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

by Warren Zanes

From nowhere, a despair overcomes me; I feel an envy of these men and women and their late-summer ritual, the small pleasures that bind them and this town together…. Right now, all I can think of is that I want to be amongst them, of them, and I know I can’t. I can only watch. That’s what I do. I watch…and I record. I do not engage, and if and when I do, my terms are so stringent, they suck the lifeblood and possibility out of any good thing, and real thing, I might have. It’s here, in this little river town, that my life as an observer, an actor staying cautiously and safely out of the emotional fray, away from the consequences, the normal messiness of living and loving, reveals its cost to me. At thirty-two, in the middle of the USA, on this night, I’ve just exceeded the once-surefire soul-and-mind-numbing power of my rock ’n’ roll meds…. I feel a deeper anxiety than I’ve ever known. Why here? Why tonight? Thirty-four years later, I still don’t know why.

“All I do know,” he goes on to write, “is as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier…much heavier.” But that wasn’t all he knew. By the end of that passage he moves in on the more formidable truth: “Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness…. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.”

“Despair” is the word Springsteen uses in his memoir. When he got to Los Angeles, walking in the door of his new home, he wanted to leave immediately, to just start driving again. But to where? Every road trip, every tour, was going to end, and the endings were getting harder.

I’m not sure how they connect or even if they do connect. I’m a little hesitant to make that immediate connection. WZ: To make it causal? Springsteen: I’m just not sure that that’s the way creativity works and functions. [Pauses.] But you did have to put yourself in that isolated place to make that record. My hometown is ten minutes to the west. I did and still do a lot of living there. I go back and plumb those mysteries to this day.

On Margate Sands I can connect Nothing with nothing.

I’m not sure how they connect or even if they do connect. I’m a little hesitant to make that immediate connection. WZ: To make it causal? Springsteen: I’m just not sure that that’s the way creativity works and functions. [Pauses.] But you did have to put yourself in that isolated place to make that record. My hometown is ten minutes to the west. I did and still do a lot of living there. I go back and plumb those mysteries to this day.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My humble people who expect Nothing.

Robert Palmer remarked of Nebraska, “It’s been a long time since a mainstream rock star made an album that asks such tough questions and refuses to settle for easy answers—let alone an album suggesting that perhaps there are no answers.”

Odysseus

But his power comes from exactly this, the relinquishing. From that position, he kills off the suitors who have taken his home. The point being that the only way to restore his place as man and hero was to first be nobody.

personal odyssey. Springsteen: I know that with Nebraska I was interested in making myself as invisible as possible. I just wanted to be another ghost. On that particular record. It spoke to some need in me. Some roaring need. That might have been a result of having had the kind of success that I had. But I needed to know that I could go back and be nobody. If I really needed to. It was an interesting moment. And, yes, then Born in the U.S.A. became possible.

“Johnny Bye Bye” and “Follow That Dream” were songs that allowed Springsteen to linger on the idea of Elvis Presley, as myth, symbol, and man. Presley had given Springsteen the desire to be a performer, and a model for what it looked like. But Presley’s success came so fast and took on such unprecedented proportions that Presley never had a chance to ask himself the question, “Should I really go after the big success?”

The real money, some would argue, is with those who sell the stuff, not those who make it. The dealers, not the growers.

“It was funny. We’d lived there. Always. But yet we’d go sightseeing.” Same town, new ways of seeing it. Sightseeing in the place you know best. That’s what listening to great songs and recordings is like. Some would say that the special ones are just better for sightseeing, even if you think of them as your own backyard. Songs like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” You could drive past that sucker a thousand times and still come up with new ideas about what’s going on in there.

But the writing itself is still the imaginative process of a single person, looking out a window at something that isn’t there. It’s educated conjuring.