ALTERED STATE
Forty years ago, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN released Nebraska, a lo-fi fever dream populated by troubled cops and serial killers, the lost and the lonely. The songs were a new kind of writing, with a depth that rendered his credibility “forever bulletproof”. But at the time, even Springsteen asked himself if, by releasing it, he was throwing everything away. “I got to wondering, What the hell am I doing?”
THE CASSETTE FIT INTO THE FRONT POCKET of Bruce Springsteen’s denim jacket, which is where he kept it for months – without a case – in early 1982: more than a dozen new songs in stark, solo demos, some in multiple versions and mixes, recorded that winter on a portable 4-track machine in his New Jersey home. But the tape weighed a ton in the singer’s head – part talisman, part conscience – as he started working with the E Street Band on a new album, the intended follow-up to Springsteen’s two-disc epic, 1980’s The River.
For three weeks in late April and May at the Power Station in New York City, the music came like a freight train. Hot and tight after 138 shows in 1980 and ’81, then February ’82 sessions for an album by R&B legend Gary U.S. Bonds, Springsteen and the E Street Band caught early, master takes – straight from the floor – of songs from the cassette, including the foreboding grind of Downbound Train and Child Bride, a set of lyrics rewired into the hardluck rockabilly jolt Working On The Highway.
“We had a particular way of working – which was everything was live,” recalled Chuck Plotkin, a mixing engineer on 1978’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River who was back at the console, co-producing this time with Springsteen, his manager Jon Landau and E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt. “It was a rock band, and the guys could play,” Plotkin went on. “There was a certain vitality that you got from not doing 2,700 takes of things” – a refreshing change from the leader’s notorious perfectionism in the studio.
One song came to unexpected life at the Power Station when Springsteen called for a pass at an idea that had evolved over several demos, in different tempos and vocal approaches, from a blues simply called Vietnam into a scathing indictment of patriotic hypocrisy. Springsteen called it Born In The USA.
“To me, it was a dead song,” Landau later confessed to Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh,
“one of the lesser songs” on the cassette – until the singer came up with the titanic entrance: a synthesizer riff played by pianist Roy Bittan and detonated like an arena-rock bomb by drummer Max Weinberg. Everything else came together in the second take.
But then Springsteen hit a brick wall: the eerie, insular force of the tape in his pocket. “There wasn’t a single song on there that we didn’t record with the band,” Plotkin noted. But many resisted the full-group brawn: the recurring violence on devastated landscapes in Atlantic City, Johnny 99 and Highway Patrolman; the bitter cycles of aspiration and disappointment in Mansion On The Hill and Reason To Believe.
“We were squashing all of the dark, strange particularity,” Plotkin said – skeletal hooks propelled by distant, solitary guitars; the low, wounded range of Springsteen’s mantra-like singing inside ocean-fog reverb.
“I realised I’d succeeded in doing nothing but damaging what I’d created,” Springsteen said of the Power Station treatments in his 2016 memoir, Born To Run. “We got it to sound cleaner, more hifi, but not nearly as atmospheric, as authentic.
“All popular artists get caught between making records and making music,” he continued. “If you’re lucky, sometimes it’s the same thing” – but not this time. “Satisfied that I’d explored the music’s possibilities and every blind alley, I pulled out the original cassette I’d been carrying around in my jeans pocket and said, ‘This is it.’”
Five months later, on September 30, 1982, Springsteen issued 10 songs from that tape – unchanged, with the murk intact after much trial and error in the mastering – as his sixth album, naming it after the desolate setting and harrowing chill of the opening ballad: Nebraska.
FORTY YEARS ON, NEBRASKA IS ONE OF ROCK’S GREATest accidental triumphs, one of the most important albums Springsteen has ever released – he had just turned 33 – yet originally made with no thought of it being a record at all. It is a masterpiece of uneasy listening: raw drafts in field-recording turbulence of a terse, visceral turn in Springsteen’s songwriting, steeped in blood, sorrow and the blunt, confessional vernacular of the jailhouse and unemployment line. “Ten innocent people” die in the first verse of Nebraska alone, Springsteen’s imagined confession of the real-life teenage serial murderer Charles Starkweather; harmonica breaks rise over the song’s blasted plains and badlands like eulogies in smoke.
“I had no conscious political agenda or social themes,” Springsteen claimed in his autobiography. “I was after a feeling, a tone that felt like the world I’d known and still carried inside me.” Here are the working-class strivers, dropouts from that race and dreamers on the fringe that filled the boardwalk nights and endlesshighway rides of Springsteen’s first three albums, the crescendo of escape and ecstasy that peaked on 1975’s Born To Run. But there is a lot less hope in these cycles of crime and reckoning, of ordinary folk pressed to desperate measures: the spectral fatalism at Sunrockabilly speed in Johnny 99 and State Trooper; the paychecks that never go far enough in the haunted countr y of Mansion On The Hill and simmering anger of Used Cars; the slim chance at redemption in the ghostly sweetness of Atlantic City, undercut in the last verse by the tug of a fast, tainted buck.
“I was only making ‘demos’,” Springsteen reiterated in Born To Run. And the stadium-scale last-chance dance of 1984’s Born In The
USA is clearly shaking in these bones – “The characters and the stories, the style of writing… except it’s just in the rock-band setting,” as he told Rolling Stone at the time – while Nebraska was waiting for its second chance on E Street. Two years after its release, Springsteen played all but two songs from the album in the first week of his Born In The USA tour. Of those, Atlantic City, Johnny 99 and Mansion On The Hill, all of which failed the Power Station test, were still coming around in 2016 and 2017 set lists.
But Nebraska was a compelling, coherent mission in its own right, long before Springsteen decided it was an album: the artist documenting a profound change in his lyric voice and rock’n’roll classicism with nothing but the band in his head. “Never before has a major recording artist made himself so vulnerable or open,” Joel Selvin wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, reviewing Nebraska in October, 1982. “Only somebody who is as trusted, known and loved as Springsteen could get away with dashing off a few, quick sketches, throwing them in frames and mounting them on the gallery walls.”
“The Nebraska demos turned the idea of urban folk music on its head,” Marsh wrote in 1987’s Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen In The 1980s. “Rather than appropriating the folk songs themselves, Springsteen worked with his own characteristic melodic ideas and lyrics that were utterly contemporary.”
The effect was improbably commercial: Nebraska went to Number 3 in both the US and the UK, ultimately selling over a million copies in America. “An artist could never get closer to his audience than this,” Steve Van Zandt told Marsh in Glory Days. “Not because it was done with an acoustic guitar, but because he was literally singing for himself.”
The guitarist went even further in his own memoir, 2021’s Unrequited Infatuations, declaring Nebraska “among the most uncompromising and uncommercial recordings any major artist has ever released.” After that album, he said, Springsteen’s “credibility” was “forever bulletproof ”.
ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1981, SPRINGSTEEN AND THE E Street Band finished their year-long tour for The River with a 28-song marathon at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was Springsteen’s last concert with his group for three years. Nebraska was already underway. Springsteen wrote Mansion On The Hill – his first song in that body of shadows and troubles – on the road.
In Hank Williams’s ballad of the same name, a Top 20 hit in March 1949, the singer’s longing is for the woman in that house, beyond his reach and station. The conflicted yearning in Springsteen’s song came from his own youth. “My father was always transfixed by money,” he said, introducing the song on the opening night of the Born In The USA tour in St Paul, Minnesota. “He used to drive out of town and look at this big white house. It became a kind of touchstone for me. Now, when I dream, sometimes I’m on the outside looking in – and sometimes I’m the man on the inside.”
Springsteen tried multiple takes of Mansion On The Hill with the E Street Band, over three days at the Power Station. He only needed one – forlorn harmonica against tip-toe acoustic picking; a surprisingly clear vocal in watery ripples of reverb – to get it right, at home, on that cassette.
At the time, Springsteen was renting a ranch house in Colts Neck, New Jersey – the very area where he would later settle down and raise a family with his second wife, singer Patti Scialfa. “I didn’t go out much,” he admitted to Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder in a 1984 cover story, “and for some reason, I started to write. I wrote
Nebraska, all those songs, in a couple of months.” Nebraska the song arrived after Springsteen saw Badlands – Terrence Malick’s 1973 film based on Starkweather’s 1957-58 killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming – and read a biography of the latter’s girlfriend-accomplice Caril Fugate. “You can get to a point where nihilism, if that’s the right word, is overwhelming,” Springsteen said, explaining the connection, “and the basic laws that
“I THOUGHT IT WAS ONE OF MY ALBUMS THAT I HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT. BUT IT WAS BRUCE!” SUICIDE’S ALAN VEGA
society has set up – either religious or social laws – become meaningless. Things just get really dark.” As he sang at the song’s end, channelling Starkweather, “They wanted to know why I did what I didLWell sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”
“I was interested in writing kind of smaller, writing with just detail,” Springsteen went on in that interview, citing the taut, sardonic fiction of the Southern writer Flannery O’Connor. He had also gone deeper into, as he wrote in Born To Run, the “toughness, wit and common wisdom” of Woody Guthrie after reading Joe Klein’s 1980 biography of the folk icon. Then there was Suicide – the New York electro-punk duo, whose 10-minute murder ballad hurricane Frankie Teardrop on 1977’s Suicide was a vivid, if unexpected, influence on Nebraska’s claustrophobic tensions and chugging low-end drone. Suicide’s late singer Alan Vega, who met Springsteen in 1980 at the Power Station where they were both recording, remembered hearing State Trooper – with its whoopingvocal flourishes, one of Vega’s signatures – after Nebraska came out: “I thought it was one of my albums that I had forgotten about. But it was Bruce!”
ACCORDING TO A PERSISTENT LEGEND, SPRINGSTEEN taped everything on the Nebraska cassette in a single day, January 3, 1982, including versions of associated orphans (Losin’ Kind) and subsequent B-sides (Pink Cadillac). Plotkin said he heard at least four stabs at Born In The USA. Recording certainly took longer, but the urgency was real – Springsteen getting the songs down in bare-minimum arrangements spiked with dramatic quirks (the distant hurrahs in Atlantic City, like a country preacher yelling down a subway tunnelX the yodelling kickoff of Johnny 99F on a Teac Tascam Series 144 4-track recorder. His then-guitar tech, Mike Batlan, assisted.
In a 2017 inter view, Springsteen’s longtime engineer Toby Scott
– who worked for the singer for nearly 40 years and was instrumental in getting the Nebraska cassette through its tortuous mastering phase – ran down the album’s genesis, pointing out the inexperience and dodgy gear that contributed to the singular fidelity. The Tascam machine was relatively new on the professional-audio market, and Batlan “didn’t have much of a chance to get familiar” with it, Scott said. “But Bruce was eager to get going,” resulting in “a bit of distortion” on some songs.
Springsteen mixed the 4-track recordings on a Panasonic boom box through “an old Gibson Echoplex” unit, Scott said, “with an endless tape loop” for that ’50s-rockabilly reverb. The Echoplex died soon after. And the ghetto blaster had previously survived a drowning after Springsteen took it on a canoe ride and it fell overboard. Yet, Scott said, “Here was the tape he was holding up in the studio and saying, ‘There’s just something about the atmosphere on this tape. Can’t we just master off this?’” Nebraska went through four different mastering rooms in New York before Springsteen found satisfaction at the Atlantic Records studio on Broadway.
He also added one more song along the way, recorded spare and solo like the rest of the Nebraska tape but five months later, in May, 1982. My Father’s House was a slender waltz in simple, staccato picking, Springsteen singing in a raspy baritone like he was shaking himself out of a bad dream – which, in effect, he was: a vision of himself as a child finding his family’s old house empty and dilapidated, the troubled relationship with his father past any repair. There was truth in it too: Springsteen’s frequent drives through his home town, Freehold, New Jersey, “past the old houses I used to live in,” he recalled, introducing the song on-stage in 1990.
“I eventually got to wondering, What the hell am I doing?” Springsteen continued, describing a visit to a psychiatrist who said, “Something bad happened and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right,” adding: “You can’t.”
But Springsteen was still going back decades later – performing My Father’s House every night, for 236 shows, in Springsteen On Broadway. It was the only Nebraska song in the show.
“IHAD THESE TWO EXTREMELY DIFFERENT RECORDing experiences going,” Springsteen told MOJO in 1999, revealing how at one point in his embarrassment of riches, he thought of releasing Nebraska and Born In The USA together as a double album – then thought better of it.
“The tonality of the music was just too different, too oppositional,” he said, expanding on that decision in his memoir. Nebraska “had been so funkily recorded” that Springsteen considered putting it out in its original format – cassette – until Plotkin found the “old mastering lathe” at Atlantic. And there was no tour for Nebraska, the first time the singer neglected to go out behind a new album. Instead, he went back to writing and wrestling with Born In The
USA, going through 80-100 songs Edepending on the sourceF before hitting the final sequence. In 1999, Springsteen finally released one of his demo versions of that title track, including it on the rarities box set, Tracks. The rhythm was a bluesy swing, the vocal more restrained than what was to come – until an electric guitar burst in, Springsteen howling behind it like he was already hearing the noise around the corner.
“I had a lot of sorting out to do,” Springsteen said, summing up that time to MOJO. “When you get older, the price for not sorting through the issues that make up your emotional life rises.” And “I was at a place where I could start to really feel that price,” he added. “There are things that make sense of life for people: their friends, the work they do, your community, your relationship with your partner. What if you lose those things, then what are you left with?”
There was always the redemption in music. “Radio’s jammed up with gospel stations/Lost souls callin’ long distance salvation,” Springsteen sang in Nebraska’s one straight-up rock’n’roll party, Open All Night, about a guy stuck on the late shift, burning rubber through “New Jersey in the mornin’ like a lunar landscape” to get home to his Wanda. “Hey Mr Deejay, woncha hear my last prayer/ Hey ho rock’n’roll, deliver me from nowhere.”
For Springsteen, that’s exactly what happened next.
“I WAS AFTER A FEELING, A TONE THAT FELT LIKE THE WORLD I’D KNOWN AND STILL CARRIED INSIDE ME.” BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN