“I don’t need to sell records that are going to make millions. I need to do work that I feel is central, vital, that sets me in the present. What I’m interested in now is finding my place in the world as it stands.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
“The Ghost Of Tom Joad…represents Springsteen’s most sustained exploration of race relations.”
JIM CULLEN
Having made his peace with the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen returned to California unsure of his next move. One of the songs he’d tried to record with the band in New York was ‘The Ghost Of Tom Joad’, but the rock version “didn’t feel right” so it was shelved. Back home, Springsteen revived it. He had other songs too – ‘Straight Time’ and ‘Highway 29’ – and the ubiquitous spiral notebook stuffed with unfinished ideas. Springsteen assembled a five-piece group and together they cut what would become the title track of his next album.
Joad is, of course, the fictional character from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath, the second son of a family of Okies who join the migration to California in search of work during the Great Depression of the Thirties. He personifies the political awakening of the common man and the rise of the union movement at a time of rank employer exploitation of labourers, particularly among corporate farmers. By the book’s end, Joad has become a crusader for the oppressed, vowing to his mother in a stirring monologue that, wherever he goes, he will stand firm against injustice. It’s little wonder, given Springsteen’s affinity with the righteous characters of director John Ford’s films, that he found Joad such a compelling figure. And, as already mentioned, he first came to The Grapes Of Wrath through Ford’s big-screen retelling of Steinbeck’s novel.
And Joad also forms another link in the chain from Springsteen to Woody Guthrie. On 3 March, 1940, Woody appeared at New York’s Forrest Theatre in a benefit performance for agricultural workers organised by Steinbeck. Shortly afterwards, he recorded ‘Tom Joad’, a 17-verse ballad that tracked the plot of both book and movie.
With ‘The Ghost Of Tom Joad’ recorded, Springsteen knew what he wanted to do next. It was, he told Robert Santelli, “an acoustic album where I picked up elements of the themes I had worked on in the past and set the stories in the mid Nineties.” Nebraska, this wasn’t. For starters, The Ghost Of Tom Joad had an outline, Springsteen had a clarity of vision. What’s more, he did research to ensure that the voices he inhabited on the album were accurate in representing those people crushed under the wheels of the new world order.
The precision of the storytelling was important, he said. The correct detail could speak volumes about the character, the wrong one could shred the credibility of the story. When both words and music came together, “your voice disappears into the voices of those you’ve chosen to write about”. Springsteen found the characters and listened to them, a method which prompted a number of questions about their behaviour, what they would and wouldn’t do. He tried to locate “the rhythm of their speech and the nature of their expression”.
It sounds like a folk collector’s approach, though instead of collecting songs, Springsteen collected voices. Among the research he did was to immerse himself in Pulitzer Prize winners Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson’s Journey To Nowhere: The Sage Of The New Underclass, whose self-explanatory title provided Springsteen with the guts of ‘Youngstown’ and ‘The New Timer’ on The Ghost Of Tom Joad.
Living in California, “a place where issues that are alive and confronting America”, a place “where you see the political machinations of how the issue of immigration is being used, and a lot of the bullshit that goes down with it”, had its benefits as a source of information.
There were also chance encounters, as he told NME’s Gavin Martin in 1996. “I met a guy in Arizona who told me a story about his brother who rode in a teenage motorcycle gang in the San Fernando Valley, called the Vagos. I just happened to meet this guy by the side of the road in this little motel. I don’t know, it just stayed with me for a very long time and when I went to write it, I kept hearing his voice.”
So Springsteen set about constructing The Ghost Of Tom Joad as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger would have done back in the day, and as the champions of topical song did later on in the Sixties. He equipped himself with knowledge from primary and secondary sources and applied that knowledge to working up narratives that substantiated the lives of those who were merely digits on sociological studies.
The Ghost Of Tom Joad is demanding. Springsteen’s vocal is so hushed that at times you strain to hear, while the melodies are largely low key, unremarkable. This was intentional on Springsteen’s part – apparently “the simplicity and plainness, the austere rhythms” are in keeping with the identities of the characters and how they express themselves. If fidelity to these characters were such an imperative, perhaps he could have delivered some of the immigrant narratives with a Mexican lilt. Pardon my facetiousness. There is much to commend in Springsteen’s determination to make it real. But worthiness doesn’t always sustain the punters’ attention.
For me, the songs actually only came alive in concert on the Born To Stand And Sit Down Tour, also known as The Shut The Fuck Up And Listen Tour. They are among his most accomplished stories, and storytelling is an oral tradition. There are few better exponents of this tradition than Springsteen, as anyone who has listened to his banter on stage will testify.
I saw Springsteen twice within a week on the European leg of the tour, at London’s Royal Albert Hall and Brixton Academy. Kitted out as though he were going to work in the local sweatshop (on a night pass from the big house!), he brought us into the songs in a way the album doesn’t. He caused us to care about the people whose lives he was singing about, just as he cared about them.
This is an important point to make, because many critics questioned Springsteen’s entitlement to sing about issues from which his wealth removed him. They found it hard to stomach that a guy who lived in a $14 million Beverly Hills home was playing at being dirt poor and desperate in these songs. While it’s a legitimate argument, it’s one that cracks under pressure. Springsteen is a writer first and a millionaire second.
His dedication to his writing has always been vocational. He walks in the shoes of those outside his experience, at least metaphorically, to better understand – and help us to better understand – their concerns. As a writer he’s curious about the human condition and recognises that the condition of all humans is not the same – that many, in fact, are in a worse condition than he is or you are or I am. Alongside the writer’s curiosity is Springsteen the man’s compassion. Wealth doesn’t preclude the wealthy from wanting to engage in the cause for social justice.
The album’s first image, almost whispered into being, is from another America, the America of Woody Guthrie, the America of the Great Depression – an America from another lifetime. Except this man, this hobo lumbering along the railroad tracks, destination unknown but far from where he began, belongs to the now. He is not a dustbowl refugee, an Okie fleeing west, but the modern incarnation of those thousands of Joads.
The country may have prospered during the previous six decades, but the march of progress leaves in its wake a trail of poverty, a trail that can be found, in Springsteen’s telling, on the edge of things, in the shadows, where the exiled are hounded by the authorities and kept alive by the kindness of strangers. The soup kitchen still has a place in the most powerful country on the planet, and so too the homeless shelter. The families who sleep in their cars could be straight out of The Grapes Of Wrath.
The highway, so often the way to somewhere better, something better, in the land of Springsteen, is going nowhere. It’s nothing but road (just like Bill Horton realised on Tunnel Of Love’s ‘Cautious Man’), endless road, infinite suffering. And not a sign of Tom Joad anywhere – nobody to carry the fight, nobody to speak up for those who don’t have a voice.
All they have indeed is faith, or what remains of their faith. The good book says the last shall be first, but such prophesy sounds hollow in the cardboard city beneath the underpass. As does the prophesy of the promised land when there’s “a hole in your belly and a gun in your hand”, when you’re laying your head down on solid ground at night and washing in a canal.
This is not the America of MTV, Coca-Cola or Hollywood. Nor the America hailed by Woodrow Wilson as “the only idealistic nation in the world”, the America in which, according to the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”, chief among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. This is an America scarred by police brutality, starving children, violence, hatred, division, unemployment, oppression… All of these things Tom Joad would have stood against, all of these wrongs he would have vowed to right. But there is no Tom Joad. And his spirit has been banished.
‘The Ghost Of Tom Joad’ is Springsteen’s State of the Union address 1995, one you’d never hear from the mouth of a president. The song is a sort of précis, an overview of the underside of American society. It sets the scene for the stories that follow, ghost stories in which lives are haunted by poverty, whether those lives are those of Vietnam veterans, illegal migrants, iron workers, rent boys or drug mules.
Stories like ‘Straight Time’ in which an ex-con, eight years out of the joint, is struggling to stay on the straight and narrow, tormented by his “cold mind”. Or the bank robber and his accomplice (Bonnie to his Clyde) crossing the border into Mexico after a heist, You just know how it’s going to end. This is the aimless driver of Nebraska’s ‘State Trooper’ finally undone by “something in me”.
‘Youngstown’ is a lift from Maharidge and Williamson’s Journey To Nowhere, a eulogy for the immense blast furnace of Youngstown’s Sheet & Tube company in Ohio, nicknamed Jeannette (abbreviated to Jenny in Springsteen’s song), which was eventually demolished in 1997, two years after The Ghost Of Tom Joad. Of course, it’s a eulogy for American industry and the men who worked in it, the men who made the moguls rich enough to forget their names.
‘Sinaloa Cowboys’ takes us into Mexico’s drug heartland, a place where boys become methamphetamine cooks because they can earn half as much money in ten hours as they could toiling in the orchards for a year, despite the life-threatening conditions, the hydriodic acid that burns through your skin and leaves you spitting blood. Such is the fate that befalls Miguel’s younger brother Luis.
‘The Line’ is yet another example of how peerless Springsteen is as a screenwriter in song. It’s the kind of film you’d like John Sayles to direct. The set-up introduces us to a former marine turned border cop, another Springsteen archetype, a man who wants to do the right thing. But then he falls hard for a Mexican migrant girl and breaks the law he’s paid to uphold by helping to bring her family into America. He is undone, this one mistake costing him everything. What becomes of the broken-hearted? He drifts through the migrant towns, a migrant now himself, seeking but never finding his Luisa.
The migrant experience features again in ‘Balboa Park’, the hustlers and the dope smugglers and the dealers and the users doing what they have to, selling what they can, ingesting what they can to survive. ‘Dry Lightning’ is defined by one of those Springsteen aphorisms that should be bolded and italicised and underlined on the lyric sheets – “Ain’t nobody can give nobody/What they really need anyway.”
‘The New Timer’ unites the Tom Joad generation with its descendants, the old vagrant jumping boxcars “since the Great Depression”, the new kid travelling cross country in pursuit of work. It’s a tale of the meanness in the world of which the Charles Starkweather character spoke about on ‘Nebraska’, a meanness illustrated by people “killin’ just to kill”, and of men who lie awake in a foreboding of evil. It’s a tale of outsiders looking in but excluded from “the glow of the saviour’s beautiful light”.
‘Across The Border’ returns to the migrant theme, the narrator, in contrast to all that has gone before, buoyed by dreams of that utopia where “sweet blossoms fill the air”, the pastures roll in colours gold and green and fruit can be picked from the vine.
Throughout The Ghost Of Tom Joad, Springsteen examines, “albeit awkwardly”, according to Bryan K Garman, “the politics of race”. And if his border ballads do assume a non-committal position on the subject, they seem to say that the plight of Mexican migrants is precisely because of their Mexican origins. Or as Jim Cullen writes in Born In The USA: Bruce Springsteen And The American Tradition, “the racism that enmeshes the non-white characters of Tom Joad is not personal, but systemic”. While Cullen identifies this depiction of racism as “an inescapable fog that cannot be fought and only sometimes escaped,” he concedes that Springsteen displays an “increasingly sophisticated understanding of the ways in which oppression depends on silence, ignorance, facelessness at least as much as it does on overt ill will.”
‘Galveston Bay’ shows a side of America that America doesn’t like to acknowledge. A reactionary America. A xenophobic America. An America “for Americans”. And for all that he has turned an honest living as a shrimper since fleeing Vietnam, Le Bin Son will never be that American. Which is why, when hard times hit, his kind are fair game, legitimate targets for the frustration boiling inside Billy Sutter and his Texan compatriots. But when Le defends himself, when he kills these pure progeny of America, he is acquitted by another America – the America that upholds the right to bear arms, the right to self-defence. Billy Sutter swears revenge for his brethren, but when the opportunity arises he allows Le to live – a conscious reprieve on the part of the writer.
“I wanted a character who is driven to do the wrong thing, but does not,” Springsteen said. “He instinctively refuses to add to the violence in the world around him. With great difficulty and against his own grain, he transcends his circumstances. He finds the strength and grace to save himself and the part of the world he touches.”
‘Galveston Bay’ would have been the perfect grace note on which to conclude The Ghost Of Tom Joad. Bad intentions can be transformed into good actions. Compassion, humanity, call it what you will, is a choice.
But Springsteen wants to go out on a laugh and so, in the year Forrest Gump cleaned up at the Academy Awards, he pokes fun at the platitudinous that sugar coats so much of what is wrong with America on ‘My Best Was Never Good Enough’. It’s an amusing but curious parting shot.
After the dual disappointment of Human Touch and Lucky Town, certainly as far as the critics were concerned The Ghost Of Tom Joad restored Springsteen’s reputation as a writer, and an American writer at that. One who penetrated the incessant propaganda pumped out about his country and got to the very heart of it – what made it beat, what made it rotten.
It was, according to Mikhail Gilmore in Rolling Stone, a timely record, being as how these were “times for lamentations, for measuring how much of the American promise has been broken or abandoned, and how much of our figure is being transfigured into a vista of ruin”. Springsteen gave voice “to people who rarely have one in this culture”, an act that, “as we move into the rough times and badlands that lie ahead…will count for more than ever before.”
Mat Smith, in Melody Maker, wrote that Springsteen had illuminated “how the outside forces of chance and fate shape personal destiny in such a way that leaves you with a discernible lump in the throat.”
Springsteen’s only other release in the Nineties was a capacious four-CD box set of material plundered from the archives. Tracks comprised 66 songs, from the John Hammond demo ‘Mary Queen Of Arkansas’ (1972) to the sole outtake from The Ghost Of Tom Joad, ‘Brothers Under The Bridge’. Only Springsteen can explain why this was overlooked in favour of ‘My Best Was Never Good Enough’, a travesty.
It’s a middling collection. Those of us hoping for, or indeed expecting, something from the Nebraska sessions featuring the E Street Band were sorely let down. All we got was an acoustic ‘Born In The USA’ from Colt’s Neck.
There was, however, a significant reunion before the close of the century and the beginning of a new millennium, as Springsteen rounded up the E Street Band for a world tour, 18 years since they had last gone on the road with Born In The USA.
The set included new versions of ‘Mansion On The Hill’ and ‘Atlantic City’ from Nebraska – full band versions that caused the faithful to wonder if this was how the electric sessions might have sounded. Gavin Martin, writing in Uncut more than a decade later, referred to ‘Mansion On The Hill’ as “a moveable feast, relocated from its original austere and foreboding Midwest Nebraska setting to become a Tex-Mex border ballad of awed contemplation”, while ‘Atlantic City’ became “a festering epic of corruption, a declaration of war by a rabble-rousing army of Pogues-style brigands.”
Other than a more muscular arrangement – insistent backing vocals, a slight Nils Lofgren guitar lick, a vein-bursting refrain of “Meet me tonight in Atlantic City” followed by Max Weinberg’s intrusive drum roll at the finale, and the vexatiously obligatory but unnecessary communal handclap – this slow burning band version of ‘Atlantic City’ adds nothing to the original. It would have sounded good on Darkness On The Edge Of Town, say, but it sounds a whole lot better on Nebraska.
‘Mansion On The Hill’ becomes a two-handed ballad – Springsteen and wife sharing the vocal – sweetened by Danny Federici’s accordion solo and Nils Lofgren’s pedal steel. Again, if you’d not heard it before, or if it had appeared on any Springsteen album except Nebraska, you’d be smitten. The fact is, though, it’s impossible to hear the Nebraska songs in any way other than how they were recorded.
Springsteen captured something on that four-track – some kind of spirit that was hovering in the ether at the time – that he never captured before and has never captured since. You see, Nebraska wasn’t a made album, it was an album that just happened. What you hear on it is the act of inventiveness in its purest form – a voice, a sound, a feeling, all channelled through an indefinable essence. A Muse by any other name. Yet why does it need a name?
A new song on the reunion tour provoked hostility from a usually reliable section of Springsteen’s blue-collar constituency, the New York City Police Department. That song was ‘American Skin (41 Shots)’. Several weeks before the Madison Square Garden, New York dates, an African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, had been gunned down by undercover officers outside his apartment in the city. He was shot 41 times. The officers involved were acquitted of any wrongdoing.
“The sheer number of shots seemed to gauge the size of our betrayal of one another,” said Springsteen.
New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the instigator of the macho zero tolerance policy that had supposedly reduced the level of crime on the streets, and police unions called for a boycott of Springsteen’s concerts. When that didn’t work, the unions formed a picket outside the Garden, which, when you think about it, was a bit of an extreme reaction to a song most of them hadn’t even heard. And while it was critical of the police, it wasn’t, according to Springsteen, as anti-police as many thought.
He worked hard for a balanced voice and was acutely aware that a diatribe would serve no valuable purpose – he just wanted to present “the other guy’s point of view”. The idea, as he explained it, was that a “price in blood” was paid for systematic racial injustice, fear and paranoia.
Two years on from this episode, Springsteen crossed paths once more with the NYPD, though this time in completely different and tragic circumstances.