Please Don’t Stop Me: 40 Years of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’
Decades after its release, the haunted highways and haunted characters of the Boss’s largely acoustic masterpiece still haunt the American psyche.
Is 100% the absolute truth.
We never really left the environments described in this work.
And now?
Now it's our future again.
Only worse.
This record came out the last time inflation had been out of control.
(82?)
And the start of the end of it being so anyway.
It just crazy to think that he had just had his first top 10 hit
(Hungry Heart, The River)
Had been building on the success of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of town etc.
So the record company was all set up for:
here we go, were all gonna cash in,
here comes the day we have all been waiting for w this guy.
And he hands them Acoustic Demos recorded in his farm house on a four track recording machine.
Record company was like WTF is this?
Where Hungry Heart pt 2 etc?
"...here comes the day we have all been waiting for w this guy."
Came with the next record:
"Born in the USA."
But to hand your record company this?
(And the lyrics are dark, haunting, stake, bare, depressing etc...BTW)
After your first top 10 hit?
Pretty ballsy.
"It is not an exaggeration to say that an entire way of American life died in 1981."
Ronald Reagan’s summary dismissal of the striking PATCO—the union of federal air traffic controllers—was a shot directly across the bow fired at working people with the temerity to organize. A footnote to history at this juncture, but a prophecy in the moment. The circumstance was complex—the union overreaching in their demands, Reagan philosophically draconian—but the net result meant the end of the modern labor movement as it had previously existed."
"the net result
meant the end of the modern labor movement
as it had previously existed"
is 100 % the case.
This is a big moment for me and my dad.
(The breaking of the PATCO Union).
Dad was a letter carrier.
He was a member of the National Letter Carriers Association.
Most of my uncles were in unions of one kind or another
in manufacturing or maintenance.
(Step mom in the Teachers Union etc.)
But dad walked his route everyday.
He lived on his route.
He knew everybody everywhere.
Even in a bigger city like Louisville.
I lived in another part of town but I knew where he was on his route by what time of day it was and I could easily find him any time I wanted.
When this happened, when they broke that Union?
This is exactly what he said to me when I was 17 years old:
"They are showing you what they are all about.
They are out to ruin the middle class of this country."
That was the day the union was broke.
Prophetic much?
Thing is?
I knew he was right.
17 years old...
Just sayin...
Dad and I had one other pretty prophetic moment but that's for a different day.
But the economic conditions of the times in the late 70's early 80's
and the breaking of that union set the stage for:
"...labor historian Erik Loomis: “It had three massive impacts. First, it ended the great militant decade of public sector unionism that had begun with the 1970 postal workers strike and that had led to major strikes throughout the decade. Second, it gave space for private employers to bust their unions too—and the ’80s was filled with companies breaking union contracts that had existed for decades. Third, it made unions scared to strike. The number of workers on strike each year plummeted after 1981 and has never recovered.”
"The punishments just kept coming for working people: NAFTA and wage stagnation, the opioid crisis and mass incarceration, the cold shoulder of a Democratic Party too interested in courting Silicon Valley and suburban elites to remember their rank and file, and the false profiteering of Donald Trump. None of it was unforeseeable, or unavoidable. It’s just that, save for lip service, no one within the political class really cared. Watching the beginning of that long downward trajectory commence, Bruce Springsteen worked on Nebraska."
(Smart working people at that time just had the sense that things just are not ever gonna be the same. And they were right. But day 1? Dad was on it, he knew where it would lead.)
"Notoriously on any short list of the bleakest LPs ever rendered by a major recording star near the apex of their commercial powers, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska turned 40 this year."
(It's not just:
"on the short list of bleakest LP's ever recorded by a major recording star near the apex of their commercial powers'...
It's the entire list all by itself. Nothing even comes close. It's like a tour through a psychopaths' mind at the height of their mass murder delirium state.)
"Recorded almost entirely to a Tascam four-track, Nebraska is a stark vision of American degradation seen through the lens of a guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic grown prosperous as the world around him becomes less and less reasonable."
"Usually he’d be boasting and strutting...Instead he’s rambling about traffic stops and state police and industrial skylines."
"Nebraska’s songs are weird vignettes and character studies, half-captured dreams and hellish nightmares, rockabilly and rebel-folk like Sun Records had been born under CCR’s bad sign."
"The creeping “State Trooper” is one of the most insinuating and frightening performances of Springsteen’s career: a plea from a homicidal criminal fruitlessly praying to avoid more carnage."
(It spooks me to this day.
If you are really listening to that song and thinking about what he is saying?
"It's like a tour through a psychopaths' mind at the height of their mass murder delirium state."
“Mansion on the Hill” evokes a different sort of menace, that of the chilling effect of cyclical poverty and the experience of literally living in the shadows of those who have benefited from the arbitrary-at-best auspices of upward mobility and material wealth. Album closer “Reason to Believe” is a half-reverential, half-ironic spiritual.
"The song “Nebraska” is an unvarnished retelling of the 1958 killing spree perpetrated by Charlie Starkweather, which started in Lincoln, Nebraska, and stretched to Wyoming. These were the murders covered in Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, a cinematic forerunner to our contemporary vogue for artfully rendered scenarios of slaughter. Eleven dead on a murder spree, a 19-year-old misfit on a pitiless rampage of cruel umbrage. Familiar to us now, but shocking at the time."
(Think, aural version of Truman Capote's
"What’s the option, really? You exhaust yourself—every moment, every opportunity, overkill in every direction. You knock on every door, and then eventually every tour causes riots. The fortune teller said you’d be a star. She didn’t tell you how strange that would feel. Springsteen was simultaneously working on Born in the U.S.A. while he was working on Nebraska. They were two sides of the same coin, in the way in which that cliché is annoyingly true. The umbrage-filled bluster of one and the quiet violence of the other taken together are a prophetic nightmare vision of a contemporary America, which can’t tell the difference between an execution and a compliment."
"Nebraska was a low confidence vote in a country that simultaneously made him rich and made him doubt everything. His doubt was ratified as the working poor were increasingly marginalized, city by city, union by union, one canceled promise following the rest."
“Everything dies / baby that’s a fact / but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” Every nightmare psychic alarm clock blaring in his head. The erratic father and the sainted, unknowable mother. The ties that do not bind. The memories that won’t stop returning. The delirium of grief ..."
(My first roommate at WKU's dad?
Was a union member.
Maunfactuing facility.
Me and dad had already had our talk.
It was fall of 82.
We would listen
to that record all the way through almost every night.
Then it was lights out,
thinking about what our future's might hold...
Things haven't really changed all that much.
I'll just say like that :-).
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