Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

by Warren Zanes

Michael Jackson, mostly quiet throughout a session that went all night, saw Springsteen’s empty Budweiser can and asked someone to take his picture with it. When Michael Jackson is getting his photo taken with your beer can, you could say things are going well career-wise.

I think Nebraska was the big bang of the indie rock that was about making shit alone in your bedroom.

Apparently even Bob Dylan had made his own attempt to see one of Springsteen’s creative spaces, empty and well after the fact. There was a rainy night in Long Branch, New Jersey, 2009, when police picked up Dylan in a neighborhood close to where Springsteen wrote most if not all of the Born to Run album. Some quick if speculative reporting captured the incident.

Soaking wet, Dylan, 68, gave his name to Kristie Buble, a 24-year-old police officer, and informed her that he was in town to headline a concert with country star Willie Nelson and rocker John Mellencamp. She was sceptical.

You couldn’t look in that rental and see all of that then, and you can’t see it now. But we know it happened there, so we see differently, with our imaginations as much as our eyes.

The River implicitly argued that imperfection is the essential ingredient of rock and roll performance.

We wanted open room mikes, smashing drums (the snare sound on Elvis’s “Hound Dog” was my Holy Grail), crashing cymbals, instruments bleeding into one another and a voice sounding like it was fighting out from the middle of a brawling house party. We wanted the sound of less control. This was how many of our favorite records from the early days of rock ’n’ roll had been recorded. You miked the band and the room. You heard the band and the room. The sonic characteristics of the room were essential in the quality and personality of your recording. The room brought the messiness, the realness, the can’t-get-out-of-each-other’s-way togetherness of musicians in search of “that sound.”

He’d had a number one album and a top ten single, but if you threw out a chair in Colts Neck, New Jersey, in 1981, there was a chance it might end up in Bruce Springsteen’s living room.

The program’s name played on that of a legendary radio program out of the American South, King Biscuit Time. The latter first aired in 1941, coming out of Helena, Arkansas, and featuring Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood Jr. From 1951 forward its host was “Sunshine” Sonny Payne, who would start the program declaring, “Pass the biscuits, ’cause it’s King Biscuit Time!” In those days the sponsor got its nod right up front, nothing quiet about it. King Biscuit Time was a significant megaphone for the Delta Blues, reaching a wide audience that included the likes of B. B. King, Levon Helm, and hundreds of others who were going to make something from what they heard. In 1973, the show’s name was adopted and adapted, given a hippie slant, as the King Biscuit Flower Hour. The first program featured Blood, Sweat & Tears, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and a young Bruce Springsteen playing Max’s Kansas City. It was just after Springsteen’s debut release.

For the film’s two featured actors, Spacek and Martin Sheen, it was their first leading roles in a feature. They didn’t challenge the director who gave them the opportunity; they followed him. They had just stepped into their dreams, why step back? Sheen later recalled: Terry called one night and said, “I want you to play the part.” I had to get up very early the next morning to go to work, and I was driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in a little Mazda. I was listening to a Dylan album I was fond of, and the song “Desolation Row” was playing, and the sun was rising, and it hit me that I was going to play the role of my life. I had been a professional actor since I was eighteen. I was thirty-one, I had four children, I was struggling, doing a lot of television—a lot of bad, silly work just to make ends meet—and I wasn’t having any luck in features to speak of, and here was the part of my life. And I was overwhelmed, and I pulled off to the side of the road, and I wept uncontrollably.

By most accounts Malick was a kind of visual obsessive. He put the light before the narrative, if only because he believed that light had a way of telling some of the best stories.

That looseness, that light, whether in Badlands or in Presley’s first Sun sessions, was a thing you might get to only once in your career. It happens quickly in an artist’s trajectory that they begin to know too much to know so little again.

The spree was the first such serial killings to be told as a television news story.

‘She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’

Nebraska closes on “Reason to Believe,” which might be summarized thus: there isn’t one.

To increase the quality of the recording, TEAC doubled the tape speed from that of a normal consumer cassette recorder, from 1⅞ inches per second (ips) to 3¾ ips.

Those professional machines sent the tape over the recording heads at a speed almost ten times faster than the TEAC 144. More tape over the recording heads meant better quality. All that said, the TEAC 144 was still the first major bid to establish a territory between studio-grade recording gear and the cassette recorders that kids played with.

The cheap devices using cassette tape had a special quality, the warmth of magnetic tape, the rich sound of tape saturation, all colored by built-in limiting/compression. What Van Zandt describes, however, was not multitrack recording. It was one-track, mono recording put down on a cassette, the tape width roughly one-eighth of an inch as opposed to the two inches for professional tape.

Once Batlan set up the TEAC 144, Springsteen, unencumbered, got right to work. By most accounts, the night of January 3, 1982, was the session that captured the bulk of the Nebraska recordings.

But not only did Springsteen use the Panasonic for mixdown; he also, in the mix process, put all the recordings through a Gibson Echoplex, which put a layer of early Sun Records–style slap echo on, well, everything: vocals, guitars, harmonica, percussion, glockenspiel. As decisions go, to mix every recorded track on a multitrack recording through a single effect is certainly not the kind of choice professional engineers tended to make when they were creating recordings for commercial release.

Born in the U.S.A.—you sent me the Paul Schrader script which I did not have the chance to read yet but I did whip up this little ditty purloining it’s [sic] title. On this number song should be done very hard rockin’. This song is in very rough shape but it is as good as I can get it at the moment. It might have potential.

No one knows what’s going to happen once recording begins. Like any other artistic enterprise, it’s a process never fully in control of itself. The gods have the final word.

Sitting on top of two-thirds of Born in the U.S.A., including five recordings that would become top ten singles, Springsteen was somewhere else.

But the double album idea didn’t last long. No doubt that was due in part to some lingering double album fatigue. The River was still too close.

Imagine an office in which individual workstations have equipment from different eras: a typewriter in one, a Macintosh from 1985 in the next, and, in the following cubicle, a MacBook Pro from 2022. It wouldn’t happen. When the new stuff comes in, the old goes out. Computers, printers, copiers. In a recording studio, because different eras of technology do come together, a common language must be found.

Bruce brought that four-track machine in, and we had the guy from the Power Station modify it so we had four individual outputs. They transferred a bunch of these songs from the cassette onto two-inch tape, thinking, “Maybe he can play along with himself.” Nothing worked.

Time’s Man of the Year in 1982? The personal computer, the magazine’s first nonhuman in that role.

“Atlantic City,” Springsteen’s first music video.

There would be critics who couldn’t help but take pride in going in the other direction. Nick Kent, in his 1974 review of Springsteen’s sophomore recording, declared that Springsteen “sings like he wants you to believe a lot of things which don’t quite ring true, and maybe that’s why I FIND HIM SO OFFENSIVE.”

He said, “Oh, you like Nebraska?” And he put a Jimmie Rodgers record in my hand.

Okay, but why, one has to ask, did being a great live performer cause people to lose sight of what a great songwriter that live performer is? Being a composer, a bandleader, and a showman all in one hadn’t confused anyone when it came to Duke Ellington’s gifts.

Unlike Bob Dylan, who so often seems like a species of one, too singular to model one’s artistic identity on, Springsteen was an example that many could and would follow. By 1982 he’d established a territory for the singer-songwriter that was wider than the tradition had suggested.

I just had confidence that this moment was meant to be, that it’s part of the story. And Nebraska was part of that story, too.” But Landau wasn’t saying any of that to Springsteen just then. Landau was listening.

Landau had discovered early that managing Springsteen had far more to do with timing than generating ideas. He’d learned to trust that Springsteen was on a path, even if that path was, in some sections, unmarked. In fact, Landau often protected Springsteen’s right to get lost.