“I felt that it was my best writing. I felt that I was getting better as a writer. I was learning things. I was certainly taking a hard look at everything around me.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
“There was no problem with nobody playing on Nebraska. It was my idea to put it out like that. He played me the four-track home demos and I said to him, ‘This is going to sound odd, but it should be released as it is – the fact you didn’t intend to release it makes it the most intimate record you’ll ever do.
This is an absolutely legitimate piece of art’.”
STEVEVAN ZANDT
It began on a rocking chair in his bedroom sometime after new year 1982. Bruce Springsteen, having completed The River tour with the E Street Band the previous October, was trying out a different approach, working alone on a cycle of songs, with the intention of evolving them sufficiently before going into the studio to record the next album.
“I decided that what always took me so long in the studio was the writing,” he told Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder. “I would get in there and I just wouldn’t have the material written, or it wasn’t written well enough, and so I’d record for a month, get a couple of things, go home, write some more, record for another month – it wasn’t very efficient.”
Springsteen asked his guitar tech, Mike Batlan, to go out and buy him a tape recorder. What Batlan came back with to Colts Neck, New Jersey, was a Tascam Portastudio 144. Tascam is the professional audio division of the Japan-based TEAC Corporation, a world leader in recording technology. The 144 model made its debut in 1979. Based on a standard compact audiocassette tape, it meant musicians could affordably record several instrumental and vocal parts on different tracks of the builtin four-track recorder and later blend the parts together while transferring them to another standard two-channel stereo tape deck to form a stereo recording. Usually, such machines are used to record demos.
Springsteen and Batlan rigged up the 144, along with a pair of Shure SM57 microphones and an old beat-up Echoplex (a tape-delay effect) for mixing.
“I got this little cassette recorder, plugged it in, turned it on, and the first song I did was ‘Nebraska’,” Springsteen recalled. “I just kinda sat there; you can hear the chair creaking on ‘Highway Patrolman’ in particular. I recorded them in a couple of days. Some songs I only did once, like ‘Highway Patrolman’. The other songs I did maybe two times, three times at most.”
And that is how the spooky underworld of Nebraska came to be. It’s improbable that Springsteen could have heard those recordings as anything other than rough cuts, templates for the band to develop later. The idea of following a blockbuster like The River with a bunch of what were effectively home-made demos would have been seen as pure folly on Springsteen’s part, especially in the context of the hi-tech Eighties. But then wasn’t that what his detractors said of John Hammond’s decision to sign Bob Dylan to Columbia? One man’s fool is another man’s visionary.
The songs themselves, according to Springsteen, were connected to his childhood more than anything else he’d written. The tone of the music took him back to the time when the family lived with his grandparents. “I went back and recalled what that time felt like, particularly my grandmother’s house,” he wrote in Songs. “There was something about the walls, the lack of decoration, the almost painful plainness.
The house was heated by a single kerosene stove in the living room. One of Springsteen’s earliest childhood memories was the smell of kerosene, his grandfather filling the spout in the rear of the stove. The cooking was done on a coal stove in the kitchen. As a child, Springsteen would shoot his water gun at its hot iron surface and watch the steam rise.
The centrepiece of the living room was a photo of his father’s older sister, who had died at the age of five in a bicycle accident around the corner by the gas station. Her ethereal presence from this portrait “gave the room a feeling of being lost in time”.
The sound Springsteen heard in his head, the sound he nailed on that Tascam 144, was deep and dark as a well, deep in the way that John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson sounded deep; the kind of deep where you feel what the character being channelled by the singer is feeling. The sound of another country, at a remove from the all-singing, all-dancing, high-kicking, big-smiling Walt Disney version starring a retired Hollywood actor as the President, and his retired Hollywood actress wife as First Lady.
And the words…the words cobbled together lives from the shadows, lives that pumped with a heartbeat but lives that were barely living.
Bryan K Garman hears the Carter Family, bluesman Julius Daniels, references to classic country, while “Woody is all over the place. The old blues artists are travelling around in the background. Since the folk tradition began as an oral tradition, it is difficult to tell where its influence begins and ends. But in terms of recorded music, it goes back to the early race and hillbilly records of the Twenties.
“Springsteen’s work is influenced by folk, blues, country, soul, gospel, rock’n’roll. His work is a conglomeration of a variety of traditions. I would resist, a la Dylan, the temptation to draw hard boundaries between folk music and other genres. Nebraska is influenced by that tradition – it is deeply linked to it. But as a work of art, it stands on its own.”
First to hear the Nebraska demos was Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau. What he heard, in this order, was ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, ‘Starkweather (Nebraska)’, ‘Atlantic City’, ‘Mansion On The Hill’, ‘Born In The USA’, ‘Johnny 99’, ‘Downbound Train’, ‘Losin’ Kind’, ‘State Trooper’, ‘Used Cars’, ‘Wanda (Open All Night)’, ‘Child Bride’, ‘Pink Cadillac’, ‘Highway Patrolman’ and ‘Reason To Believe’. Nine of these songs wound up on Nebraska just as they were mixed at Colt’s Neck. ‘Downbound Train’, ‘Born In The USA’ and ‘’Child Bride’ (which became ‘Working On The Highway’ after an extensive rewrite) were earmarked for Born In The USA.
While Landau found the material moving, “these songs were so dark they concerned me on a friendship level”. Springsteen insisted he had the bones of his next album. Landau was less certain. Things were postponed as Springsteen put his shoulder to the wheel of Gary US Bonds’ second album, On The Line, on which he wrote seven of the eleven tracks.
In May, Chuck Plotkin, part of the production team on Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River, arrived in New York to work on Springsteen’s new album. What he heard on the tape was “frontier material”. The singer had found a new voice, the songwriter had “fetched something that was at the time mysterious to him”.
What engineer Toby Scott, in an interview with Daniel Keller on the Tascam website in 2007, remembered about the demos were Mike Batlan’s technical shortcomings in recording them. “Mike was a guitar roadie…and he didn’t have much of a chance to get familiar with the gear before Bruce wanted to record. He got some levels and tried to make sure the meters didn’t go into the red too much, and he may have listened briefly with the headphones, but Bruce was eager to get going so I don’t think he got too much beyond the basics. In fact, on some of the first songs they recorded, you can hear a bit of distortion where Mike is still getting his levels.”
At the Power Station, Springsteen and the E Street Band spent two weeks trying to mould the Nebraska songs into shape as a unit. They tried ‘Atlantic City’, the song that most seemed to lend itself to a band arrangement. It didn’t happen. They tried ‘Mansion On The Hill’. Same thing. They tried ‘Nebraska’ itself. They tried them with the full band, they tried them with some of the band – Springsteen even tried to re-record them solo. Nothing worked. Plotkin believed they were “losing more than we were picking up”, that “it was being scaled incorrectly”. The decision was taken to switch to songs Springsteen had written since recording the cassette. The latter wasn’t being abandoned, merely set aside for now.
What happened at the next session was ‘Born In The USA’ which, Landau claimed, had already been dropped from consideration for Nebraska because it just didn’t fit. So essentially, out of the failed Nebraska band rehearsals came the seeds of the album that would send Springsteen global. Everyone was excited – except Springsteen himself. His attention was still focused on the Nebraska songs.
“I was troubled by what was happening,” said Plotkin. “The problem was that the demo tape was great and our treatments of the Nebraska stuff in the studio were adequate and they were less meaningful. They were less emotionally compelling, they were less honest; we were reducing the stuff, we were making less of it. We ran into a brick wall. We were screwing it up.”
A meeting was called at which Landau, according to Plotkin, “had pretty much decided himself that he thought we could and ought to treat this thing as an album”.
This is where it gets really technical. While listening again to the Nebraska tapes, Toby Scott learned some interesting details about how Springsteen and Batlan had recorded the songs. “It turns out they’d mixed everything through an old Gibson Echoplex – the ones with an endless tape loop for slapback – and that machine had since gone to meet its maker.
“It seems also that, during the recording process, Mike had never really figured out what that little round knob next to the transport controls was for and had left it at around the two o’clock position. So they’d ended up recording everything with the varispeed set fast. Then he thought, well, maybe it shouldn’t be in that position so he turned it back to twelve o’clock for mixdown.
“Then there was the mixdown desk. Turns out they mixed down to the only other deck they had around that had a line input, an old Panasonic boom box with a history of its own. You see, Bruce had a canoe he liked to take out on this little branch of the river that flowed near his house, and the previous summer, during one of these trips, the boom box had fallen overboard and sunk in the mud. Later that day when the tide went out, he retrieved it, brought it back to the house, hosed off the mud and left it on the porch for dead. About a week later, he was sitting in the porch reading the Sunday paper and the boom box all of a sudden comes back to life.
“So now it’s the following January and, forgetting all about that, this was the machine they used for their mix.”
When Springsteen, who had been carrying the tape around in his back pocket for a couple of weeks, presented it as a master to Scott and the other engineers at Power Station, “you could just about hear the moans”.
Scott again: “We were all trained to get the best sound possible on the best equipment, and here was our artist asking us to go against pretty much everything we knew. And I said, ‘Yes Bruce, we could. I’m not sure you’ll like it, but we could.’
“So I gave the cassette to an assistant and told him to copy it onto a good piece of tape. Then we went around to four or five different mastering facilities, but no-one could get it into a lacquer – there was so much phasing and other odd sonic characteristics the needle kept jumping out of the grooves.
“We went to Bob Ludwig, Steve Marcussen at Precision, Sterling Sound, CBS. Finally, we ended up at Atlantic in New York, and Dennis King tried one time and also couldn’t get it onto disc. So we had him try a different technique, putting it onto disc at a much lower level, and that seemed to work. In the end we ended up having Bob Ludwig use his EQ and his mastering facility, but with Dennis’ mastering parameters. And that’s the master we ended up using.
“The album sounds the way it does because of all those factors – the multiple tapes, the dirty heads, the varispeed – it’s all part of the overall atmosphere and part of what Bruce liked about the songs.”
The so-called electric Nebraska – the attempts to remake the songs as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band songs – has never been released, nor have the recordings ever surfaced as bootlegs. It remains as elusive as the holy grail among Springsteen devotees, although my guess is that Jon Landau may be hoarding the tapes to form part of some kind of anniversary package along the lines of those issued for Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town. As recently as 2006, Landau insisted that “the right version of Nebraska came out”, adding that he didn’t think the band sessions constituted “particularly meaningful stuff”.
Drummer Max Weinberg disagrees. He told Rolling Stone in 2010 that the E Street Band recorded Nebraska in its entirety and “it was killing. It was all very hard-edged. As great as it was, it wasn’t what Bruce wanted to release. There is a full band Nebraska album. All of those songs are in the can somewhere.”
While it is inevitable that Nebraska with Springsteen and the E Street Band will be considered ready for release sooner or later (what are the odds it will be 2012, thirty years after Nebraska was originally released?), interesting though it would be to hear, I would rather it remained in the vaults.
Even live renditions of the Nebraska songs (whether performed solo by Springsteen or with the band) jar a little, taken as they are out of context of the album as a whole piece of work. And besides, Nebraska is not only about the songs, it’s about the atmosphere, an atmosphere that can’t be reproduced in an over-populated studio where application and not art informs the process, nor in the communal gathering of a concert arena where man love is expressed by homo sapiens brandishing beer bottles in their raised firsts, while their little women sway uneasily on their shoulders singing the wrong words.
Electric Nebraska – who really cares?
With the Nebraska master finally secured, the next step was an album cover. Springsteen didn’t want his image this time. He wanted something more evocative, something that cut Nebraska from the cord of his celebrity. This was folk music, and folk music was of the folk, by the folk and for the folk; it didn’t countenance the cult of personality. It was faceless and yet had myriad faces.
Art director Andrea Klein introduced him to David Michael Kennedy, a fine art photographer who had a successful career in advertising, editorial, music and portrait photography, A photo session was arranged from which three pictures emerged, two of them of Springsteen. The shot that appeared on the Nebraska sleeve – a two-lane blacktop in the Midwest snapped through the windshield of a car – had been taken by Kennedy some time before.
Kennedy, who lives in New Mexico, works within the realm of analogue processes. His prints possess a mystical quality that, if such a thing is possible, portray the soul of his subjects, who have included Bob Dylan, Debbie Harry, Willie Nelson and Muddy Waters, as well as a whole series on Native Americans.
“I was doing a lot of stuff for CBS Records at the time,” he recalls. “And I’d done a landscape – the one that they used on Nebraska – a long time ago, around the mid Seventies. I honestly don’t remember where it was taken. It was a very old image. It was somewhere in the Midwest, so there’s a very good possibility it was in Nebraska – it was certainly in that region of America. And Andrea Klein, who worked at CBS and did most of the Springsteen stuff, had seen my studio.
“I’d done a lot of stuff for her. I had it on the wall of my studio and she’d seen it there. So when the Nebraska album came along and Bruce wanted to do a landscape for it, she remembered that one. She called me and asked me if I could show it to Bruce. I don’t think she asked me for any others. She was pretty specific, if I remember right, that that was the one. And Bruce loved it. He said, ‘That’s the one’.
“Then they needed to do the point of purchase stuff, advertising and all the other stuff, so Andi asked me if I’d also shoot a session with just Bruce. It’s funny because I wasn’t all that excited about Bruce Springsteen. I really liked his rock’n’roll, but it wasn’t the kind of music that just really knocks me out. I like rock’n’roll but I’m much more attuned to music like what was on Nebraska. So I was sort of like, ‘Yeah, whatever, another cover’. And then he sent over the tape. And when I heard the tape it just flipped me out. I fell in love with it. His acoustic music I think is incredible.
“It really talked about America, about the real people in America and their feelings and thoughts and emotions. Like That song, ‘My Father’s House’, is just incredibly touching. It really spoke to an America that I’m very familiar with and have photographed a lot and seen a lot. A couple of years ago, my house burnt down, I got a divorce and I was really disillusioned with what was going on in America. I bought a vintage Airstream trailer and I just travelled around America for two years, on all the back roads, seeing the real America that you never hear about.
“There’s a spirit here and a self-reliance that you see in the people that just impresses the hell out of me. It’s not the America that we read about in the newspapers. It’s not that greedy, corporate group of people. It’s like a subterranean America – that’s what America is. You travel around and so much of it is rural, so much of it is people that are creative in how they deal with their land, with their cows, with how to survive – creative in their lifestyle.
“I think it’s much more what this country used to be about. What made me feel really good is that, when I went out and travelled for those two years, the majority of the country is still about that. The only problem is it’s lost.”
Springsteen, says Kennedy, had no preconception of what he wanted from their sessions together. “Once they decided to use that landscape for the cover, the rest of what we were doing I don’t think was as important in terms of a look or feel. It was more for the advertising and point of purchase, and it needs to reflect a kind of country, folkie kind of look, but I don’t think he had anything real specific in mind.
“I had to have a private meeting with Bruce. So he came down to the studio one day and we just had coffee and talked. And I realised part-way through it that I was sort of being interviewed. It was like after Bruce left he was going to decide what he felt about me as a person. I had a lot of pictures around the studio, so he had a good feel for my work. But I realised it was important to him that he wanted to know who I was and what I thought and how I felt before he decided, I want this guy to do the pictures. He needed to connect with me on a human level first. I guess I passed the interview!”
When Kennedy is given a commission, he approaches it “with an empty mind”. He explains, “I try really hard not to pre-judge or to think, this is what I want to show. I want to try and understand, who is this person? Forget what we know – forget this is Bruce Springsteen, rock’n’roll star, the Boss, all of that nonsense. Who is this human being and how do I connect with him in such a way that I can share this experience of who he is with the people who look at the pictures? One of the ways I do that is I always make eye contact. When we started planning the shoot, I got pretty much told that Bruce didn’t want any production values. He didn’t want hair or make-up people, he didn’t want any kind of a production, he just wanted to make portraits.
“We did them at my family’s summer home in upstate New York. He just showed up in his old pick-up truck, just him. No limos, no entourage, this dude just pulled up in his pick-up truck and got out. I had my assistant and my daughter and my girlfriend there. My girlfriend usually did the make-up, but she didn’t do it that day – she just wanted to come for a trip. It was really just a few people getting together in the country and fooling around. That’s how it felt. It was very much, hey, this is the kitchen, let’s play over by that window, have some coffee and let’s just make a few pictures. Very loose. There are a couple of shots that I think are pretty magical, a couple that capture who he is, his spirit.”
A couple of shots that are pretty magical? Kennedy is being far too modest. Those black and white images of Springsteen, perched on a kitchen chair, sat at a kitchen table, standing against the railing of a verandah, are among the most iconic ever taken of him – just like Kennedy’s close-up of Bob Dylan.
“Dylan, for me, was an idol. The opportunity to photograph Bob Dylan doesn’t come along too much. And I was really intimidated by that shoot. That’s a whole other story – if you do a book on Dylan, I have a good story about that.
“But once we got past the surface stuff with Springsteen, it was really the same. With Dylan, it was just me and Dylan – I didn’t even bring an assistant when I shot Dylan. It was very much two people fooling around, having fun and making pictures. That’s kind of how I’ve tried to approach my whole career. I used to tell people when we started shooting, ‘If we have fun today and we make horrible pictures, that’s fine, because we can always come back and make more pictures. But if we don’t have fun today and we make great pictures, that’s really not okay because you can never get back that time that wasn’t fun.’
“If you’re fooling around having fun, you always make good pictures. That good time and good feelings show through in successful photographs. Unfortunately, a lot of the time you get people who are into the production values, they think they need hair and make-up and caterers – they’re very much into that aspect of the industry. But Springsteen was totally not into that at all.
“That shoot remains one of the definite highpoints of my career. It meant a great deal to work with him. At the time rock’n’roll was not, as I said, a music that I got really jazzed about. His music wasn’t so special to me. But looking back now, I realise how amazingly special his music is, the things he writes about. I’d work with him any time.
“And he’s such an accessible guy. After Nebraska I pretty much lost touch with him. We worked on the project and went our separate ways. We don’t live in the same world. I don’t think I had any contact with him. Ten years or so after that, a friend of mine called me, she was a Jersey girl. She said, ‘David, Springsteen’s coming to New Mexico, I want tickets, I want us to go and I want you to introduce me to him. He’s coming in three days.’ I’m sitting here in New Mexico. I don’t even think I’d talked to anyone in CBS Records in so long – how can I do this? I got in touch with the people at his management company. This was maybe a Friday and he was playing on the Sunday. They knew who I was, I explained the situation and they said, ‘Let’s see what we can do’. They couldn’t put it together.
“We went to the concert, and I brought the photograph of him in the kitchen. I’m pretty sure it was that one. I signed it and I wrote a note saying, ‘Bruce, we’re in the audience, I’m with this Jersey girl who really wants you to autograph this picture for you and she would love to meet you.’ We got to the concert. It wasn’t a big venue. It was an acoustic tour (The Ghost Of Tom Joad) and I think there were 400-500 people in the audience. I went to one of the security guys and I explained it to him. I said, ‘Look man, can you please run this backstage? If nothing else, maybe he could just sign it for her.’ The guy’s kind of looking at me, and he believed me, I guess. He went backstage and he came out a couple of minutes later with the print. He said, ‘Look man, when the concert’s over, you’re going to see everybody going through that door over there. Go over to this other door over here’.
“So the concert’s over, we go to this other door, knock, somebody opens it and we were brought into his dressing room. He’s there all by himself. We spent ten or fifteen minutes hanging out with him. He just chatted her up, he signed the thing. He was so focused. It was like, here’s this person, she’s so into my music and I want to give her some time. Then he said, ‘Look, I’ve really got to do the meet and greet thing now’, so we said okay, they let the people in the other door and he hung out with everybody. I just thought, what an incredible man.
“Then another friend of mine, two or three years ago, ran into him in New York. She went up to him and said, ‘Excuse me, I know people bug you all the time, but I just really want to let you know I love your music, and by the way, I’m good friends with David Kennedy’. And he immediately knew exactly who I was. Think how many covers he’s done, think of how many people he’s met. I’ve met so many people in the industry and it’s so hard for me to remember everybody. He just talked to her for a couple of minutes on the street. He just stopped what he was doing and shared some of his time with her. This is who this guy is. That’s so refreshing.”
There was much deliberation about the title of the album. About half of the song titles were considered before it was narrowed down to three choices – Open All Night, January 3, 1982 (the date on which the majority of the Colt’s Neck demos were recorded) and Nebraska. Springsteen plumped for Nebraska, the first one he’d recorded, the first on the track listing, the song that, according to Dave Marsh, “set the mood and told the story”.
In September, Rolling Stone announced its impending release with a note of caution, warning its readers that “those who’ve heard it say its mood is personal and darkly ruminative about America as a whole”.
For an album that came out of a DIY recording session featuring just voice, guitar harmonica, a bit of glockenspiel and nothing in the way of a hit single, Nebraska did respectable business. Industry watchers (remember, the music industry was suffering the same as every other industry in Reagan’s America) predicted it wouldn’t sell much more than a quarter of what The River sold – they suggested a ballpark figure of between 200,000 and 300,000. It went on to shift some 800,000 units in America alone, and reached Number 4 on the Billboard chart.
And in a concession to the new age of MTV, which streamed videos to promote singles twenty four hours a day, Springsteen agreed to a short film for ‘Atlantic City’, though he himself had only nominal involvement. “The only direction I gave was to say that it should be kind of gritty looking, and it should have no images that matched up to the images in the songs,” he said.
Arnold Levine’s black and white drive-by video, made in one day with a handheld camera, was voted Number 37 in Rolling Stone’s 100 Top Music Videos of All Time. Levine described the concept thus: “It was showing the disparity between the boardwalk and a block away from the boardwalk, after all those broken promises about how they were going to rebuild Atlantic City.”
Critical opinion of Nebraska was overwhelmingly positive. The Eighties was such a synthetic decade in music, with British electro-pop the dominant soundtrack, that for something this raw, this uncompromising, to infiltrate the mainstream must have felt like revolution.
Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times wrote: “In the album’s best moments, Springsteen combines a captivating sense of cinematic detail with an endearing sense of America that we haven’t approached in pop music since the early works of John Prine and the Band.”
Paul Nelson, in Musician, acknowledged it wasn’t easy listening. To his ears it “sounded so demoralised and demoralising, so murderously monotonous, so deprived of spark and hope”. Springsteen, he added, had made an album “as bleak and unyielding as next month’s rent”. But for all that, Nelson heralded Nebraska as a descendant of works by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, as well as redolent of the Library of Congress field recordings.
Mikal Gilmore, in Rolling Stone, called it “a dark-toned, brooding and unsparing record…the most successful attempt at making a sizeable statement about American life that popular music has yet produced”.
Greil Marcus concurred: “Nebraska is the most complete and probably the most convincing statement of resistance and refusal that Ronald Reagan’s USA has yet elicited from any artist or any politician.
“Because Springsteen is an artist and not a politician, his resistance is couched in terms of the bleakest acceptance, his refusal presented as a refusal that does not know itself. There isn’t a trace of rhetoric, not a moment of polemic; politics are buried deep in stories of individuals who make up a nation only when their stories are heard together.”
Those individuals, Marcus continued, were alone, “because in a world in which men and women are mere social and economic functions, every man and woman is separated from every other”.
For Robert Palmer, writing in The New York Times, it had been a long time “since a mainstream rock star made an album that asks such tough questions and refuses to settle for easy answers – let alone an album that suggests there are no answers”.
In Britain, the reception was less rapturous. While Chris Bohn, in NME, applauded Springsteen for “writing and singing in the testy troubadour tradition of entertaining with a kick”, Melody Maker’s Paolo Hewitt castigated him for being “completely unable to move away from his overblown, romanticised view of the world”.
Surely the first and last time Nebraska has ever been labelled overblown and romanticised.