands of a man who works an endless string of hard days. The salesman is not familiar with such hands, but he knows that they are the tools of an honest man, the easiest sort to swindle. The boy's tone begins to change when his father is told there is no deal available. In an ambiguous promise to himself he says if given the chance he "swears" he knows what he would do. What is clear is that he is unhappy with the situation his father is in and he wants to change it.
Lacking any effective means (physical or financial) the boy imagines the impending day when he wins the lottery. It is only because he is a child that he can actually expect to win this impossible game. He is not old enough yet to have to wonder if "everything that dies someday comes back". Death and defeat are far from his mind. All he knows is that when he wins he will have a new car and all will be made right. What he does not yet know is that he already has "debts no honest man can pay", debts that will only grow as he does, debts that no brand new car can make go away. It is in this boy's vain optimism that the song painfully drives home the refrain of the album, there is no escape from this world, not via crime, women, cars, or atonement.
When the full family drives up to the house in their "brand-new used car" the entire neighborhood comes to see. This public reaction shows the condition of the lives that surround the family. The purchase of a measly used car creates a comotion in the streets. The boy is not satisfied with this simpe world. Instead he wished his father would do exactly what the driver does at the end of the "State Trooper", the song that preceeds this one. As he expells his last prayer he goes shooting down the dark highway and lets out a Lizard King-like ecstatic yelp that echoes throughout the night. The boy's father is not nearly as free of reckless. Instead the family slowly pulls in to the driveway as the boy's mind silently screams his wish for defiance from what surrounds him.
The purchase of the used car changes nothing. His dad still works the same job and the boy still "walks the same dirty streets where [he] was born". The implication here is that, like his father, he will walk these very streets until he is no more. This realization takes him back to the lonliness he felt the day of the test drive as he can still hear his sister honking the horn with one hand as she holds her ice cream in the other. She is experiecing a taste of freedom he has yet to feel. If we can be allowed to use the rest of the album as a lens, it is safe to say he never will. Despite all the emptiness he sees around him the boy awaits the day his "number comes in" so that he can finally get the new car that will save him. Sadly we know on this album every road leads to the same place. Unlike Thunder Road that leads to "heaven waiting down the tracks" and a chance to "case the Promised Land", Michigan Avenue eventually leads to barren Badlands.

Open All Night: the Lone Ranger of Rockabilly

“Open All Night” by far the most up-beat number on all of Nebraska, seems to show Springsteen breaking the persona of the album and slipping back into the imagery and attitudes (read: hopeful and defiant) of the previous three or so albums. The song itself, which is an up-beat rockabilly jam played on the album’s lone electric guitar, is in many ways a parody of, or less-likely an homage to, the music of early rock’n’roll/rockabilly artists like Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis. While this comparison is justifiably made, the guitar intro smacks with the sound of Chuck Berry licks, the goal of this stylistic parody may not be as apparent. What does become apparent, especially if one studies the lyrics, is the illusion which this narrator is creating for himself, the illusion of having a destination with human contact somewhere down the road. Immediately one is forced to draw a comparison between this track and “State Trooper,” which has a similar setting, narrator, and sequence of events. Through this comparison one is able to see into the psyche of this narrator and how stranded he really is, despite his upbeat tone. Ultimately, as the song progresses and the rockabilly allusions begin to stack up, the song becomes a dark commentary on the illusory relationship people have with their dreams, and the way in which people refuse to look beyond themselves to see their reality.

This song, which quickly draws many parallels with the haunting “State Trooper”, starts with a lone narrator describing the catalogue of improvements and checks he has run on his car. This movement is an illusion which allows Springsteen to continue with his allusions (which started with the Berry-esque guitar intro), in this case ending the verse with “rock that joint” a reference to a song in which rock’n’roll has as it’s result an abundance of chaotic violence (“tear down the mailbox, rip up the floor, smash out the windows”), Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock the Joint.” The opening verse also shows the amount of time the narrator has on his hands to prepare for this trip, an amount of time which will seem to contradict him later in the song. In the following verse the narrator situates us once again on the New Jersey Turnpike, like his “State Trooper” comrade he is all alone out on the road, but unlike his counterpart he is nervous and unfamiliar with the isolation and bleakness of the turnpike, which thus becomes to him as foreign as the surface of the moon. Unlike his inevitably solo counterpart, this driver believes he has somewhere to be, that someone is waiting for him somewhere and that he had better call and reassure them of his arrival as soon as possible.

In the following verse, the third thus far without a chorus, Springsteen shifts gears, giving a bit of exposition about this drivers situation before slipping into a verse almost identical to the third verse of “State Trooper.” Beginning with “The boss don’t dig me…” this verse has a meta-narrative twist which begs the listener to question who the Springsteen they’re listening to really his, seeing as how “the Boss” put him on the night shift, where, like the narrator of this song, it would be nearly impossible to reach anyone. The fact that this driver is on an “all night run” to get back to another yet unnamed “baby” figure comes before Springsteen takes a direct quotation from “State Trooper.” These identical lyrics, which contain another Chuck Berry allusion which will become more important later, become most interesting when one reads them as the narrator of each song putting his faith in a string of relay towers rather than their own wavering psyche. Except, as the state trooper becomes a reality, hitting his spot light as this driver flies overhead, this song takes a turn from it’s counterpart, the narrator here can’t afford to be stopped and thus must drop a gear and push his faithful machine to the limit. Next, as the narrator hurls onward, his mind slips into a dream-like memory of how he and his baby, “Wanda,” met. In a song whose sound and feel is so contrary to the rest of the album, this verse goes over the top with such ridiculous, idyllic, and clichéd, images that it forces one to question the truth of it all. Instead, it seems more like this driver, in his demented, lonely, state, has created a memory which is more reminiscent of George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” or Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” than any New Jersey reality. The unreliable nature of this verse certainly forces one to question whether Wanda knows he is coming, and how long it has been since he has seen, or even met, her (seeing as how according to the first verse he had his car up blocks for some time).

The next verse brings us back to reality as we learn that the car is beginning to suffer the consequences of such a full-bore run, namely it’s eating oil faster than gas and the windshield is getting hazier than the narrator’s mind. In the second line of this verse Springsteen makes another Chuck Berry reference, quoting “Too Much Monkey Business,” a lighthearted song about the daily struggles between man and the machine of society. Next, Springsteen confirms the suspicious nature of the journey as the narrator explains that he still needs to find a phone and call his love, who may know he is supposed to return, but likely has no idea when. Before moving into the unsettling final verse the listener learns that despite driving all through the darkness, this driver still has a long way yet, three more hours on the lonely turnpike.

By far the darkest, the final verse begins with a pair of allusions, the first another reference to the Chuck Berry song “Wee Wee Hours,” which, interestingly enough is a bluesy number about a loner who sits in small room, pining and pondering over the fading memories of his one true love. The second allusion, “the red ball risin,” is more of a nod than anything else, to Jerry Lee Lewis and his perennial hit “Great Balls of Fire.” Following these references Springsteen slips back into the voice and lyric of “State Trooper,” casting a doubtful shadow across the end of the song. Similar to his lone counterpart, this narrator turns to the radio for relief only to be thwarted by talk once again. This time, though, it’s “lost souls” calling radio evangelists to have their hearts uplifted that clog the airwaves. Ironically, these people are in a state similar to that of the narrator, so isolated that instead of turning to other people, as in the church congregation, they turn to “long-distance salvation.” Finally, the verse concludes with this loner calling out to the leader of rock’n’roll society, to the deejay, hoping he will hear his final plea and play the rockin’ music that will keep him sane until he can escape his lonely prison. Immediately after this the narrator, echoing “State Trooper” yet again, begins vocally expounding his situation with a nonverbal string of syllables, sounds that are the proper accompaniment to a desperate rock beat pounded out on the steering wheel.

* * *

Ultimately, the song, which strikes a certain parallel to the title track of Born in the U.S.A., is easily misunderstood. With such a fun sound it is easy to mistake this for a song of hope on an album of isolation and meanness. Despite the sound, it is another song about being alone on the highway. An apt companion to “State Trooper,” the narrator of this song is inevitably bound to the road, always in between places he is never arriving of leaving, just moving again. Despite his best efforts and his hopeful dreaming, he is stuck in a failing car and most likely will never escape the disparaging eyes of the refineries.

Ironically, this song also parallels the careers of the legends it parodies, particularly in the way the reality of the situation is ignored in favor of the rock’n’roll dream. In the case of Chuck Berry, the fall from grace came early in his career. Arrested for hiring a fourteen year old girl, then firing her and turning her loose on the streets (she was brought in for prostitution), Berry fell from grace and served a four year sentence. Jerry Lee Lewis fell after a similar bad choice when he famously married his teenage second cousin, this combined with drug abuse and alcoholism has permanently tainted his legendary status. Bill Haley was even an admitted alcoholic. In their lives, as in the life of the narrator of “Open All Night,” the dream of living like it’s always Friday night has failed, and now they are stuck, caught between the glory of the rock’n’roll lifestyle and the reality of being a flawed character in a cutthroat world.

My Father's House

The third song on the second side of Nebraska is, like “Mansion on the Hill,” an architectural metaphor but in this case the setting is psychological rather than social or historical. After two songs on side two set in the narrative present, the narrator once again mines his own past, a memory of a dream, and makes a statement about his relationship with his father in the narrative present. In the contexts of both Bruce’s psychological and autobiographical development and his development with the use of place in his songs, this song represents two aspects of a major paradigm shift in Bruce’s thinking: his relationship with his father has matured from the trauma of “Adam Raised a Cain” and the separation of “Independence Day” to self-realization and acceptance; and, his use of landscape in his writing has matured from the metaphorical escape routes of earlier songs such as “Born to Run” and “Wreck on the Highway” to an inhabited space, a landscape shared with the listener, lived out in a sociohistorical and psychological context.

The song begins as a narrative of a dream, a dream that Bruce claimed (at the Christic Institute concert of 1990) haunted him for years, a archetypal story of being chased by the devil in a forest of pines to a house that, like the Mansion on the Hill, is “shining hard and bright”; however, in the dream the house is the site of refuge, where the narrator “fell shaking into his arms.” It is unclear whether the narrator goes into the house during his dream, but when he awakens, he realizes the refuge is unattainable. The “hard things that pulled us apart” are gone, and he tells the listener—a “sir” who may be the same person as the listener in Mansion on the Hill—a short anecdote to emphasize the lost opportunities for resolution with his father. In the last two stanzas, the dream becomes real as the narrator tells of visiting the house and realizing that not only is it behind a “chained door” and occupied by a woman strange to him, but that the guilt and remorse, the “sins” of his relationship with his father “lie unatoned” on the road, where the narrator can only look up to the house which calls him to forgiveness. In the end, the narrator is “cold and alone,” unable as an adult to expiate his adolescent actions, which remain and “stand like a beacon” in his psyche, and in his neighborhood, too. The guilt, anger, and pain that has filled the narrator’s life, expressed in the memories of phantom drives to look at mansions with his father, drives that Bruce has described in his introductory monologues (Marsh 371) and in the spaces of the house, which he has described over and over in his concert monologues in different, but always personal, contexts (302), are important elements of what Marsh has called his "father songs." In the end, one gets the feeling that the narrator of “My Father’s House” will drive his children by an unattainable place, recreating his childhood for the next generation.

Reason to Believe

Reason to Believe is the final song on Nebraska, the end piece to Bruce's dark, soul-searching journey and should give an indication of what he found at the end of the road. Perhaps this is why the interpretations of Reason to Believe are so starkly divided - critics and listeners are looking for one song to sum up the "meaning" behind an entire album. That is a lot to ask of any song, but Reason to Believe is an enigmatic powerhouse that lends itself to debate. Ultimately, the question is whether Reason to Believe is a pessimistic or an optimistic summation of the album.

The song features a very measured, symmetrical structure: four images an four repetitions of the chorus. The images are balanced as well, alternating between the death of the dog in the road, Mary Lou being abandoned by Johnny (Johnny 99?), the death of Kyle William and the Groom being abandoned by his Bride. Even the abandonments are meted out equally, one to a man, one to a woman.

The first image, that of a man poking a dead dog with a stick, is shockingly graphic, especially considering the laconic, conversational tone of Bruce's voice. The surprising nature of this image is effective. It strips away any romanticism or idealism behind the search for faith. A man poking at a corpse in a ditch is not a philosopher nor a poet nor a priest. He is one individual faced with and puzzled by inevitability of death. His response is to attempt to understand what is in front of him with his only tool at hand, a stick. Presented so plainly, mankind's search for meaning is almost laughably inept.

The third image, that of the life and death of Kyle William, is equally powerful, if not as immediately shocking. Bruce sums up Kyle's entire life in a mere four lines, so quickly that it is easy to miss "what passes in between the second line and the third - between life and death - is an entire lifetime, that the baby dunked into the water and the old man flung into the earth are the same person." (Marsh, p. 373). This image also works to strip away the noise of everyday life, all those quotidian details that seem so pressing. Birth, sin and death are the most important matters in life, the only ones we pray that someone will "tell us what does it mean".

The second and fourth images of Reason to Believe illustrate love offered and rejected. Mary Lou loved her man so much she would work for him every day. The Groom loved his gal so much he would marry her, commit himself to her for everyone to see. Offering love, offering yourself to another is perhaps one of the greatest acts of faith a person is capable of. Opening up to another person in this way requires faith that the person you love is not only decent enough to treat you fairly, but also has enough love and goodness in them to share it with you. When the offer of love is sincere and public, as are the offers of Mary Lou and The Groom, they render the offerer pitifully vulnerable. When these offers of love are rejected, there is no way to take them back or to erase them from the community's memory. The broken heart must stand.

Proponents of the pessimistic reading of Reason to Believe say that the unexplained death and rejected love in the four verses indicate that the chorus of the song is a dark joke.

Struck me kind a funny, seem kind a funny, sir,
to me
Still at the end of every hard-earned day people
find some reason to believe

In Two Hearts Dave Marsh says reads the chorus as staring down "all of Bruce's Rock n' Roll idealism and mocks it's certainty" (Marsh, p. 372). He argues that if the chorus is an affirmation, it is an affirmation of nothingness, since each of the song's images offer no explanations and no hope. The possibility of redemption - the idea and magic behind so many of Bruce's earlier songs - is symbolized here by a dead dog. Stripped of its romanticism the ideas of redemption and rebirth are ridiculous, bizarre and foolhardy. Faith in your fellow man is symbolized by the love offered by Mary Lou and The Groom, both of whom are burned for believing that this world and the people in it will treat them decently. They are wounded and publicly humiliated for believing that love is possible. In the pessimistic read of this song there is no reason to believe. For the lost souls of Nebraska "it's all over but the shrouding" (Marsh, p. 370).

The optimistic reading of Reason to Believe takes the chorus at its word and believes that it is an affirmation of mankind's relentless ability to find hope where there seems to be none. True, the four images in the song are dark and bleak, but they still embody faith. The man with the dog is still trying to understand death. He hasn't given up his search. The congregation at the graveyard is mourning the death of Kyle, but they are still asking for answers, praying and trying to figure out what is all means. Even the rejected lovers still believe that they will have love again. They haven't left the driveway or the riverside. They are keeping themselves open to the possibility that they can have their desires satisfied in this life. No one in this song has given up or accepted the nihilistic conclusion that life is pointless. The characters in this song still have clear dreams and desires.

These personal, improbable hopes are, in fact, what defines the characters in Reason to Believe. Of the seven characters mentioned in the song (man, dog, Mary Lou, Johnny,Kyle, congregation, groom, preacher, bride) Bruce gives only three of them proper names and gives none of them physical or social features like descriptions of their looks, their jobs, their cars or their homes. Four of the characters, - the man, the groom, the preacher and the bride - are almost archetypal in their simplicity. They could be anyone, even you at some point in your life. Springsteen's thrift with detail in this song points us to what is most important in it: that each character still possesses and is defined by their belief.

“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.