How a Quiet Springsteen Album Inspired The Movie About Him

5 Min Read

Welcome to the third edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are on the mountaintop of rock ‘n’ roll. The wildest dreams you had as a child and teen, watching Elvis and then the Beatles invent rock stardom whole cloth, have become real in your life. You and your band can tour the world and sell out entire arenas thanks to worldwide acclaim for your last three albums. It took a while for you to launch—it wasn’t until your third album that people realized you were the real deal—but once you did, you’re pretty sure anything you touch will turn to gold. With the tour for your fifth album winding down, you’re faced with time off for the first time in more than five years, when your career took off. You’re back home, and thinking about everything that could have gone wrong had things not gone right.

What would you write about? What kind of album would you make?

The answer, for Bruce Springsteen, was to make Nebraska, his best album (yeah, I said it, with my chest!), and one even his staunchest detractors have to admit is really, really good. Instead of the ‘70s rock and Phil Spector Wall of Sound bombast of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, Bruce is heard on the 1982 album with just his guitar, a mic, and a harmonica, recording over a prehistoric 4-track machine. Instead of songs about the onward thrust towards the world ahead of you that’s ready to be bent to your will, Bruce looks back and looks inward, examining his personal history of abuse, blue collar desperation, depression, and a historical kind of weariness that you can feel in your bones. He intended to record fleshed out versions of all the songs, but instead opted to just release the demos, a spiritual and musical cleansing that cleared the way for what came next: Born in the U.S.A..

This is an era of Springsteen that is easy to mythologize: he didn’t do any interviews or promotion of the album in 1982, and barely talked about it in his own autobiography. It’s maybe the only era of the Boss’s career it’s easy for fans to hang stories and theorizing on. Which is why it’s the basis for the new movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, starring everyone’s favorite sad man, Jeremy Allen White. I haven’t seen the movie, but I bet it rocks; a depressive movie about a depressive album is like catnip for me in the Autumn months. The idea that the smallest, most interior album by Bruce would be his biopic is a left turn you have no choice but to respect. He could have made the Born to Run movie and done gangbusters!

But none of the mythologizing or the movie would be possible if Nebraska doesn’t hold up, 43 odd years later. Like I said above, it’s still absurdly good. I mean, listen to this:

Bruce somehow turns a song about a real-life Philly mobster with a case of childhood chickenpox (the chicken man) and his crew taking over Atlantic City into a sad ballad about a man taking his girl to the same town, despite there being no hope, no jobs, and no cash to do so. This is where the 4-track recordings become a wonder to behold: Bruce howling over his own voice in the background, the harmonica being too high in the mix. This is raw, uncut dope straight from the source.

The characters of Nebraska are down and out, laid off, sad, one bad move away from it all blowing up. None more than the titular “Johnny 99,” a laid off auto worker who shoots a night clerk at a gas station in a drunken stupor. When sentenced to 99 years in prison, he begs for execution instead. In its way, it captures desperation the same way something like “Born to Run” captured optimism.

The most devastating song is “My Father’s House,” a song about a man dreaming about his father and waking up and realizing he should try to rekindle his relationship with him. They’ve been estranged, but the narrator goes to visit his dad’s old house and finds out his dad moved away some time ago. He’s left unfulfilled, and unsettled, since there’s no way for him to contact his dad. The Freudian implications are rich, the ties to Springsteen’s own problems with his dad impossible to ignore.

When Bruce and his engineer finished the album, all they had was a literal cassette tape filled with songs. When studio sessions to flesh them out didn’t sound like how Springsteen wanted them to, he asked for the original album to be released, making it one of the first home-recorded albums ever released publicly to a wide-audience. The technology to take a cassette tape and turn it into a widely distributed album had to be perfected on the fly. As such, every copy of the album you hear is copied from that original tape, any hiss or atmospherics present from the days in 1981 and 1982 when Bruce recorded them.

As you head to the multiplex this fall, do yourself a favor and spin Nebraska: The sound of an artist cracking himself open, and figuring out what’s inside. He’d make many more albums after it, but none as lacerating as this one.

To shop Victrola's Bruce Springsteen vinyl collection, go here.

End of post bonus: The Band covering “Atlantic City” absolutely smokes: