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

by Warren Zanes

WZ: After finishing Nebraska, you said you felt it was your best work. Springsteen: Yeah, I felt that it was. Still may be.

The truth was that Springsteen was a little lost. He was only a matter of months from a breakdown that he’d speak of very candidly decades later. The role he’d been given as a public figure was at odds with what he was experiencing behind the image he’d created. He went into a solitude that was more powerful than he was himself.

When Nebraska was first released, and because no one knew what was going on with Springsteen, it looked to some like an act of defiance. To others it seemed a terrible career choice. There were people who loved it for both reasons, and my old band was among them. Nebraska seemed to take up some of punk rock’s unfinished business, which was substantial.

Then Nebraska came along, a major release by a major artist, an album that was cutting deals with no one. It might not have sounded like punk rock, but it sure behaved like it.

music writer Bryant Kitching described it as “punk as fuck.”

Springsteen has lived with the joy and burden of people wanting his time. The intimacy of the music brings something out in people. He’s probably had to scrape off hundreds of us just to stay on schedule.

He described it to me as “an accident start to finish” but also as the album that “still might be [his] best.”

Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected

recollected in tranquillity.”

“What else you got?” Whether it was intended to or not, that response shifted the energy in the room. Frankly, I’d never seen an interview start like that. “What else you got?” The room belonged to Springsteen from that point forward.

I felt that hollowness. Part of it was just my time, I was thirty-two, thirty-three. I was living literally five minutes up the road from here. It was right before my first big crash, my depressive crash, you know, that I had in 1982. This was just before that, and there was a lot of strange stuff in the air. In my life, I guess.

Shifting, defining, rich in misunderstanding, glorious, sick with hidden aspirations, delicate beyond comprehension: bands were the mystery they all called home.

lost one singing of lost ones.

As herd animals, band members do their best work when they can think with one mind, when their shared interests bring them together in some clumsy yet glorious movement forward. “Look, there’s water over there. Let’s go get some.” But when one of them wanders off by himself, looking for a thing the others don’t have in mind…it’s a different experience of the prairie. Gone is the oneness.

“I’m an alienated person by nature,” Springsteen told Brian Hiatt in 2010. “Always have been, still am to this day. It continues to be an issue in my life, in that I’m always coming from the outside, and I’m always trying to overcome my own internal reticence and alienation. Which is funny, because I throw myself the opposite way onstage, but the reason I do that is because while the stage and all those people are out there, the abyss is under my heels, and I always feel it back there.”

Suicide called themselves “punk” as early as 1970, a year after Woodstock and somewhere around Johnny Rotten’s fourteenth birthday, well before the term’s usage soared. The word was printed in their flyers. But come 1976 and 1977, when punk emerged as a phenomenon, Suicide didn’t look like punk, if only because they lacked some of the genre’s defining features, such as a drummer and a guitar player. They weren’t like the Ramones or the Clash, Elvis Costello and the Attractions or Blondie. There was a classification dilemma, based in part on all that was missing. It was two men, one doing things with a microphone, the other playing electronic instruments, early synthesizers and drum machines, among other things.

“Early Elvis, Little Richard, Johnny Cash,” Vega told one interviewer, trying to explain what music mattered to him most. “They represented that lonely man on the lonely street in the middle of a lonely nowhere. They’re singing. They’re doing their thing. It’s a loner thing.” Unlike many of the critics who reviewed Suicide over the years, Springsteen detected this thread of influence in the music. “I’ve liked Suicide for a long time,” he told Mojo. “If Elvis came back from the dead, I think he would sound like Alan Vega.”

The “unforgiving” aspect was, of course, in both the recording’s sound and the story told. If Vega was inspired by the 1950s, it was a 1950s of madness, of violence, a shadow world that lay far, far from Pat Boone’s house.

“Yeah, I guess Alan Vega was more of a performance artist than a singer-songwriter,” Springsteen told me. “And we shared that interest in early rock and roll. The ’60s is a whole different ball of wax. The fundamental nature of the roots of where I come from is pre-’60s. The E Street Band itself. After ’64, we’re not that influenced by psychedelia and all that kind of music. We’re kind of rooted in blue-collar, 1950s aesthetic. I was always sort of just a circumstantial hippie; the few years that I lived that lifestyle, it was just, I got thrust into it. By life. But I connected with Alan on a musical level, among other things.”

As Springsteen labored to finish The River, reconceptualized as a double album, Suicide got his interest. They weren’t a band, not really. They were a collaboration, a duo, closer to art rock than to rock and roll. They didn’t sound like any of the references Springsteen had thrown out over the years. But they stuck with Springsteen, like a thing growing inside him as he tended to other business.

Joyce] Hyser

He felt as if he no longer belonged with the people he grew up with and wrote about, but neither did he feel at home where he’d ended up, as a celebrity.

There’s this song, “Jungle Rock” by Hank Mizell. Where is Hank Mizell? What happened to him? What a mysterious person, what a ghost. And you put that thing on and you can see him. You can see him standing in some little studio, way back when, and just singing that song. No reason [laughs]. Nothing gonna come of it. Didn’t sell. That wasn’t no Number One record, and he wasn’t playin’ no big arena after it, either. But what a moment, what a mythic moment, what a mystery. Those records are filled with mystery. Like these wild men came out from somewhere, and man, they were so alive. The joy and the abandon.

the child, living in a world before romance and class begin to reorganize life:

“I think that if an adult is singing about class,” the songwriter Dave Alvin says of the song, “it can come across as dogmatic, where if a child paints the picture, there’s that sense of wonder. It draws out something even deeper.

And that’s when it went from “mystical,” to use Springsteen’s word, to dark and troubled.

“Hundred years from now, what’s gonna play well?” he said. “That record will play pretty well. It’s just one of those records. If people are interested, that represents a particular place and time. It has a particular view of America and tells a particular kind of story. That record will always stand up. It’ll always hold up.”

More than any other record he made, Nebraska was one that he would later explain with reference to a strangely specific list of inspirations and source materials. Most of it had some connection to the 1950s of his childhood; all of it had characters and settings that carried traces of the same “unforgivingness” he found in Suicide. If Nebraska was a mystery of sorts, the clues given to understand it were these: Charles Laughton’s film The Night of the Hunter, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Robert Frank’s book of photographs The Americans, and, most conspicuously, Terrence Malick’s Badlands.

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. For his own part, Springsteen had been there as a young record maker, and some part of him was determined to get back there again—no matter that he was five albums into a major career.

“the most attention he had ever received in his life, and it was worth cutting that life short for these few days of infamy.”

“trans-generational haunting,” that suggests the trauma from one generation can pass not just to the next generation but even skip over to the generation after that.

It was almost like he was seeing how far his empathy, and ours, could extend. It would have been different, I imagine, if he’d labored over the songs rather than just letting them come fast. “It was the people in the songs,” Scott Kempner says. You never hate Johnny 99. You feel for him. They take his house away, he gets drunk, he kills somebody. You still don’t hate him. He’s all instinct. Nothing else in there but pure instinct. We all know a little about that, even if something finally keeps us in check. We see ourselves in there,

About half of Nebraska’s songs are about people reacting to this thing that’s destroying them by trying to destroy something else.

It’s a rare, rare thing to come across a record like that, any kind of work like that. And it’s so well done. He paints his masterpiece of America as a brand and what it does to people. To me, Nebraska is an album-length description of how America has struggled to find its soul, has never had much of an identity beyond the brand that’s been sold over and over again to people living here. But lives are lived behind the brand, and Springsteen is unearthing them, exposing them to the light.

Writer Toby D’Anna describes Flannery O’Connor’s short stories as shining “lights in moments of incredible darkness.” O’Connor became known for coaxing something monumental from the stillness of American life.

“To the hard of hearing you shout,” O’Connor explained, “and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Grotesques, really.

Springsteen spoke further of Flannery O’Connor: The really important reading that I did began in my late twenties, with authors like Flannery O’Connor. There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about. They were a big, big revelation. She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn’t be getting it. It was always at the core of every one of her stories—the way that she’d left that hole there, that hole that’s inside of everybody. There was some dark thing—a component of spirituality—that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own.

O’Connor’s stories didn’t hinge on redemption. Among her most lasting images is that of the traveling salesman’s Bible in the story “Good Country People,” a book hollowed out and containing a bottle of booze, some condoms, and a deck of cards with naked women on them. Just when you think it’s one thing, the Good Book, it becomes another. The grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” comes into her moment of grace, a word O’Connor liked, only as the killer on the loose, the Misfit, holds a gun in her face. In that instant, late in the story, she sees his humanity as it’s bound up with her own…and then she’s dead. “ ‘She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’ ” In Flannery O’Connor’s words, she was after those moments when she could reveal “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

the night of January 3, 1982, was the session that captured the bulk of the Nebraska recordings.

But you have to make sure the technology doesn’t outpace the humanity…. It didn’t matter if a studio was a shiny, state-of-the-art outfit or a raggedy little room whose jerry-rigged equipment was held together with tape and whatever else was on hand: magic was laid down for the rest of the world to hear. —Quincy Jones, foreword to Temples of Sound

“My big mistake,” he insisted, “was leaving the Nebraska version of ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ off of Nebraska. I should have put it on there. I could have easily had it on both records. It would have made complete sense, and it would have been a fine part of the Nebraska record. It fit perfectly.”

“Here’s the next Bruce Springsteen release.” Rough home demos. Mastered at a low level. No singles. First track is about a serial killer. No tour or press. If you could make a list of the things a record company does not want to hear…

Nebraska, even if inadvertently, saw one kind of isolation coming as it looked back on another.

It’s the Martin Scorsese quote, something like, “Your job as an artist is to make the audience care about your obsessions.” His great films have come when he’s done that. My good songs are when I’ve done that. So I was confident that I could do this. I could make my audience care about these people and stories and this kind of record.

“The thing about Springsteen, and, really, a lot of the really great artists, is that they get famous for something, and then it obscures some of their deepest gifts,” Dave Alvin insisted. “That applies to Merle Haggard, and, in a way, it applies to Bob Dylan. With Bruce Springsteen, I think his abilities as a performer being what they are, they sometimes keep people from seeing just how great he is as a songwriter. It may sound odd, because he’s obviously recognized as a songwriter. But I don’t think he gets quite what he’s due. When I sat with Nebraska, I was sitting with one hell of a songwriter.”

You can lose sight of him as the great songwriter he is. So in that way, Nebraska stands as his best record. I’ve never changed that opinion, since it came out. I think it’s a courageous record.

But she also wondered about another artist, her father, Johnny Cash. “I sent Nebraska to my dad,” she explained. “I said, ‘This is a record you’ll clearly like.’ And, yeah, I was right, my dad loved Nebraska.

My dad ended up recording a couple songs from Nebraska, ‘Highway Patrolman’ and ‘Johnny 99.’ ”

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that’s the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up—either religious or social laws—become meaningless. Things just get really dark. You lose those constraints, and then anything goes. The forces that set that in motion, I don’t know exactly what they’d be. I think just a lot of frustration, lack of findin’ somethin’ that you can hold on to, lack of contact with people, you know?

That’s one of the most dangerous things, I think—isolation…. Nebraska was about that American isolation: what happens to people when they’re alienated from their friends and their community and their government and their job. Because those are the things that keep you sane, that give meaning to life in some fashion. And if they slip away, and you start to exist in some void where the basic constraints of society are a joke, then life becomes kind of a joke. And anything can happen. —Bruce Springsteen, speaking with Kurt Loder,