“A multi-layered work of revisionist history narrated in working-class language, Nebraska represents the history of class in the United States and places the social problems of the Eighties in the context of change over time.
BRYAN K GARMAN
“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.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Jimmy Guterman, in his book, Runaway American Dream: Listening To Bruce Springsteen, describes Nebraska as eccentric. The foremost definition of eccentric is something or someone deviating from convention. Which is exactly what Springsteen did by releasing an album of what were effectively coarsely recorded demos. Another definition of the same word is that which is “situated away from the centre or the axis”. The centre, or axis, in this context would be the mainstream, which is where Springsteen was safely ensconced after The River. The mainstream is that constituency where an artist gets the populist vote, sometimes at the expense of artistic integrity – compromise by any other name. Subjective opinion as to whether Springsteen performed such a trade-off to enhance his commercial appeal will vary. I don’t believe he did; I just think The River was, in parts, typified by lazy songwriting.
So here we have someone whose public stock has never been higher, someone who has had his first Top Ten US single in ‘Hungry Heart’. It’s a perilous place to be for a man who takes seriously what he does. The air gets thinner up there, judgement is not what it would be at a lower altitude. And then the people responsible for elevating you, consumers who have exchanged their hard-earned cash (particularly hard-earned in Reagan’s America) for what you’re offering, want more of the same. They want songs that make you feel good. Yeah, they understand the need for the slower stuff like ‘Independence Day’ and ‘Wreck On The Highway’ – the need for some contrast – but what they really dig are the rockers, soul-stirrers like ‘The Ties That Bind’, ‘Sherry Darling’ and ‘Out In The Street’. It’s Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Experience they’re after. That Bruce Springsteen and the E Street formula.
Only an authentic artist – an eccentric – would mess with such a favourable method. Isn’t eccentricity – that wilful determination to eschew the impregnable for the risky – the sign of the authentic artist? So in that sense, Guterman is spot-on. Nebraska is an eccentric album, the work of an eccentric man – an authentic artist.
In fact, I’d go further. Nebraska is downright weird in the way that the songs on Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music are weird – or at least in the way those songs sound weird to us now. They probably sounded weird even on their release in 1952; if you could put colour to sound, the anthology would sound like sepia. Just like Nebraska. Sepia evokes not only another time, a long ago time, but also another world. A world apart from that in which we exist on the surface, never daring to tunnel our way underneath things, fearful of what we may unearth there.
Of course, there has always been weirdness, especially in the realm of the artistic. But weirdness has either always been a peripheral pursuit or an entity indulged by the masses for their amusement. When Nebraska came along, because of Springsteen’s status, weirdness was forced into the foreground and it was no laughing matter. I would suggest that its acceptance – an acceptance borne out by the numbers of people who actually bought it and by those who, during the nearly three decades since its release, regard it as Springsteen’s masterpiece and an album of immense artistic significance – preceded the acceptance of all sorts of other weird Americana that came in its wake, from the films of the Coen brothers through the novels of Daniel Woodrell and William Gay to the music of the Handsome Family.
And yet there’s nothing that immediately strikes you as weird about ‘Nebraska’, the song that opens the album. This is folk music, plain and simple, introduced by a gently picked acoustic guitar with an accompanying harmonica line over the top. Then the vocal comes in, and that’s when it hits you. The quietness of Springsteen’s delivery. But no, that’s not it, not exactly. It’s the quietness and the detachment – maybe remoteness is more correct. He’s singing from inside himself, or outside and removed from himself.
Remember, this is a guy who cut his teeth on live performance in the Seventies, a guy whose marathon shows have become the stuff of legend, a guy who can justifiably lay claim to being among the finest rock and soul frontmen around. And here he is singing as though telling a story, a story in which he is both narrator and protagonist, a story in which Bruce Springsteen has disappeared.
Bruce Springsteen has become a medium, a channeller, a vessel for this other guy, this guy telling you about a girl, a young girl he first encounters twirling a baton on he front lawn. A majorette, perhaps? He’s telling you about how him and this girl, how they took a ride – and in the next line, ten innocent people have died. This detail is conveyed without drama, as a matter of fact, and is all the more shocking because of that.
Just like when the principal in ‘Banks Of The Ohio’ reveals that he has drowned his love and watched her dead body float down the river (although in another version, covered by Johnny Cash among others, he plunges a knife into her breast first). We are in murder ballad territory, of which there are plentiful examples in the folk genre – ‘Stagger Lee’ (‘Stagolee’, ‘Stackerlee’, ‘Stack O Lee’, ‘Stack-a-Lee), ‘Down In The Willow Garden’ (‘Rose Connelly’), ‘Lord Randall’, ‘Little Sadie’ (‘Cocaine Blues’) and ‘Pretty Polly’ are just a handful.
In the best tradition of the murder ballad, Springsteen proffers evidence of the crime, or, in this case, multiple crimes. His character tells of how he drove through Lincoln, Nebraska, and on through Wyoming, murdering anyone he came across that he had a mind to murder.
That’s all we learn before the narrative turns into a valediction of sorts. But where we, the civilised, law-abiding audience, would expect to hear penitence, there is none forthcoming. This is a man who feels no compunction for what he did. Quite the opposite.
Only those knowledgeable about such things (or those familiar with the inspiration behind the song) would have been aware that Charles Starkweather was the model for ‘Nebraska’. The rest could but surmise that they were entering the psyche of a sociopath.
In the fourth verse Springsteen shifts gear again to satisfy our curiosity and confirm our suspicions – this is a man facing a death sentence, going to the chair; a dead man, if not walking, then readying himself for that walk into eternal darkness, or whatever you choose to believe awaits us after death.
And then, in the penultimate verse, an absurd request. He wants his girl, his “pretty baby”, right there with him when he’s electrocuted. Hopeless romantic or homicidal fetishist?
And as if we’re not reeling enough from the brutal candour of the narrative, the unflinching insight into the broken mind of a murderer, the final verse, rather than offering the succour of salvation in the form of reason or, at the very least, repentance wrought by fear of “that great void”, all we get is a shrug of the shoulders and a supposition that the world can be a mean place.
If it’s answers you want, if it’s reassurance you’re after that humanity lies in the heart of every one of us, no matter how inhumane some may appear, ‘Nebraska’ is not the song for you. For it acknowledges the presence of depravity in our midst, a presence that impels us to examine the issue of our faith in our own god, whatever our creed. For such an entity supposedly symbolises goodness and mercy, and we are supposedly created in the image of this entity.
This is Springsteen, the songwriter, going deeper than he’s ever gone before. The language, the imagery may well be uncomplicated, the human condition he is seeking to investigate, less so. Nothing is as it first appears, everything cannot be rationalised. And what if all that we believe in, all that we hold dear, is a great big con?
And this is Springsteen the singer, separating from himself and becoming someone else, a transformation that, for those six verses, is wholly credible. We buy into Springsteen as psychopath just as we buy into Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle or Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz. This is Springsteen as method singer.
And it is the abstruse nature of what he’s singing about, combined with the convincing tenor of his performance, which makes ‘Nebraska’ probably the scariest four and a half minutes you’ll hear on record.
The argument could feasibly be constructed that ‘Nebraska’ is a commentary on the moral collapse of America, assuming, of course, that you subscribed to the theory that it was collapsing. Certainly the politics of Reaganomics seemed to favour the monolithic corporations while exploiting the little man’s industry – or dispensing with it, whichever proved more useful in feeding the wealth of the few. Framed in this context, it wouldn’t be wholly inaccurate to suggest that the American government had relinquished its moral responsibility to its citizens.
Perhaps Springsteen’s character in ‘Nebraska’ could be read as a personification of the indifference of the legislators on Capitol Hill towards the electorate, or, on the flip side, as the latter’s anarchic response to such indifference. A variation on the Bob Dylan premise that when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. But I prefer to think that ‘Nebraska’ transcends the politics of the day, that its concerns, and Springsteen’s concerns, are of an altogether more spiritual kind.
In fact, why bother with my analysis of ‘Nebraska’ when there’s a perfectly good primary source available? Springsteen himself, in VH1’s Storytellers, described how, on The River, he began to approach the compositional process differently, taking on other characters and walking in their shoes, and, by extension, inviting us to walk in their shoes also.
“It kind of frees me to choose characters in some ways different from myself, to sing in those voices and to tell those stories along with my own,” he explained.
“This type of writing is often very detailed. You’re creating a physical world that’s not your own. I’m in the desert, I’m in Texas, I’m in Mexico. It involves a certain amount of research.
“For this song (‘Nebraska’) I’d been moved by the Terrence Malick film, Badlands, and I got interested in the story. There was a book out at the time called Caril, about Charlie Starkweather’s partner. Just out of the blue I decided to call a newspaper in Nebraska. I called up and the woman who had reported the story was still there, thirty years later. So I got to speak to her. And she was just friendly and helpful.
“You can put together a lot of detail, but unless you pull something up out of yourself it’s just going to lie flat on the page. You’ve got to find out what you have in common with that character, no matter who they are or what they did. So ‘Nebraska’ is a song written with the premise that everybody knows what it’s like to be condemned, which they do, of course.
The body of the song, the first five verses, is basically reportorial. It’s information you can glean from researching the story. It’s spooky because I’m singing in the voice of the dead. The music is very childlike and mystical. On the record I used a glockenspiel. I think I was interested in an aural projection of the Robert Mitchum film Night Of The Hunter, which is kind of this horror story told from a child’s perspective.
“The character in this song is very plain-spoken. He’s just storytelling, what he did, what happened. But the song takes place in a place where it’s quiet now, it’s after the violence. It feels like it takes place after his death. There’s even a joke – ‘Make sure my pretty baby sits right there on my lap’. And things kind of roll along until the end, when someone or something else steps forward. And that something else, that’s me and that’s you and that’s him. And we all kind of meet.”
If ‘Nebraska’ could be deemed a somewhat circumspect reaction to the dominant American politics of the day, ‘Atlantic City’ puts a human face to the consequences of Reaganomics. It makes real the suffering that occurs when a government abandons its accountability to the people it represents. It strips away the layers of propaganda, the words finessed into phrases designed to lull the millions into a false sense of security, to persuade them that things are good – that this, lest you forget, is America, the land of the free, the home of the brave, where anybody can be somebody.
American presidents have always been quick to employ the trump card of patriotism in times of crisis, to appeal to the people’s blind loyalty to the stars and stripes. But ‘Atlantic City’ blows a hole in the futility of such jingoism. The people on the eastern edge of the States might as well be on the edge of the world. They are falling, and their descent is slow and agonising as everyone scrambles for a foothold, does whatever it takes to hang on.
In the furious scramble, there are victims – the Chicken Man (probably a reference to a mobster by the name of Philip ‘Chicken Man’ Testa, whose Philadelphia house was blown up in March, 1981), the gangs rumbling on the promenade, the gambling commissioner… The first two verses, propelled by the big, dark minor chords on Springsteen’s acoustic, and by the urgency of his vocal, conjure up a nightmarish tableau – the New Jersey shore as the abyss. But hold on, the chorus brings respite, the promise of reincarnation. Everything dies, sure, but everything comes back.
So forget about the now, forget about the madness and the hardship and the heartache, and let’s pretend that we still believe in magic and in magical places. And Atlantic City was once a magical place, a place where the American Dream could be realised – or at least that version of the American Dream that values wealth above enlightenment.
But after the first chorus it becomes apparent that the central character in the song, the Springsteen character, is in Atlantic City not for love, nor for dreaming. He’s there looking for a break; he wants some cold cash and lots of it, fast, because he has “debts no honest man can pay”. The gambling mecca along the shoreline is his last-chance saloon. He’s the guy with a film of sweat where a moustache should be, jelly legs walking the plank, clutching his wife’s arm for support, their life savings in the handbag slung from her exposed bony shoulder.
And then you hear him, in the bridge of the song, trying to assure her, trying to assure himself; things may be bad now, but things will get better. But suddenly we’re plunged into the resignation of the final verse. You get the feeling that even the money he drew from the Central Trust, his gambling loot, has been gambled away. The promise of Atlantic City, like the promise of America, is a broken one. There is nothing down for him if he plays it straight, so he’s not going to play it straight any more.
If ‘Nebraska’ owed much to Springsteen’s fascination with the Charles Starkweather killings and with Terrence Malick’s Badlands (although, unlike Springsteen’s song, Malick’s narrative perspective was that of Caril Fugate character). It was a literary device used by Flannery O’Connor that informed the structure of ‘Mansion On The Hill’ (and, later on the album, ‘Used Cars’ and ‘My Father’s House’). O’Connor, in common with William Faulkner and indeed another southern writer, Eudora Welty, often told her stories through the eyes of a child. Springsteen’s adoption of the same device meant he could relate the bare facts of the piece as witnessed by the minor, while leaving the listener to read the white space – to unravel the subtext, if you like. This is one of his particular attributes as a songwriter, that facility (acquired or instinctive?) to judge what to show and what to tell. It’s what makes him a persuasive political songwriter without being polemical.
‘Mansion On The Hill’ is a song about the class divide (yes, even in America), the mansion emblematic of the haves, towering above the have nots toiling in the factories and the fields. It’s a song about how the American Dream is not, contrary to popular myth, available to all; how the mansion on the hill – the same American Dream – is cordoned off by “gates of hardened steel”.
There is a poignancy in the image of the father taking the son to look up at the mansion in the third verse. It’s not so much as if the older man is endeavouring to foster aspiration in the boy, more as though he is letting him see what will never be his, what will always be out of his reach, beyond the grasp of his kind.
On The River tour, Springsteen would recall how he couldn’t envisage his life being different from that of his father’s. “It seemed that if you were born in a certain place, things didn’t change much for you,” he said. “I tried to think what was the thing that we all had in common, why did it, time after time, end up that way? And it was that we didn’t have enough knowledge about the forces that were controlling our lives.”
Of course, Springsteen’s life became the polar opposite of his father’s. He chose to do something he loved, laboured hard to get good at it and enjoyed the bounty of his success. Yet not even enormous wealth has dulled his class consciousness, has prevented him from continuing to write about the guy he used to be, and perhaps at heart, remains.
“Springsteen’s characters on Nebraska are predominantly working class and speak in a working-class dialect,” says Bryan K Garman. “For example, their use of the word ‘sir’, a word you will often find on Nebraska, often indicates a sense of their social standing. It’s a multi-layered album because it represents so many music traditions and is filled with many historical references. Think too about a song like ‘Youngstown’ (from The Ghost Of Tom Joad), or even his cover of ‘How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?’ That song keeps some old references to poverty and is updated with a treatment of Hurricane Katrina and references to George Bush.”
The world inside the gates of Springsteen’s mansion in ‘Mansion On The Hill’ is exotic, a world of shining lights, music playing and people laughing – a world without care.
Then, in the final verse, the boy becomes a man. Like his father before him, he is excluded from opportunity, fated to accept the preservation of wealth in the hands of the wealthy. And not only that, but the suggestion of something worse; the suggestion that he has lost his place even among his own (working) class as he watches “the cars rushin’ by home from the mill”.
‘Mansion On The Hill’, like much of Nebraska, could also be heard as a spiritual, the promise of an Elysian recompense in the sweet by and by, a conceptual reflex related to Springsteen’s Catholicism. Many of us confirmed in that faith have loosed the chains of its dogma only to discover that we can’t fully exorcise ourselves of its mystical possession.
‘Johnny 99’ harbours no such delusions of redemption. The sinner has sinned, and unless the mitigating circumstances of the sin can be acknowledged, he might as well pay the ultimate tariff.
Like the guy in ‘Atlantic City’, Ralph has “debts no honest man can pay” – the repetition of this line two songs apart, reinforces the sense that the impossible choices imposed by Reagan’s America weighed heavy on Springsteen’s mind. ‘Atlantic City’ hints at involvement in illicit activity as a means to the end of penury. This seems to denote, at the very least, a decision reached after taking a rational overview of the situation. ‘Johnny 99’ is what happens when the response to a similar predicament is completely irrational.
Ralph gets soused on alcohol and shoots a night clerk. The malice of the character in ‘Nebraska’, the calculated reasoning of the character in ‘Atlantic City’, is here replaced by the tragic impulse of a man whose dignity has been incrementally eroded, a man frustrated by the fix in which he finds himself, a man who cracks under pressure. This pressure is accentuated in the second verse as Ralph/Johnny brandishes his gun and threatens to do still more damage before the cops haul him away.
The appointment of Mean John Brown as judge rules out the possibility of a sympathetic hearing – such is the unforgiving nature of Reagan’s staunchly right-wing Republican administration in matters of law and order. And sure enough the harshest of sentences (short of the death penalty) is handed down.
Springsteen increases the dramatic ante in the fourth verse as, in a scene that could have come straight from a Sunday afternoon black-and-white matinée, the family of Ralph/Johnny make a desperate petition for clemency. The judge consents to hearing the statement of the condemned man before he is forever taken away.
And what a harrowing statement it is; an inventory of his poverty – economic poverty, spiritual poverty, the poverty of opportunity – that subverts fundamental decency, that precipitates the evil that men think and do. This is a man who has awoken from the American Nightmare to the loss of everything he held dear – most importantly, his freedom. He’d rather be dead.
‘Johnny 99’ is blues of the bluest hue. The falsetto cry that launches the song is as lonesome as anything out of the deepest, darkest Delta. The bark that punctuates its fade is strange and unsettling. The way Springsteen seems to speed up the melody in places, the way he seems to pause almost imperceptibly before the second line of the last verse (“The bank was holding my mortgage…”), the frenetic harmonica break, all of it conspires to underscore the sheer awfulness of the tale, as though it were something you don’t want to hear but he has to tell you, because this is how things are.
And this is how things are still. We’re almost thirty years from Nebraska, in a whole new century, a whole new world, where erstwhile enemies are now friends and technology has accelerated change at a pace and in ways we could never have imagined back then. But we haven’t come so far as to eradicate the problems that spawn the guy in ‘Nebraska’ or ‘Johnny 99’.
This the true measure of the ten songs that comprise Springsteen’s solo masterwork – their timelessness, their continued relevance. They speak to us just as the songs of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan speak to us long years after they were written down and recorded. They endure just as all folk songs endure, because we are the folk and we understand what they mean because we live out their meanings every day. Our heartbeat remains the same.
It’s not at all surprising that Sean Penn choose ‘Highway Patrolman’ as the basis of the script for The Indian Runner, his debut as a film director. He could have picked pretty much anything on Nebraska, for every narrative is a potential treatment for the big screen. Just think what Martin Scorsese, in his Seventies pomp, could have done with ‘Atlantic City’. Or how the Coen bothers, before they went all Hollywood and recruited George Clooney and Brad Pitt to their pool of actors, would have left their imprint on ‘Reason To Believe’.
‘Highway Patrolman’ is not only among the finest songs on ‘Nebraska’, it’s among Springsteen’s finest songs, period. And it’s one of maybe three songs on the album that has a proper chorus.
The narrator is Joe Roberts, a small-town policeman who has always tried to be honest, to do the right thing. But he has a brother, Frankie – and Frankie, well, he just “ain’t no good”. It sounds ominous already, as if Joe’s readying us for a confession of sorts.
And that confession comes in the second verse. Joe has sometimes compromised his position for Frankie, turned a blind eye to his misdemeanours, because blood’s blood and there’s nothing more important than that.
The chorus ghosts in with a fond memory of the two brothers laughing and drinking, dancing with a girl named Maria, a girl who would, we later learn, become Joe’s wife. This memory of what Frankie once was, of what perhaps he could be again, is what compels Joe to catch him whenever he strays. And besides, your loyalty is to your family, and if you have no family loyalty, then you’re nothing. That’s Joe’s whole dilemma right there – family loyalty pitted against loyalty to the law he’s paid to uphold.
Springsteen provides some back story in the next verse. Frankie joined the army in 1965 as American involvement in Vietnam was escalating, while Joe settled down with Maria and worked the family farm. Three years later, Frankie came home and Joe, unable to sustain a living on the land, became a cop.
Then we’re back to the chorus before the real action of the song unfolds in the fourth verse, the episode that has Joe all tangled up in angst. Trouble in a roadhouse, a kid bleeding (to death?), a girl crying, Frankie’s responsible. Joe sets out after him, driving like a madman, spots Frankie’s car at a crossroads and gives chase to the Canadian border. But rather than apprehend him, as he would have done had it been anyone else, Joe pulls over and watches as Frankie’s light disappears.
Springsteen, as he does throughout Nebraska, allows you to reach your own conclusion, however obvious it may appear that Joe has bailed Frankie out yet again. Of course, the disappearing light could be the archetypal death metaphor. It could be Joe finally liberating himself from responsibility for his kin. Or it could be that Joe has realised he can’t maintain the law and stay good, anomalous though that seems.
‘Highway Patrolman’ is a model of narrative articulation in its rendering of the imminent aloneness of belief in what we hold to be right, even when we know it to be wrong. Put another way, we sometimes do things that are wrong for the right reasons.
Five songs in and this was relentlessly wretched stuff. And they used to say Leonard Cohen was lugubrious! Most albums are composed of light and shade; five songs in, Nebraska was composed of dark and darker. And it was about to get darker yet.
‘State Trooper’ is the sound of suicide. It’s unbearably desolate, Springsteen’s unhinged voice eerily echoing over an insistent bluesy riff as he climbs into the skin of a character hell bent on running right off the end of the road to nowhere. You wouldn’t want to be in this guy’s shoes. Not here, not now. We’ve all of us been in his head at some time or other.
He’s riding on the New Jersey Turnpike, Springsteen relocating to familiar territory after travelling through Nebraska, Wyoming and Michigan. The night’s wet, the rivers are black underneath a sky illuminated only by the fire from the refinery. There are no stars upon which to make a wish, there is no moon to make you swoon. We’re in the land of heavy industry, the American counterpart to the dark Satanic mills in William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’. It’s a picture that might have been in Cormac McCarthy’s mind when he was imagining himself into a world gone wrong for The Road.
This driver hasn’t got a licence; he is, like the guy in ‘Nebraska’, the guy in ‘Atlantic City’, like ‘Johnny 99’, like Frank in ‘Highway Patrolman’ a lawbreaker. But he has a clear conscience, he has absolved himself of whatever crime or crimes he has committed. He is his own God, his own judge. He entreats the state trooper not to stop him – why? Is he beyond the parameters of whatever punishment the law can mete out? Is he unable to trust himself not to administer his own punishment for whatever he perceives the law – or society as a whole – has done to him? You begin to fear for the state trooper. This guy could be another Charles Starkweather.
This fear is exacerbated in the next verse. “Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a pretty wife” comes over as menacing, as though he resents the fact that others possess what he doesn’t himself possess – apart from that which has been “botherin’ me my whole life”. This could be anything, but it’s not anything good. Charles Bukowski wrote a poem about the hole in the heart that would never be filled, a certain lack of something, an emotional deficiency that meant true bliss would always be denied him. This could be what’s troubling the protagonist in ‘State Trooper’. Or it could be that his particular deficiency is more psychological, a form of mental illness. Whatever the nature of his torment, we’ve got a ringside seat, watching him as his head – filled with disparate voices on the radio stations he flicks through – comes apart. And then he’s gone, or nearly gone, issuing one last plea for someone, anyone, to listen to him, to save him. You get the feeling it’s too late, Springsteen’s bloodcurdling wail seeming to confirm as much.
The first brace of songs on side two (in the vinyl days before CDs or downloading) are as light as it gets on Nebraska. ‘Used Cars’ is another variation on the theme of class, an amusing if heartrending anecdote about always having to settle for second best, for other people’s cast-offs, of never quite having enough to afford the shiny new things. We all remember the kid in hand-me-downs, the kid dependent on the state for school meals and school books, the kid despatched with similar kids on a one-week holiday every summer to some kip of a seaside resort down the country. Some of us were that kid.
As in ‘Mansion On The Hill’, Springsteen allows us to see the whole sorry tale through a child’s eyes. It’s the family’s big day out, a trip to the used-car lot to buy “a brand-new used car”. The mother, alone in the backseat in the first verse, fingering her wedding band in the second, seems to embody the disappointment of their lives, the fact that they just about make ends meet. And if you’re in any doubt about their place on the economic ladder, the line about the salesman staring at the old man’s hands affirms it. For these are the hands of a manual worker, a worker who doesn’t earn enough to qualify for the credit offered in purchasing a vehicle straight off the production line.
The child narrator takes it all in, he knows what’s going on here. There’s righteous indignation as he swears never again to ride in a used car when his lottery numbers come up. The realisation of wealth is presented as a matter of chance rather than something that can be achieved by design.
The neighbours emerge from every nook and cranny (I picture a trailer park) to gaze upon the family’s second-hand acquisition, a scene that makes the boy squirm with embarrassment and seethe with anger. This is not what he wants for himself, this is not the way it’s meant to be, sweating the same job day after day, interned on the same “dirty streets” he’s always known. But again, other than through good fortune, there’s nothing as tangible as a plan to escape the emptiness.
‘Open All Night’ uses some of the same imagery as ‘State Trooper’, but with none of the latter’s sense of foreboding. The car, so often the mode of transport to the promised land in Springsteen’s songs, so often a feminine object about which Springsteen’s characters rhapsodise, once more assumes the principal role. She’s ferrying the guy to his girl, Wanda (are there really girls called Wanda?), whom he met behind the counter of a fast-food joint at a service station.
Just as in ‘State Trooper’, he’s journeying into night, “in the wee wee hours” when his “mind gets hazy”, out there all on his lonesome, the last man on earth, the only man on the moon (“This New Jersey in the mornin’ like a lunar landscape”), the turnpike giving him the creeps but the radio keeping him safe, keeping him sane. There’s mischief in this guy where there’s misery in the ‘State Trooper’ guy. He’s going to see his baby, even if it means a “one two power-shift” spiriting him away from the motorcycle policeman on his tail, and no matter how long it takes.
There’s exuberance in the final verse, a kind of amphetamine rush that comes with being up all night or from the natural high of impending reunion with your lover. This guy’s wired now, poking fun at the lost souls seeking salvation on the gospel stations. He’s beseeching his own god, the god of rock’n’roll, to “deliver me from nowhere”. But it sounds to me as if he’s already been delivered, like he’s already found his somewhere.
Nebraska is loaded with religious allusions. Religious themes are implicit throughout. But it only on ‘My Father’s House’ and ‘Reason To Believe’, when the God question becomes manifest. Make no mistake, these are gospel songs, though gospel songs with a difference. While traditionally such songs are written and performed in praise of a deity (whose existence is never up for debate), Springsteen’s are filled with dubiety. Is there really a God in heaven, as we are taught as Christians? And how on earth, literally, do people sustain their faith in the face of adversity?
‘My Father’s House’ begins with the narrator recalling a dream in which he was a child again, making his way home through a fairytale landscape before nightfall. Like the best fairytales, there is something forbidding about the landscape, something sinister – something wicked this way coming. The “ghostly voices” from the fields evoke the spirits of the dead, spirits lost in Catholic purgatory, maybe. The boy runs from these voices – sins of the man’s past, sins of America’s past, sins of slavery? Could the fields referred to be the cotton fields in which African slaves worked until they were half dead from work?
It’s not impossible, given Springsteen’s interest in American history and how it records the barbarism visited upon African Americans, that this was more than a subliminal thought. Though simple in terms of their composition and arrangement, the lyrics on Nebraska do open themselves to different strata of explication. Whatever the nature of these “ghostly voices”, they instil abject terror in the boy who, with Satan himself in pursuit, finally reaches the sanctuary of his father’s house. He has eluded the fiery flames of hell, fled through purgatory and reached his heavenly reward – at least in the dream.
The man emerges from his slumber and thinks about “the hard things that pulled us apart”, of how vice ripped him from the heart of virtue, of how it took him away from God’s church, the church to which he now vows to return and repent. But when he gets there, a woman speaks to him through “a chained door”. He is like those “ghostly voices”, cast out, a lost soul like so many of the lost souls on Nebraska. Or is it his faith that has been lost? For, according to the woman, nobody with his father’s name lives at his father’s house any more. There is no God and heaven is merely made-up. Yet the man can’t fully shake the sense that this isn’t true. He wants it not to be true, because otherwise he can’t atone for his transgressions but has to carry them with him for all eternity.
Another less complicated reading of ‘My Father’s House’ could be that as children we are systematically indoctrinated into to a certain belief (whatever the denominational origin of that belief) and consequently we accept it unconditionally. As adults, we are more inclined towards deconstructing that belief.
So if ‘My Father’s House’ is about lost faith, ‘Reason To Believe’ is about holding onto that faith come what may. The narrator here appears bemused by people’s capacity for keeping on believing despite the shit that life throws at them. It’s a curious song with no little humour in it, though you have to listen hard. The man by the highway poking the dead dog with a stick, as if he expects it to revive itself, is quirky enough for a Coen brothers’ movie.
There’s nothing funny about Mary Lou’s vigil “at the end of that dirt road” for Johnny, her no-good lover who upped and left her. It’s just plain pathetic. The girl needs to move on.
In the third verse, one life begins as another ends. Newborn Kyle William’s (original) sin is washed away in the water. It’s not clear whether the old man “in a whitewash shotgun shack” has been absolved of his sins before passing away. But if he hasn’t, prayers are offered up for him in his grave, which I suppose is a form of absolution.
It could be that Springsteen had Bob Dylan’s ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar’ in mind when he wrote the final verse – because that’s exactly where the groom is still waiting at the end of it all, “wonderin’ where can his baby be”. He’s been jilted, poor fellow, and not only that, the congregation have left him to hurt alone. This image, more than that presented in the chorus about how folk, at the end of every day, find reason to believe, is possibly the overriding image on Nebraska. It compresses the album’s many themes into a single dominant theme: namely, that faith, like suffering, is a solitary thing.
Another theme – although it’s probably more accurately described as a thread – that runs through Nebraska is criminality, or, as New York Professor of Law Samuel J Levine puts it, “the decisions, actions and perspectives of criminals”.
According to Levine, Springsteen defies simplistic judgements and categorisations, confronting us “with an uncompromising examination of and, consequently, a more truthful and realistic reflection upon the complexities of crime, criminals and our justice system”. Levine places the criminals on Nebraska into three different groups: the enigmatic criminal, the sympathetic criminal and the criminal as brother.
The enigmatic criminal is represented in the Starkweather-prototype who narrates ‘Nebraska’. Here, says Levine, Springsteen offers “the disheartening but valuable lesson that exploration of the criminal mindset may not yield any insight into the mysteries of senseless criminal acts, their causes or their motivations”.
Levine finds three examples of the sympathetic criminal, in ‘Atlantic City’, ‘Johnny 99’ and ‘State Trooper’. In the former two, Springsteen maps the trajectory of the principals “from dejection to desperation and ultimately to the fateful submission to the pressures to cross the line and commit a crime”.
Levine continues, “In contrast to the enigmatic protagonist of the title track, whose crimes linger unexplained and whose cavalier attitude shocks and dismays, the speaker in ‘Atlantic City’ tells us precisely how and why he has arrived at his decision to break the law, and we appreciate the suffering and struggles he has unsuccessfully tried to overcome. Although we may not condone or excuse his conduct, we understand the forces that have driven him to seek solace and success in the world of criminal activity.”
‘Johnny 99’, meanwhile, compels us to examine more thoughtfully the criminal’s predicament “and appreciate more fully the emotional and logical appeal of his argument”. This is what Ralph/Johnny himself wants; he’s not seeking acquittal, he just wants a measure of sympathy for his suffering and some regard for his plight.
“Thus, consistent with prevailing principles of criminal law, Springsteen does not put forth the more radical contention that the criminal’s misfortune should preclude guilt; rather, through its emphatic narrative, the song makes a powerful case for the proposition that a broader understanding of the sympathetic criminal’s condition warrants more careful attention in a determination of a just and fair sentence.”
For Levine, ‘State Trooper’ (which he hears more as an urgent plea for help than a song) presents the most sympathetic criminal on the album. The narrator’s troubled situation calls on us “to accept the seeming inevitability of his criminal conduct. The driver’s lonely desperation stems neither from external pressures nor from financial hardship, but instead from a deeper existential angst borne out of a lifetime of suffering, apparently beyond remedy or repair.
“Springsteen’s portrait evokes in us a reaction strikingly different from our response to the remorseless Starkweather. Rather than feeling puzzled or repulsed by the driver’s lack of contrition, we begin not only to understand his justifications but perhaps to concur with his disquieting conclusion that he need not maintain a guilty conscience for the crimes he has committed.”
If the guy in ‘State Trooper’ is the most sympathetic criminal, Frankie in ‘Highway Patrolman’ receives the most sympathetic treatment, says Levine. “As we listen to the powerful narration of the song, told through the perspective of Joe Roberts, we understand and appreciate his attitudes and actions. Indeed, putting ourselves in his place, we cannot help but begin to feel compassion for Frankie as well. After all, as the narrator repeatedly reminds us, once we picture Frankie as our own brother, we owe him our sympathy and our support, the question of whether he deserves it now proving immaterial.
“Thus, through a story of two brothers, closely connected but playing opposing roles in the legal system, Springsteen leaves us to ponder the difficult questions that stand at the boundaries of law and loyalty, questions that force us to confront the complexity of striking the appropriate balance between justice and mercy.”