“Like a lot of great American writers – John Steinbeck, Mark Twain etc – I think he sees the same injustices that many great American writers also saw, and he wanted to lend his voice to that group.”
MIKE APPEL on Bruce Springsteen
“Much of Nebraska explores the subtle and ordinary ways that working-class lives are devalued.”
BRYAN K GARMAN
There was a second-hand bookshop in the town where I grew up, a veritable trove of literary riches discarded by unwitting owners or (far less credibly) donated by altruistic readers who wanted to enlighten others. It was here, in ‘The Book Nook’, that I unearthed copies of Bob Dylan’s Tarantula and Writings & Drawings (in excellent nick), Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans and Visions Of Cody, Kathy Acker’s Blood And Guts In High School and Stephen King’s The Stand. Yes, you read that correctly – Stephen King’s The Stand mentioned in the same sentence as Dylan, Kerouac and Acker.
You’re no doubt expecting a barbed aside, a snort of derision directed at an author whose prolific pulp-horror output generates the kind of sales figures that has so-called proper authors crawling around the cramped confines of their dusty garrets in apoplectic envy. But I’m not about to throw my lot in with the elitist mob who masquerade as custodians of what constitutes literature. In fact, quite the opposite. For Stephen King, as well as being a consummate storyteller, is as undisputed a master of the horror genre as Charles Dickens was of Victorian realism. And, like Dickens, he has turned more people on to books than the self-aggrandising esotericism of critical darlings such as Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie.
Of course, he doesn’t always get it right – impossible when you’re churning out fiction on such a prodigious scale. And King’s work doesn’t always bear up under the scrutiny of second reading, as I realised when nostalgia sent me back to The Stand a couple of years ago. Yet when I first devoured it over several autumn nights in the mid Eighties, the post-apocalyptic world engendered by King seemed to resound in a terrifying way with the recently purchased cassette copy of Nebraska that was always playing in the background. It wasn’t in the detail of the viral outbreak known as ‘Captain Tripps’ that wiped out 99.4% of the population; nor was it in King’s evocation of the breakdown and destruction of society and the subsequent battle between the forces of good and evil among the remaining survivors. Rather it was in how the two very separate creative conceptions vibrated with the solitary heartbeat of individual journeys; and it was in how a sense of fatalism stalked each of those journeys. These were the real badlands, this was the real darkness on the edge of town. King and Springsteen may have been engaged in artifice – imagined characters, imagined narratives – but it was artifice rooted in what Springsteen (when talking about country music) had referred to as “the human thing”, the vicissitudes of life writ large.
The Stand is a road novel just as Nebraska is a road album. But where King adheres to the mass market’s appetite for reassurance in the form of a definitive denouement (the end of the road brings the traveller to salvation or condemns them to damnation), in Nebraska the outcomes are not so straightforward.
The ambiguity in Springsteen’s writing makes perfect sense when you consider the influences he was absorbing at the time of Nebraska’s composition. Flannery O’Connor, for one. A Catholic from Savannah, Georgia, O’Connor produced two novels and 32 short stories during her short life (she died at the age of thirty nine of complications from lupus). Her style bore some of the hallmarks of southern gothic, a sub-genre of gothic specific to the American South that relies on supernatural, ironic or unusual events to guide the plot and to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the region. Yet it is plausible to posit that O’Connor’s fiction owed just as much to her faith in its frequent investigation of morality.
Whatever the source of her inspiration, what can certainly be said is that O’Connor, in the telling of her tales, was nothing if not vague. You, the reader, are left to reach your own conclusions. This obscurity too is a facet of the songs on Nebraska. Wendy Lesser, in an internet article entitled ‘Southern Discomfort: The origins of Flannery O’Connor’s unsettling fictional world’, could have had Springsteen (and Nebraska) in mind when she wrote: “You could read all of O’Connor’s work and conclude that she hated God with an amused and bitter hatred; you could, with somewhat less support, imagine that she loved God and all his creation; but you could not emerge from a thorough reading and conclude that she was indifferent to God.”
But if the make-believe world of O’Connor’s literature cast a spell on the Springsteen who realised Nebraska, so too did a story from the real world – a story every bit as grotesque as one of O’Connor’s own.
Charles Starkweather, known as Chuck or Charlie, was born on 24 November 1938 in Lincoln, Nebraska. At elementary school he was picked on because of his thick glasses and speech impediment. He deterred his tormenters with the threat of using a knife. Starkweather, whose copper-coloured hair and piercing green eyes gave him the appearance of James Dean, was a high-school dropout. His only interests were guns, guitars, hot-rods and girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. He got a job on a garbage truck only to be fired for laziness, and was then banned from his rented room until he paid the outstanding rent.
After robbing a Lincoln service station on 1 December, 1957, Starkweather abducted employee Robert Colvert, 21, took him to a secluded location and shot him in the head.
Caril Ann Fugate was born in 1943. At the age of fourteen she fell for Starkweather, five years her senior, despite the fact that her parents had forbidden him from seeing her.
On 21 January, 1958, Fugate returned home from school to her family’s rundown, one-storey house in Lincoln’s poor Belmont area. Starkweather had killed her stepfather, Marion Bartlett, 57, and her mother, Velda Bartlett, 36, and clubbed her two-and-a-half-year-old baby sister, Betty Jean, to death. He hid the bodies and the couple carried on living on the property for days. On two occasions, relatives called to find out why the Bartletts hadn’t been seen; Fugate sent them away, claiming everybody was sick with the flu.
Starkweather and Fugate had fled by the time detectives were brought in to investigate by Fugate’s grandmother. A search turned up Marion’s body wrapped in paper in the chicken house; Velda and Betty Jean were found in an outbuilding.
What the police didn’t know was that Starkweather and Fugate had, only hours earlier, driven to a Highway 77 service station to buy gas, a box of .410 shotgun shells and two boxes of .225, before heading to the rural farmlands of Bennet, 16 miles southeast of Lincoln, to hole up in a farmhouse belonging to 70 year-old August Meyer, a friend of Starkweather’s. En route to Bennet, their car broke down. When high school student Robert Jensen, seventeen, and his date, Carol King, 16, pulled over to help, Starkweather shot them in the head with a .22 rife and made an unsuccessful attempt to rape the girl before stuffing their bodies in an abandoned storm cellar. They then drove to Meyer’s house to procure more guns and ammunition, killing the old man with a .410-gauge shotgun.
Starkweather drove back to Lincoln. He knew his way around the city’s opulent south east side. After pulling into the garage of the large French provincial-style home of Capital Steel Company President C Lauer Ward, 47, he pushed Clara Ward, 46, and housekeeper Lillian Fend, 51, to the second floor, tied them to a bed, gagged and fatally stabbed them. When Lauer Ward returned from a conference that evening, accompanied by Nebraska Governor Victor Anderson, he was shot in the head and neck and knifed in the back. Starkweather and Fugate took his 1956 black Packard and made for Wyoming.
Lincoln was in the grip of terror. When Sheriff Merle Karnopp called for a posse, one hundred men volunteered, arming themselves with deer rifles, shotguns and pistols. The National Guard was called in to protect the National Bank of Commerce, district court recessed, parents kept their children indoors, even going so far as to remove them from school. In all, more than a thousand law enforcement officers and National Guardsmen were searching for Starkweather and Fugate.
They were already five hundred miles away, outside Douglas, Wyoming. Merle Collison, 37, a travelling shoe salesman from Montana, pulled his brand new Buick off Highway 87 to grab some sleep. Fugate climbed into the back seat, while Starkweather eased open the driver’s door and shot Collison nine times in the head.
Joe Sprinkle, 40, a geologist, stopped his car when he spotted Collison’s Buick, believing someone might need his help. He got more than he bargained for, when Starkweather put a rifle to his head. Sprinkle managed to escape just as Deputy Sheriff William Romer was approaching the scene. Fugate ran to the deputy, screaming, as Starkweather fired up Sprinkle’s Packard and sped off, crashing through a roadblock at more than one hundred miles per hour until a police bullet shattered his windscreen and brought his killing spree to an end.
Starkweather and Fugate were locked up in Douglas, neither showing much remorse for what they had done. Starkweather smiled for the media, admitted to the murders and agreed to extradition. Initially he said he had kept Fugate captive, but when she turned against him Starkweather fingered her as an accomplice.
He pleaded guilty at his trial, which began on 26 March 1958. Psychiatrists attributed the murders to paranoia; Starkweather’s friends asserted it was because everyone had opposed his plans to marry Fugate; his father maintained he was a slow boy growing up too fast. On 23 May, Starkweather was found guilty.
On 27 October 1958, Fugate’s trial commenced. She claimed Starkweather had held her hostage and that she had feared for her life. Starkweather, brought to court from his death cell, testified that she had been a willing participant in the crimes and could have fled when he left her with loaded guns. On 21 November, the five women and seven men on the jury handed down a life sentence for Fugate. She was taken to the Nebraska Correctional Centre for Women in York.
Starkweather went to the electric chair on 5 June, 1959, the last person to be electrocuted in Lincoln. Fugate, after serving eighteen years of her sentence, was released on 20 June, 1976, settling down in Clinton County, Michigan. She never married, nor did she ever discuss the case publicly.
And here’s a footnote worth mentioning, apropos of the earlier anecdote about Stephen King in this chapter. King, as a boy, kept a scrapbook on Starkweather. “It was never like, ‘Yeah, go Charlie, kill some more!’ It was more like, ‘Charlie, if I ever see anyone like you, I’ll be able to get the hell away’,” he told The Guardian’s Tim Adams in 2000. “And I do think that the very first time I saw a picture of him, I knew I was looking at the future. His eyes were a double zero. There was just nothing there. He was like an outsider of what America might become.”
Springsteen’s fascination with Starkweather and Fugate was further stoked by Badlands, director Terrence Malick’s film dramatisation of their eight-day killing spree. Martin Sheen, like a beautiful hybrid of Elvis and James Dean, the quintessence of Fifties cool in white tee-shirt and denims, plays Kit Carruthers and Sissy Spacek, a South Dakota miss encumbered by ennui, his girlfriend Holly Sargis. Malick’s laconic script refuses to judge the actions of Carruthers/Starkweather and Sargis/Fugate. These are people we should abhor because of the crimes they commit, especially Carruthers/Starkweather; yet, if anything, we find ourselves won over by the amiable character as portrayed by Sheen as even his eventual captors are in the movie.
As Malick himself explained shortly after Badlands’ theatrical release in 1975: “Kit doesn’t see himself as anything sad or pitiable, but as a subject of incredible interest, to himself and to future generations. Like Holly, like a child, he can only really believe what’s going on inside him. Death, other people’s feelings, the consequences of his actions – they’re all sort of abstract for him.
“He thinks of himself as a successor to James Dean, a rebel without a cause, when in reality he’s more like an Eisenhower conservative. ‘Consider the minority opinion,’ he says to the rich man’s tape recorder, ‘but try to get along with the majority opinion once it’s accepted.’ He doesn’t really believe any of this, but he envies the people who do, who can. He wants to be like them, like the rich man he locks in the closet, the only man he doesn’t kill, the only man he sympathises with and the one least in need of sympathy. It’s not infrequently the people at the bottom who most vigorously defend the very rules that put and keep them there.
“And there’s something about growing up in the Midwest. There’s no check on you. People imagine it’s the kind of place where your behaviour is under constant observation, where you really have to toe the line. They got that idea from Sinclair Lewis (American Nobel Prize-winning novelist and playwright). But people can really get ignored there and fall into bad soil. Kit did, and he grew up like a big poisonous weed.”
Malick’s Badlands led Springsteen to Ninette Beaver’s unauthorised biography of Fugate, Caril, and a somewhat amusing phone call to the author herself. Beaver, then an assignment editor for KMTV news in Omaha, told Rolling Stone: “His name sort of rang a bell. First I asked him what he did. And he said, ‘I’m a musician’. I just said, ‘Honest to God, I know I should know who you are, but I’m just drawing a blank’. And he was just a doll about it – really cute.” They spoke for around thirty minutes, mainly about Fugate, and Springsteen came away with the guts of the Nebraska title track.
If the musical sensibility that shaped The River’s more reflective material was down to Springsteen’s discovery of country music, Nebraska owed a considerable debt to archival American folk music. As Dave Marsh rightly points out in Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen In The Eighties, Nebraska had “the quality of stillness associated with the great Library of Congress folk recordings of the Thirties and Forties, by performers actually described by critic Paul Nelson as ‘traditional (and non-professional) singers and musicians you’ve probably never heard of: poor folks, mostly from the rural south, just sitting at home in front of that inexpensive tape or disc machine and telling their stories, sometimes artfully and sometimes artlessly, undoubtedly amazed that anyone from the urban world would place any value on what they were saying or how they were saying it…a considerable piece of Americana’.”
You can also hear, on Nebraska, the revenants of Harry Smith’s multi-volume Anthology Of American Folk Music, a collection that became indispensable to the callow youth, Bob Dylan, in the fertile days of the Sixties folk movement.
The bohemian Smith was an artist, filmmaker, musicologist, anthropologist, linguist, translator and occultist, a figurehead of the mid-20th Century American avant-garde. His anthology was issued by Moses Asch’s Folkways label in 1952. It comprised 84 recordings made between 1927 (the year electronic recording enabled accurate reproduction) and 1932, the period between the realisation by major record companies of distinct regional markets and the Great Depression’s stifling of folk-music sales.
According to Eric Alterman, the project was “an attempt by two left-wing bohemians to tell the story of another America, one that lived outside the mainstream of history and national politics. Both Asch and Smith were obsessed with the possibilities of political and cultural syncretism that folk music seemed to offer.”
And just as Dylan drew on Smith’s anthology for ‘Maggie’s Farm’, a homage to the Bently Boys’ ‘Down On Penny’s Farm’, so did Springsteen plunder it for ‘Johnny 99’ on Nebraska. Springsteen’s song is a rejoinder to ‘Ninety-Nine-Year Blues’ by Julius Daniels. The latter, recorded in 1927, concerns a young black man arrested while visiting a new town under “the poor boy law”. The judge sentences him to ninety nine years in “Joe Brown’s coal mine”, an injustice which provokes in the boy a desire to “kill everybody” in town.
But for all the artistic forces that cohered to create Nebraska, it was also an album that responded to the social and economic climate that existed in Ronald Reagan’s America, thus fulfilling the American folk music mandate established by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in the Thirties. The country was, after all, experiencing its greatest economic decline since the Great Depression, with high inflation, double-digit unemployment (the combination of these two factors led to stagflation), hundreds of thousands of home repossessions, fractured families and crumbling communities.
It was a recession of two parts. The first, from January to July 1980, came on the back of an oil crisis, while the second occurred between July 1981 and November 1982.
Gross national product fell by 2.5% and almost one third of America’s industrial plants lay idle. Major firms like General Electric and International Harvester laid off workers. Farmers were also hit hard, with numbers declining as production became concentrated in the hands of fewer. During the Seventies, American farmers had helped to prevent India, China and even the Soviet Union from suffering food shortages, and had borrowed heavily to buy land and increase output. Oil prices raised farm costs and a global economic slump in 1980 reduced the demand for farm products.
Banks, too, were affected by the downturn. Deregulation introduced in 1980 had phased out restrictions on their financial practices and broadened their lending powers. The newly liberated banks subsequently rushed into real estate and speculative lending, as well as other ventures, just as the economy began to break down. By the middle of 1982, there was a steady rise in banks that were failing.
Reagan’s popularity rating plummeted to 35%, close to Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter at their most unpopular. Many voters thought him insensitive to the needs of the average citizen. This perception was hardly improved when Reagan, in the midst of the crisis, quite incredibly complained that he was tired of hearing about it every time someone lost his job “in South Succotash”.
“The chief idea behind Reaganomics was that the wealthy and the corporations were taxed much too heavily,” says Sean Wilentz, Princeton University historian and author of The Age Of Reagan. “Also, that cutting taxes and tax rates on the rich would, at once, lead to spectacular investment and economic growth and narrow the federal deficit by increasing wealth that would make up for the loss in federal revenues. Finally, the benefits of all of this would trickle down to ordinary Americans. It didn’t exactly work out that way, as inequality worsened.”
In the long term, Reagan’s presidency radically revamped the structure of America’s tax system and, according to Wilentz, “remade the federal judiciary, turning it in a dramatically more conservative direction. While falling well short of the goal of some of its supporters, namely to repeal the New Deal (the series of economic reforms passed by Congress during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term in response to the Great Depression, the Reagan era brought about fundamental shifts not just in institutions but in the broad view of how the country ought to be run. Those presumptions are far to the right today from what they were in 1980.”
Springsteen, despite his wealth, was plugged into the suffering of ordinary Americans and the gradual demise of the American way of life under Reagan.
“The record was basically about people being isolated from their jobs, from their friends, from their families, their fathers, their mothers – just not feeling connected to anything that’s going on,” he said. “And when that happens, there’s just a whole breakdown. 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.”