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Old 06-02-2011, 12:21 PM   #20 (permalink)
Trollheart
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Default American badlands, acoustic highways


Nebraska ---- Bruce Springsteen --- 1982 (Columbia)


There are a lot of singers, a lot of good singers and some great singers, but the proof of the pudding can often be the answer to the question: how does the singer/star stand up without his/her band behind them? In other words, are they accomplished enough an artist to stand out there and do their thing solo, or do they perhaps hide behind a great guitar player, keyboard wizard or drummer? Bruce Springsteen has long been acknowledged as one of the music world's premier singer/songwriters, a consummate artist and entertainer, and in many ways a voice for his age. He had nothing to prove really, having “made it” by the early eighties with albums like “Darkness on the edge of town”, “Born to run” and of course “The river”, but when he released “Nebraska”, only two years after that chart-smashing double album, it was very much against the grain and not what people had been expecting, least of all his fans.

Recorded originally as demo tracks for the next E Street Band album, every track is acoustic, sparse and with very little in the way of production, leading to a very raw feeling on each. Springsteen eventually decided to release the demos as the next album, and “Nebraska” was born, as he recounts below:

"I was just doing songs for the next rock album, and I decided that what always took me so long in the studio was the writing. 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. So this time, I got a little*Teac*four-track cassette machine, and I said, I'm gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin' 'em, then I'll teach 'em to the band. I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin' else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a littleEchoplex*that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It's amazing that it got there, 'cause I was carryin' that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of week, just draggin' it around. Finally, we realized, "Uh-oh, that's the album." Technically, it was difficult to get it on a disc. The stuff was recorded so strangely, the needle would read a lot of distortion and wouldn't track in the wax. We almost had to release it as a cassette."

(From interview with “Rolling Stone” magazine, December 1984. Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Whether it happened as he relates above, or whether it was all planned ahead of time to be this way, what emerged was an album which has polarised opinion among his fans. Some loved it, seeing it as the “real” Springsteen, stripped of --- well, everything! --- and the man going back to basics. Others thought it was a bleak, depressing record, and after the highs of 1980's “The River”, it was a real come-down. Personally, I love it, and though it's not an album you listen to if you want to be cheered up (!), it stands as a classic in the man's considerable repertoire.

Kicking off with the title track, you get a good idea of what you're in for here. Low, mournful harmonica, sparse acoustic guitar, no percussion whatever, and Springsteen's powerful yet quiet voice, like a prophet crying in the wildeness. Similar to Steve Earle's “Billy Austin”, “Nebraska” tells the tale, in the first person, of a “Bonnie and Clyde” couple who are so bored with their humdrum lives that they decide to go on a killing spree in a car: “From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska/ With a sawed-off four-ten on my lap/ Through the badlands of Wyoming/ I killed everything in my path.” Apparently this song is based on tbe real-life killer Charles Starkweather. There's no explanation at the end, no reason why the couple did what they did, when they're caught and sentenced to death: “They declared me unfit to live/ Said into the great void my soul'd be hurled/ They wanna know why I did what I did/ Sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world.”

These are not songs of love, nor redemption, nor good-time songs. They're not songs of hope, but mostly of depair, as the characters realise they can never break out of their situation, like “Johnny 99” later in the album, or the unnamed driver in “State Trooper”. There's no escape for these people, and the sense of brooding frustration that coats every track, every line, bleeds through the album like liquid desperation. It's America, far from the land of the free, or the home of the brave, that Springsteen sings about here. It's honest, ordinary, unremarkable for the most part people, going about their dull lives and doing their best to survive, doing what they have to do to make it through to the next day.

“Atlantic City” is a “Jungleland” for the 80s, a more uptempo track but still in essence a tale of people trapped by their circumstamces and their station in life: “I'm tired of comin' out on the losin' end/ So last night I met this guy/ And I'm gonna do a little favour for him.” The aforementioned “Johnny 99” is almost funny in its way, as the poor guy gets 99 years for an attempted bank robbery, but the message is clear as Johnny makes his plea: “Your honour, I do believe I'd be better off dead/ And if you can take a man's life for the thoughts that's in his head/ Won't you sit back in that chair/ Think it over just one more time/ Let 'em shave off my hair/ And put me on that execution line?”

After the bleak introduction of “Nebraska” things do rock out a little more with tracks like the above, “Atlantic City” and later on “Open all night”, but mostly they're dark, desolate ballads which always tell a story. The paucity of instrumentation and lack of a band pushes you to concentrate on the content of the songs, to listen to the stories, like the tough decision faced by the cop in “Highway Patrolman” as he tries to balance doing his job with looking after his troublesome brother, Frankie. “I catch him when he's fallin'/ Like any brother would/ Man turns his back on his family/ Well he just ain't no good.”

One of the best tracks, in my opinion, on the album, comes up next, the toe-tappingly catchy “State Trooper”, with nothing but Springsteen's voice and his strumming guitar to carry the song, his voice echoing into the darkness like the cry of the damned on a highway to oblivion. The guitar work gets quite loud and insistent here, the closest to electric on the album, apart from the later “Open all night”, which truly rocks out. Before that, there's a stark contrast between Springsteen's current status of rock god with the kid sung about in “Used cars”, as he declares “Mister the day the lottery I win/ I ain't ever gonna ride in no used car again.”

Then we're up to the standout track, as already pointed towards earlier. By far the fastest and rockiest, and even most upbeat of the songs on “Nebraska”, “Open all night” is a fifties-style rocker that just radiates exuberance, joy in the face of bleak despair, for a while. A real “cars and girls” song, the kind of thing Springsteen made his name on, it's a real “Two fingers to the world”, and a short oasis of hope in a sea of despair. In some ways, it really doesn't belong on the album, which is so dark, and yet, through every night must shoot some shaft of light, be it the first glimmers of the dawn, the stars blinking in the sky high above, or just the moon peeking out from a cloud for just a moment, before it is once again swallowed by the night, and the world plunged back into darkness. "Open all night" is that shaft of light on "Nebraska".

If you approach “Nebraska” expecting another “Born in the USA” or even “Tunnel of love”, you'll be disappointed, but if you want to hear WHY Springsteen was once rated as the best songer/songwriter since Dylan, this is the album you want to listen to. Just leave the razor blades out of reach, okay?

TRACKLISTING

1. Nebraska
2. Atlantic City
3. Mansion on the hill
4. Johnny 99
5. Highway patrolman
6. State trooper
7. Used cars
8. Open all night
9. My father's house
10. Reason to believe



Suggested further listening: "Born to run", "Darkness on the edge of town", "The river", "Tunnel of love", "Born in the USA"
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Last edited by Trollheart; 10-24-2019 at 07:19 PM.
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