“It is just Springsteen and his sparse vocals seeming to sing out into the empty expanse of the American West and its sprawling landscapes where hope—at least until the final track—is nowhere to be found. One can feel it was recorded in winter.”
Bruce Springsteen turns 75 today. It is always jolting to hear of someone one associates with being young having lived now for three quarters of a century, first Paul McCartney, then Mick Jagger, and now Bruce Springsteen. I remember how he looked, long hair flowing, on the cover of Born to Run, and how he sang of being young in tracks like “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” which he recorded when he was just 24. It reminds me of what Charles Krauthammer wrote on the occasion of the death of his brother, Marcel, unable to imagine him aged and, then, gone: “Whenever I look at that picture, I know what we were thinking at the moment it was taken: It will forever be thus. Ever brothers. Ever young. Ever summer.”
Springsteen certainly won’t be remembered for his vocals. And many friends of mine, once fans, have tired of Springsteen over his outspoken political views. He will be remembered, though, for his anthems about ordinary Americans in the second half of the 20th century (a staunch egalitarian, he used to hate being called “the Boss”), as well as his unending affection for his home state of New Jersey. (New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has declared September 23rd “Springsteen Day.”) And he has always been a rocker—in his 70s, just as in his 20s. It is perhaps for that reason, many of his fans thought he was being so true to himself when, for his second marriage, he wed Patti Scialfa, a longtime member of the E Street Band, instead of another model or European beauty queen. For me, though, like with John Prine, I appreciate Springsteen foremost as a lyricist. He has that rare talent among songwriters of being able to tell a story while also leaving one with the most quotable of lines, a lyricist of both the narrative and the aphorism.
Think “Thunder Road,” in the minds of perhaps most listeners, his enduring masterpiece:
“The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison’s singing for the lonely
Hey, that’s me and I want you only
Don’t turn me home again
I just can’t face myself alone again”
And then there is that striking opening of “Jungleland,” the album’s last track, and after 42 seconds (characterized by the violin and then the piano), his voice comes on: “The Rangers had a homecoming/In Harlem late last night.” Then, after a long interlude, punctuated by a saxophone solo in which Clarence Clemons channels his idol, King Curtis, Springsteen returns: “Beneath the city, two hearts beat/Soul engines running through a night so tender…In the tunnels uptown, the Rat’s own dream guns him down.” Both of these tracks, along with the almost equally as memorable “Meeting Across the River,” appear on Born to Run, released on August 25, 1975.
Seven years later, after having released Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River in the meantime, came Nebraska. There is little of boardwalk hijinks or the honky-tonk accordion from early albums such as The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, and it was not immensely popular with many of his fans. However, in an interview last year with CBS News Sunday Morning, Springsteen said: “If I had to pick one album out and say, ‘This is going to represent you 50 years from now,’ I’d pick Nebraska.” Written amid a period of depression in his own life, there is a bleakness and hopelessness that characterize the tracks of Nebraska, paralleling his descriptions within of places like the Wyoming Badlands. Thanks, in part, to a 1993 cover by The Band, “Atlantic City” may now be the album’s best known track:
“Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies some day comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City”
It is a song of resignation to the inevitable sung by a man on borrowed time who had gotten himself in the debt of the mob. And later, through “Highway Patrolman,” Springsteen sings of failing crops in the fictional “Michigan County,” while a down-on-his-luck-farmer-turned-policeman turns a blind eye—out of fraternal loyalty—to his troubled brother who had just returned to their hometown after leaving the Army.
But it is the album’s title track, which tells the story of the 1957-8 killing spree perpetrated by Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend/accomplice Caril Ann Fugate, that—at least to me—remains most unforgettable:
“I saw her standing on her front lawn
Just a-twirling her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir
And ten innocent people died…
Sheriff, when the man pulls that switch, sir
And snaps my poor head back
You make sure my pretty baby
Is sittin’ right there on my lap”
Although in previous albums, including ones I have mentioned, Springsteen makes inroads into plunging the minds of his song’s characters, nowhere is this accomplished more successfully than in Nebraska, with his exploration of the inner thoughts of a serial killer awaiting execution being the most shining example. (Though the son looking for peace in his long troubled relationship with his father in “My Father’s House” is a close second.) The album, which was produced amid a songwriting binge, is genre-bending, bleak, and haunting. It tells ten stories, an American musical analog perhaps to James Joyce’s The Dubliners, sans a band accompanying him and often marked by a wistful harmonic. It is just Springsteen and his sparse vocals seeming to sing out into the empty expanse of the American West and its sprawling landscapes where hope—at least until the final track—is nowhere to be found. One can feel it was recorded in winter.
As much as future generations may know Springsteen’s work just through a few hit singles, their covers, or “Born in the USA” blaring before a political candidate takes the stage and, as much as I used to enjoy queuing up Springsteen’s offbeat Western anthem over 8-minutes-long “Outlaw Pete,” what I will remember most about Springsteen—as it seems he would want—is Nebraska, particularly its title track, and its closing line, which seems to linger even after the whole album has been played: “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”.
Erich J. Prince is the editor-in-chief of Merion West.
