The big chill
The inside story of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 masterpiece Nebraska. By Keith Cameron.
Deliver Me From Nowhere
★★★★ Warren Zanes
PENGUIN/RANDOM HOUSE. £23
ACCORDING TO himself, Bruce Springsteen is “a conceptual optimist yet a personal pessimist”. The duality has defined his entire career, and more often than not the light has prevailed. Only a supreme conceptual optimist could turn a song about depression into a glitter ball-friendly hit single. Yet there would have been no Dancing In The Dark without the preceding Nebraska, the one record where Bruce Springsteen admitted no light whatsoever.
“I wanted to know where Nebraska came from, [and] what it led to,” declares author Warren Zanes. In BruceWorld, Nebraska is both Holy Grail and Death Star, still resolutely elusive even after 40 years, an album recorded alone in a bedroom onto a cassette, its skeletal, otherworldly songs thwarting subsequent attempts with the E Street Band to be whipped into a more digestibly Springsteenian form. There was no tour, no inter views, no explanation why America’s ascendant rock’n’roll star was following up his first Number 1, The River, with a bleak album about murder and isolation. It’s also the album Springsteen regards as possibly his best. So as the key to understanding the artist and the man, Nebraska requires a biography to match – and Deliver Me From Nowhere truly delivers.
In January 1985, the teenage Warren Zanes was guitarist with Boston bar-busters The Del Fuegos when Br uce Springsteen walked into their dressing room at a North Carolina club, declared himself a fan, then joined them on-stage. Zanes duly brings a musicianly rigour to his dissection of Nebraska, poring over the cultural and historical contexts which influenced Springsteen: the music of Hank Williams and Suicide, the novels of Flannery O’Connor, and the story of ’50s America’s first celebrity serial killers, as portrayed in Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands and voiced by Springsteen in Nebraska’s title track. He also emphasises the importance of its accidental genesis, the fact that Springsteen pressed ‘record’ on his new TEAC 144 4-track with no intention that these demos would be his next album, rather than sketches for what became Born In The
USA. As the music industry rushed to greet the digital dawn, says Zanes, Springsteen made “a cave painting in the age of photography”.
The author draws on new inter views with key associates, but securing the participation of Springsteen himself greatly broadens the book’s emotional scope. Until his 2016 memoir,
“By putting out Nebraska first, Bruce Springsteen gave himself artistic immortality.”
Springsteen had barely discussed the personal demons which inspired
Nebraska and led to a subsequent breakdown. Zanes takes us with him into Springsteen’s New Jersey home, just a few miles from the house where
Nebraska was made and not much further from his childhood home in Freehold, host to the trauma that seeded Nebraska’s desperate core. “It destroyed me and it made me,” Springsteen says. In one exchange, Zanes gamely compares the conjoined Nebraska/Born In The USA
diptych to the heroic trials of Homer’s Odyssey, with Springsteen hilariously deadpan in response: “Go on”… “Incredible”.
Springsteen’s manager
Jon Landau characterises
Nebraska as the “art movie” to BITUSA’s “Star Wars”. By going with Nebraska first, Bruce Springsteen gave himself artistic immortality. Whatever else he did, or is yet to do, he can always play the ultimate getout-of-jail card: he’s the guy who made Nebraska. “Hundred years from now, what’s gonna play well?” Springsteen asks Warren Zanes, before answering his own rhetorical question. “That record will play pretty well.”