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Runaway American Dream
HOPE AND DISILLUSION IN THE EARLY WORK OF
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Two young Mexican immigrants who risk their lives trying to cross the border; thousands of
factory workers losing their jobs when the Ohio steel industry collapsed; a Vietnam veteran
who returns to his hometown, only to discover that he has none anymore; and young lovers
learning the hard way that romance is a luxury they cannot afford. All of these people have
two things in common. First, they are all disappointed that, for them, the American dream has
failed. Rather, it has become a bitter nightmare from which there is no waking up. Secondly,
their stories have all been documented by the same artist – a poet of the poor as it were – from
New Jersey. Over the span of his 43-year career, Bruce Springsteen has captured the very
essence of what it means to dream, fight and fail in America. That journey, from dreaming of
success to accepting one’s sour destiny, will be the main subject of this paper.
While the majority of themes have remained present in Springsteen’s work up until
today, the way in which they have been treated has varied dramatically in the course of those
more than forty years. It is this evolution that I will demonstrate in the following chapters. But
before looking at something as extensive as a life-long career, one should first try to create
some order in the large bulk of material. Many critics have tried to categorize Springsteen’s
work in numerous ‘phases’. Some of them have reasonable arguments, but most of them made
the mistake of creating strict chronological boundaries between relatively short periods of
time1, unfortunately failing to see the numerous connections between chronologically remote
works2 and the continuity that Springsteen himself has pointed out repeatedly. I would like to
1
In her article on “Class and Gender in Bruce Springsteen’s rock lyrics” (1992), Pamela Moss distinguishes four
phases. However, she draws quite strict boundaries between them and in doing so, she misplaces Born to Run
(1975) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) in the same closed category, missing the closer thematic
connection between the latter and The River (1980), which is placed in another ‘phase’.
2
Most critics have, for instance, trouble interpreting the ten-year ‘gap’ between Born in the USA (1985) and The
Ghost of Tom Joad (1995). The chronologically intervening albums Tunnel of Love (1987), Human Touch (1992)
5
argue that there can only be made one key division into two parts: part one ranging from his
debut in 1972 up until the 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad and part two starting with his
2001 record The Rising. The major turning point between these two phases seems to be an
accumulation of both internal and external events occurring around the turn of the century,
the most prominent being – internally – the reunion of Springsteen’s long-time friends and
partners in the renowned E Street Band (after a ten year-long break) and – externally – the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which made as deep an impression on Springsteen,
just as they did on most Americans. The main argument in favor of 9/11 as a defining
moment is the sudden change of attitude towards the themes he had been treating for all those
years. What had become a deeply rooted pessimism – with The Ghost of Tom Joad as climactic
exponent – suddenly turns into a message of hope and optimism. The “Badlands”3 where
dreams are inaccessible illusions, become a “Land of Hope and Dreams”4, where collective
faith can ultimately lead to salvation. Another notable difference is that between the primarily
negative view on religion in his twentieth-century work and its prominent positive presence in
his 21st-century songs. Thirdly, whereas his earlier work focuses almost exclusively on the
working-class people from his native New Jersey, the more recent songs have broadened their
area of inspiration5. The ‘working-class hero’ has become an all-American poet deliberately
choosing for eclecticism on various levels. Thematically, his recent work deals with people
from all ranges of societal, ethnical or geographical background. But also musically, he has
adopted other styles, going deeply into Negro spirituals and soul music, as well as adapting to
contemporary musical innovations.
This brings us to another problem that critics often face when discussing Springsteen,
being the angle from which to approach his oeuvre: is it possible to deal with his songs solely
on a literary level? The fact is that it is hard to talk about Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics without
taking into account the music that supports them. Very often, the combination of the two is
what really brings across the intended atmosphere – just as poets frequently depend on sounds
to strengthen their message. The contrast between, on the one hand, the hopeful cheers on
Born to Run and, on the other hand, the desperate cries on Nebraska, is also partially brought
out by the contrasting musical styles – bombastic versus minimalistic. However, while the
musical tone can sometimes be misleading (songs like “Working on the Highway” might come
and Lucky Town (1992) are, thematically speaking, to be placed in an entirely different timeline. Ghost should
consequently be seen as the true successor to the protest songs on Nebraska and Born in the USA.
3
From his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town.
4
Released in 2002 as a b-side to “The Rising”.
5
On The Ghost of Tom Joad, we can already perceive signs of this tendency towards a slightly broader subject
matter (cf. CHAPTER 7).
6
across as cheerful, while its story is far from happy), the words never lie. But sometimes it is
exactly this seemingly conflicting fusion between words and music that gives songs like “Born
in the USA” their full strength. In this paper, I choose to focus on the messages that lie in
these different songs, and the evolution that runs through them. In his own trademark style,
using gently picked but usually highly intelligible phrases, Springsteen tells in each of his songs
a short story – frequently (part of) someone’s life story – which always tries to grasp the very
essence of this character in an average of about three hundred words, using first person
narratives or anecdotes. They are short stories that, because of their rich imagery, could be
adapted easily into feature length films – and some of them already have been.
The problems mentioned above are only two of the many moot points that arise when
trying to discuss the work of Bruce Springsteen (cf. CHAPTERS 1-2). Taking them all into
account, I have tried to create a retrospective overview of the evolution that takes place in the
twenty years between 1975 and 1995. This paper will, in other words, focus on the ‘first
phase’ as described above. I have chosen to largely omit the first two albums (Greetings from
Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle) from my area of research,
as well as the three albums that were released between 1987 and 1992 (Tunnel of Love, Human
Touch and Lucky Town) – not because they are artistically irrelevant to his career, but because
they are no substantive part of the evolution I will describe. The first two function as typical
experiments, offering reflections of the life of a young artist in the growing music scene at the
Jersey shore. The latter three, in their turn, mostly deal with the subject of love, and are deeply
inspired by the events taking place in Springsteen’s own private life (from his divorce from his
first wife to the marriage with his second). While chronologically, they of course have their
respective places in between Born in the USA and The Ghost of Tom Joad, thematically they are
nothing but a temporary break from the themes that pervade the majority of his work.
As a result, this paper deals primarily with the work released on the remaining six
albums. In the next chapters, I will describe the remarkable development in the way
Springsteen tackles the myths of the American dream and the ‘upward mobility’ regarding
blue collar America. On Born to Run (1975), the working-class youth is given a chance to
escape: by means of a collective effort, one is said to be able to break out of the oppressive
working-class surroundings. Even though the album – just like the other five – departs from
the point of view that prolonging one’s stay in this environment is not an option, it offers a
certain optimism that a concrete possibility of escape truly exists. This possibility fades away
on the following albums Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) and The River (1980), where the
7
main undertone has shifted from optimism to nostalgia. The characters described here are
mostly frustrated in their realization that the things they have always dreamed of will never
come true. The escape offered here, is no longer a positive one, but rather an evasive solution:
they lose themselves in regretful reveries. The cautious laments then turn to explicit rebellion
and a flight into immorality. Feeling like their cruel background never gave them an honest
chance, the characters end up losing themselves completely in criminality or despair. Their
protest takes on two forms: the almost silent, but heart-rending howls on Nebraska (1982) and
the loud charge on Born in the USA (1984). Finally, when it becomes obvious that no form of
protest is ever going to change the situation of those poor people, Springsteen offers a final
means of escape: death. The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), directly inspired by the tradition of the
protest song and by the influential figures of Woody Guthrie, John Ford and John Steinbeck,
is Springsteen’s only work where he seems to entirely give up the fight. It therefore serves as
the climax of the evolution from optimistic dreaming to facing the nightmare, which will be
dealt with chronologically in CHAPTERS 3-7. The first chapter will introduce the work of
Springsteen as a valuable subject of academic study, while the second gives a brief outline of
the major themes and motifs, and the language that is used to express them.
8
CHAPTER 1
| Springsteen as an Academic Research Subject
“Bruce Springsteen is the single most influential purveyor of literacy
in what is often falsely considered the non-literate culture of rock music”
(H.E. BRANSCOMB)
Compared to the great amount of research that is being devoted to 20th century prose, as well
as drama and poetry, much less time is being spent by academics on another part of our recent
literary tradition, being music lyrics. Moreover, the lion’s share of this research is being done
by critics in the field of social sciences or musicology, given that in most literature
departments, popular music still bears the stigma of being unworthy compared to the work of
canonized ‘literary’ poets. This is largely due to two reasonable conceptions.
First of all, the scene of popular music is surrounded by an atmosphere of transience.
While most literary authors consider their works to be a long-term legacy, success in the music
business is – especially nowadays – intense but temporary. Above all, singer-songwriters are
much more susceptible to commercial interests: even more than popular novelists, they are
under immense pressure to produce new work as soon as possible, while the ‘hype’ is still fresh.
As a result, the value of their work often may often suffer from high commercial demands,
rather than artistic ones. Secondly, the subject of popular music is often considered as quite
‘new’, historically speaking. While the novel as we know it has been around for centuries and
poetry for thousands of years, the first forms of rock and roll music were introduced in the
1950s, by Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and many other aspiring young artists. Just like other
new poetic genres, rock music did not immediately become part of the canon. Chronological
distance is often seen as an important criterion in academic circles, as it seems to lend a certain
aura of objectivity to the research. As an illustration, the songs of Bob Dylan, who started his
career in the early 60s, have been receiving far more critical attention than those of artists that
debuted in the 70s or 80s, but articles on ‘traditional’ literature, for their part, still outnumber
those on Dylan. Both time and esteem thus work against recent music as a research topic.
While articles on 1950s novelists such as J.D. Salinger can fill whole libraries and
commentaries on 1960s songwriter Bob Dylan could still account for a few bookshelves, the
accumulated literary research on Bruce Springsteen would barely start a campfire.
9
However, I believe that both popular music in general and the work of Springsteen in
particular could pose questions deserving of comprehensive study. Besides, they can easily
refute the two counter-arguments described above. As to the second objection considering the
relatively ‘new’ genre of popular music, there is a simple but clear rebuttal. Many ancient
traditions of storytelling have been inextricably bound up with music: the ancient Greek aoidoi
used musical lyre accompaniment to facilitate the memorization and recitation of stories that
were passed down orally from one generation to another; the medieval troubadours used more
or less the same techniques to sing their tales6. Carl Rhodes summarizes that “indeed the use of
musical forms to embody stories and knowledge is not new; lyric poetry and oral traditions
have performed this function in many cultures past and present”7. Contemporary music can
then be seen as building on those ancient traditions of storytelling: for some songwriters,
music is just the natural and most desirable way to express their thoughts and to convey their
message.
As to the first objection – that commercial pressure and the need to get the most out of
temporary success restrict the artistic potential – the answer is even more clear-cut. From the
very beginning, Springsteen has gone his own way, surrounded by only a few associates who
granted him full intellectual and artistic freedom. Knowing where he came from, surrounded
by New Jersey working-class families who were as poor as church mice, he was very well aware
that “this is what he would have become if he had no musical talent”8. For this reason as well
as ethical ones, Springsteen never gave in to commercial success and always kept close to his
roots. After the bestselling album The River, he decided to work on a grim folk record
(Nebraska) that would never even come close to matching the earlier success. Almost directly
after the record-breaking Born in the USA, he decided to part from the successful E Street
Band setting and start a 14-year long solo career in which he barely scored any ‘hits’. And
when he had just returned to big commercial success with The Rising, he started working on
another folk record (Devils & Dust) and a project with Pete Seeger in which he breathed new
life into classical American folk songs and spirituals (We Shall Overcome: the Seeger Sessions).
Even though his art has made him a millionaire, Springsteen has always meticulously
delineated what he himself wanted to achieve with his art. As he told his biographer Dave
Marsh, “the release date is just one day, at a certain place set in a certain time. But the record
6
Paterson & Cheyette (1995), 411-413.
Rhodes (2003), 5.
8
Ibid.
7
10
remains forever. So you better be aware that what you say today, will be – and should be –
relevant not only in this particular setting, but for generations to come”9.
Springsteen may not be, like other artists such as Leonard Cohen or Paul Simon, the
example par excellence of a songwriter who, if born a century earlier, could have turned out to
be a Victorian poet. Nevertheless, connections to the literary world are never far away. Rhodes
remarks that “in addition to his commercial success, artistically Springsteen has been
compared to American musical and literary giants, ranging from Woody Guthrie and Bob
Dylan, to Walt Whitman and John Steinbeck”10. This has led him to be heralded as “the
single most influential purveyor of literacy in what is often falsely considered the non-literate
culture of youth and rock music”11. It is through this literariness that “Springsteen’s allegorical
lyrics use familiar characters and situations to tell big stories”12. The most direct link with
literature is found on his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad, which is named after the
protagonist of Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and adopts many of its themes –
although the majority of them were already present in earlier work.
Because of these clear connections with literature, plus the fact that Springsteen can
counter most prejudices against music lyrics, it is rather strange that so few literary scholars
have paid attention to his work. In this paper it will become clear – I hope – that this now 62year old New Jersey songwriter has a lot more in common with the literary world than most
people think. His work can be analyzed using more or less the same techniques that are
employed in a literary analysis, with attention to themes, motifs, character sketches and plot
development.
9
Marsh (2003), 452.
Rhodes (2003), 11.
11
Branscomb (1993), 29.
12
Rhodes (2003), 5.
10
11
CHAPTER 2
| Hopeful Dreams in a Horrible Reality
“I spent most of my life as a musician measuring the distance
between the American dream and American reality”
(BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN)
As this chapter’s title suggests, the majority of themes in Springsteen’s lyrics revolve around a
certain ambiguity: contrasting images spread through his work, always with a thin line
between them. There’s the intimate dance of life and death, the closeness of failure and
success, and the rich contrastive imagery of night and day. Hope and despair are close
neighbors, as are expectation and disappointment. Together, they make up the main paradox
of his oeuvre: the coexistence of dreams and reality.
An indisputably large part of Springsteen’s work is shaped by his own background, and
the environment where he grew up. Born on September 23, 1949, in Long Branch, New
Jersey, Bruce Springsteen was the firstborn child in a poor working-class family. His father,
Douglas Springsteen, was an Irish Catholic whose life had brought him little happiness.
Growing up in a poor household himself, he had to cope with the great grief that struck his
family when his five-year old sister Virginia died in 1927, when she was hit by a truck while
riding her tricycle across the neighborhood13. Her loss would keep on haunting the family and
its offspring for decades to come. Having been sent to the front during World War II, he
returned, with few prospects, to his native town of Freehold. After Bruce was born, he
struggled to find a regular job that would support his family. Taking on every trade he could
find – working as a cab driver, prison guard and factory laborer – he would nonetheless suffer
long periods of unemployment. This caused the family to move from one house to another,
only to lower the rent a few dollars a month, and eventually to move in with their
grandparents14. Feeling like a failure at everything he did, Douglas became an introverted,
cynical man who did not restrain himself from taking his frustrations out on his family. In
interviews, Springsteen would often testify “how simple father-son conversations could
deteriorate into screaming matches”15. Bruce’s mother Adele, a second-generation Italian
immigrant, tried to provide the warmth and support that his father could not give. When he
13
Remnick (2012).
Marsh (1987).
15
Ginell (1998).
14
12
was younger, she would tell him an endless range of stories that she made up herself. She
bought her son his first acoustic guitar when he was 13 and two years later, she even
negotiated a $60 loan to be able to buy him his first electric one – a moment he would later
commemorate in “The Wish”.
His parent’s divergent personalities would have tremendous impact on the nature of
his art. From his mother, he inherited the valiant strength to keep faith and see the hope in
every setback. His father, on the other hand, became a symbol for the oppressive working-class
atmosphere, a personification of the thousands of laborers who saw their already futureless jobs
in the New Jersey factories melt away as the industry in the entire region collapsed. Douglas
Springsteen became a symbol for failed dreams and disappointment. Summarizing the malaise
and tension that pervaded his home, Springsteen recalled: “When I was a kid, I really
understood failure. In my family, I lived deep in its shadow”16. The spark of hope, however,
would come from a tiny little thing in the family’s kitchen. Encouraged by his mother,
Springsteen started listening to their old radio, picking up an interest in rock and roll music.
Listening to Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and The Beatles, he found in them “a collective
struggle for freedom and equality”17. Rock music created unprecedented opportunities for the
lower classes to express themselves. To quote from one of Springsteen’s songs, “the hungry and
the hunted exploded into rock and roll bands”18. He would later recall this defining ‘epiphany’
during a stage performance in London:
It wasn’t until I started listening to the radio, and I heard something in
those singer’s voices that said there was more to life than what my old man
was doing and the life that I was living myself. And they held out a promise
that every man has a right to live his life with some decency and some
dignity. And it’s a promise that gets broken every day, in the most violent
way. But it’s a promise that never, ever dies, and always remains inside of
you19.
As becomes obvious in the quote above, it was more about keeping faith and believing
in it, rather than actually making the dream come true. The belief in the dream, for
Springsteen, was a means to survive in a world were hope seems lost. It is this fierce belief that
recurs on all of his albums, although it takes on different forms – motifs to express the greater
theme.
16
Marsh (1987), 49.
Garman (1996), 73.
18
From “Jungleland” (Born to Run, 1975).
19
Marsh (1987), 36.
17
13
Basically, Springsteen’s characters try to break away from everything that typifies their
existence. However, one aspect in particular becomes the main ‘evil’, namely the key part of
working-class life: work itself. Nearly every mention of work in his early songs has a strictly
negative connotation. In Springsteen’s hometown of Freehold, New Jersey, “the local
economy centered around a plastics factory, a rug mill, a Nestlé plant, and other small
manufacturing companies”20. Manuel labor work in these places offered few prospects, and
when the laborers would get started Monday morning, they “already got Friday on [their]
mind” as Springsteen sings in “Out in the Street”. In the beautiful but tragic poem-like song
“Factory”, based on his father’s life as a factory worker, he sums up what work meant to the
people in Freehold: “Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain / I see my
daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain / Factory takes his hearing, factory gives
him life / The working, the working, just the working life”. Little life remains, however, at the
end of the day (which is also the end of the song), when the “factory whistle cries” and “men
walk through these gates with death in their eyes”. Still, terrible as these jobs may be, they do
give the people some structure in their lives, and they produce the little money that keeps
them and their families alive. When this fundamental keystone vanishes, life becomes chaos.
The war veteran who returns to his hometown in “Born in the USA” becomes desperate upon
hearing that all the jobs are gone or taken. And when Nebraska’s “Johnny 99” loses his job
when the local auto plant is closed down, all hell breaks loose.
This conception of work is closely connected to the father figure. In “Adam Raised a
Cain”, Springsteen sang about his painful relationship to his father: “Daddy worked his whole
life for nothing but the pain / Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to
blame / You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames”. A few years later, the melancholic song
“Independence Day” described a son’s farewell to his father, when he recalls “[t]here was just
no way this house could hold the two of us / I guess we were just too much of the same kind”.
In the same song, he claims that “they can’t touch me now, and you can’t touch me now /
They ain’t gonna do to me, what I watched them do to you”. Another four years later, in the
last song on the Born in the USA album, Springsteen has taken up the role of the father
himself, as he drives his son through Main Street in “My Hometown”, remembering how his
father had taken him for the same ride and how the town has declined since21.
As said before, the characters try to escape everything that is connected to this working
life and everything it represents. The first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and The
20
21
Marsh (2003), 21.
Morley (1987), quoted in Sawyers (2004), 153.
14
Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, which are primarily concerned with New Jersey
nightlife, introduce the duality of night and day as a contrast that mirrors fantasy and reality –
an image that is further elaborated as a more universal motif on Born to Run and Darkness.
While the day symbolizes the monotonous work in the factory, the night offers new
possibilities. On songs like “Night”, “Born to Run” and “Prove It All Night”, the darkness is
when dreams come alive – even though they are bound to surrender to the upcoming dawn.
Another motif, closely connected to that of the night, is the imagery of cars and streets. Many
Springsteen songs feature roads and highways as a literal getaway from reality. As he
remembers, in the 1970s in New Jersey’s working-class society, “cars were still a symbol of
success, and success offered a way out of this misery”22. Many songs on Born to Run deal with
this concrete escape via the road out of town. On Darkness (“Racing in the Street”, “Streets of
Fire”), however, the function of the streets has become a way of forgetting misery, rather than
escaping from it. Looking at the later albums Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, the image
of cars in the night has become the icon for doom. The streets are filled with nothing but
death, from the dead dog in “Reason to Believe” to the “Wreck on the Highway” and the
burned cars in “Something in the Night”.
Other significant motifs include that of the river, which develops most prominently in
“The River”, the title song from the 1980 double-album, where it serves as a place of refuge
and shelter – a spot where people can forget their troubles for a moment. But while the initial
image is that of a “valley where the fields were green” where a young couple can live their
dreams, in the end the narrator still visits the place even though he “know[s] the river is dry”.
The dateless image of the river as a heavenly place of rebirth and salvation eventually becomes
a ghostly image of paradise lost.
The use of these and other motifs in the course of the twenty years that I am about to
discuss will indicate the changes in Springsteen’s outlook on the promise delivered by the
American dream. Worthy of a final introductory note is the language that Springsteen employs
to sing all these stories. As Springsteen’s characters bear witness, they speak in a “working-class
language, which locates them in a specific social space”23. Concrete manifestations of this
specific language are colloquialisms (“you ain’t a beauty, but hey you’re alright”24), the
dropping of word endings (“seem like the whole world walkin’ pretty”25), moderate slang
22
Sawyers (2004), 3.
Garman (1996), 86.
24
From “Thunder Road” (Born to Run, 1975).
25
From “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” (Born to Run, 1975).
23
15
vocabulary (“some fleshpot mascot was tied into a lover's knot with a whatnot in her hand”26)
and, very often, the use of improper verb tenses (“is a dream a lie, if it don’t come true?”27).
The fact that Springsteen himself originates from a society where this kind of language was
rather standard, does not, according to Bryan Garman, necessarily mean that this was the kind
of language he was going to use in his music. Garman claims that through “the use of
nonstandard
English,
Springsteen
deliberately
represents
the
unequal
educational
opportunities afforded to working people and corresponds to the lack of political and cultural
power and influence that they wield in the vast social spaces claimed by the middle class”28.
Yet, by making use of this working-class language, Springsteen also makes a statement that this
‘dialect of the poor’ is worthy enough to function as a form of art.
Taking these main themes and motifs as a basis, I will demonstrate the way in which
they develop throughout the years. While the following chapters are ordered chronologically,
each dealing with one or two albums at a time, it is important to bear in mind that there is a
continuity that flows from work to work. Even though there are many years in between the
release dates of these albums, the songs have been written exactly during those years, and
overlaps are far from seldom29. The greater part of my paper will consist of a close reading of
some of the key songs on the respective albums, as well as supportive arguments taken from
some of the academic articles written on specific themes or albums (the most notable being
those by Bryan Garman and Jim Cullen). Additional background information primarily stems
from Dave Marsh’s biography Glory Days (1987) and its updated version Two Hearts (2003).
As Garman rightfully notes, “Marsh’s narrative is far too hagiographic to rely on as a sole
source, but it does provide a wealth of information on Springsteen’s political and artistic
development”30.
In my analyses, I have selected the songs that I deem most relevant to the themes that I
have been describing in this chapter, and those that are most representative of the albums’
predominant atmosphere. By no means have I intended to arrive at a full-scale in-depth
analysis of the entire albums, since this would lead us too far from the main subject of this
paper, but I believe that, together, these selected songs sketch a well enough picture.
26
From “Blinded by the Light” (Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, 1973).
From “The River” (The River, 1980).
28
Garman (1996), 87.
29
A song like “Independence Day”, written in 1978 was a contender for a place on the Darkness on the Edge of
Town record, but it was eventually released two years later, on The River (as explained in the documentary film
“The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story”, CBS, 2010).
30
Garman (1996), 110.
27
16
CHAPTER 3
| An Invitation to Escape: Born to Run
“The night’s busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere”
(“BORN TO RUN”)
The idea of the ‘American dream’ has lived in the US from the very beginning, although it has
gone by a variety names. All versions are united by “a common underlying faith that is rarely
articulated explicitly, and has never been formally codified, but it can be summed up in the
following assertion: anything is possible if you want it badly enough”31. The creed has taken
on many forms and has been articulated from different angles. Its earliest formulation was
perhaps best expressed by John Winthrop, for whom the American dream was a religious one.
In time, the dream took on a more political (in the Declaration of Independence) and
individualistic character (for example in the Transcendentalists’ quest for self-reliance). In the
twentieth century, the term ‘American dream’ has become very chameleonic. For foreign
immigrants, it stands for the promise that America holds as a land of new opportunities; for
poor people already living inside its borders, the dream represents the hope of rising to better
economic circumstances (the myth of ‘upward mobility’ that can bring someone ‘from rags to
riches’); for the more prosperous citizens, it can be the desire for fame and personal success; for
the politicians at the country’s head, it includes the diffusion of American values all over the
world. But for all these people, pursuing the dream means to achieve something, to improve
one’s current condition.
In twentieth-century music and literature, many great works have tried to deal with the
concept, one of the most famous being F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Few fictional
characters can better embody the modern dream of personal freedom and success than the
tragic James Gatz, Fitzgerald’s protagonist, “who transformed himself into the fabulous Jay
Gatsby to win the heart of the beautiful Daisy Buchanan”32. Gatsby makes the classic mistake
of pretending to have achieved something already, thinking that if he imagines it hard enough,
it would eventually come true. The novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, cannot help but be
moved by the intensity by which Gatsby is longing for the dream, symbolized in many forms,
including Daisy herself, but also a green light at the end of her private dock. At a certain point,
31
32
Cullen (1997), 54.
Ibid, 57.
17
Nick even compares the green light to how America, rising out of the ocean, must have looked
to early settlers of the new nation, making it the ultimate symbol for the American dream33.
While Fitzgerald described the decay of the American dream in the 1920s and the
hollowness of the upper class society, Bruce Springsteen portrays a similar evolution in the
United States’ working-class culture during the century’s last three decades. In the twenty
years from Born to Run to The Ghost of Tom Joad, we notice the sharp decline of belief in this
dream. For people of Springsteen’s generation of working-class people, born in the late 1940s
and early 1950s, the dream was a promise that was given to everyone who was ‘born in the
USA’ – a promise that there would be at least some opportunity in their lives, some chance to
really make something out of the, say, seventy or eighty years that are given to us on this
planet. As he grew up in Freehold, however, Springsteen could not help but notice that for his
family, and the many others leading their working-class lives, this dream never came true. Yet,
on his 1975 breakthrough album Born to Run, he still proclaims the possibility of achieving
the dream, by means of an escape from this ‘doomed society’.
On the night Barack Obama crowned Springsteen as one of the 2009 Kennedy Center
honorees, Jon Stewart mentioned in his celebratory speech that “if you listen to Bruce
Springsteen, you no longer feel like a loser. You feel as if you are a character in an epic
poem… about losers”34. Indeed, there is a mysterious irony in his work, as he is at the same
time disgusted by this “town full losers”35 and nevertheless portrays its people in all their
dignity. Springsteen offers them, through his music and lyrics, a worthy platform to tell their
stories. And nowhere is this truer than on Born to Run.
As with many of his albums, the title track includes most the essential ideas of the
record. The opening lines immediately introduce the contrast between day and night
(mentioned in CHAPTER 2) as symbolizing dreams and reality: “In the day we sweat it out in
the streets of a runaway American dream / At night we ride through mansions of glory in
suicide machines”. The protagonist sends out an invitation to who seems to be his love
interest, named Wendy, to run away from their town, which he describes as “a death trap” and
“a suicide rap”. He incites her to come with him: “We gotta get out while we’re young /
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run”. A similar, even more cinematic scene is
found in the first song on the album, “Thunder Road”. The protagonist sits in his car, in front
of Mary’s house, and invites her to run away with him, because he is “riding out tonight to
33
Fitzgerald (2000), 136.
“2009 Kennedy Center Honors”, as broadcasted on CBS (2009).
35
From “Thunder Road” (Born to Run, 1975).
34
18
case the promised land”. The song starts with some dreamy, illusory imagery: “The screen
door slams, Mary’s dress waves / Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays”.
However, the silky appearance is nothing but a façade, as the protagonist uncovers her true
situation: “You can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain / Make crosses from your
lovers and throw roses in the rain / Waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise
from these streets”. Again, the night comes in to offer a getaway opportunity: “The night’s
busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere … Climb in back, heaven’s waiting down
the tracks”.
It should be noted that in both songs, the escape can only be achieved collectively. The
protagonist of “Born to Run” is “just a scared and lonely rider” and constantly asks Wendy to
accompany him, because “only together we could break this trap”. In “Thunder Road”, the
young man is waiting for Mary to “take that long walk from your front porch to my front
seat” before he can take off. In both songs, too, there are risks that come with the attempt to
escape. Both narrators cite examples of people who have failed and are now lost, roaming the
streets at night. In “Born to Run” “[t]he highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last
chance power drive”, while in “Thunder Road” “[t]here were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys
you sent away / They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out
Chevrolets”. Lastly, both songs also feature a fierce optimism that the efforts will be rewarded
with success: “Someday girl, I don’t know when / We’re gonna get to that place where we
really want to go, and we’ll walk in the sun” / “It’s a town full of losers, and I’m pulling out of
here to win”. After this last line, the song bursts into a glorious symphony that mirrors the
narrator’s hopeful message.
The day-versus-night motif is certainly on of the most prominent on the album. It also
dominates its third song, “Night”, which describes how factory workers try everyday to survive
the eight hours of hell, only to be released into the oblivion of the night. While during the
day, “the world is busting at its seams and you’re just a prisoner of your dreams”, at night
something like love suddenly becomes possible and you find yourself “out on a midnight run /
Losing your heart to a beautiful one”. Every night “she will be waiting there / And you’ll find
her somehow you swear”. However, the narrator knows in his heart that the rescue of the
night is not a definitive one: it is a sort of escapism that does allow one to flee for a moment,
but eventually pulls your feet back to the ground. This is why he sings that “somewhere
tonight, you run sad and free” – sad, because this freedom is not really there. There is a
19
constant nervous friction between dreams and reality, symbolized by the nervous rhythm that
continuously underscores the words.
At the end of most songs, the eventual outcome remains a mystery. We are not sure if
Mary ultimately gets in the car, or if Wendy really goes out on a run. “Meeting Across the
River” offers no difference, as it is another song that suggests nothing more than an invitation.
The narrator apparently has fixed a meeting with – as is strongly suggested – a Mafioso and he
asks his friend Eddie to accompany him on the dangerous trip. He tells his friend that his
girlfriend Cherry wants to walk out on him every minute, as he has pawned her radio to
temporarily solve their financial troubles. What she does not understand, he continues, is that
“two grand is practically sitting here in my pocket”. He is determined that “tonight is gonna
be everything that I said / And when I walk through that door, I’m just gonna throw that
money on the bed”. However, just as in “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road”, it is unclear
whether he actually carries out his plan. His certainty in the penultimate verse is being undone
by the single final line of the song, in which the question of the first line is repeated: “Hey
Eddie, can you catch us a ride?”
Springsteen has often mentioned that, on all of his albums as well as his live shows, he
always tries to tell the story as a whole, starting with the posing of questions at the beginning
and trying to answer them towards the end. In some way, Born to Run’s last song,
“Jungleland”, answers to “Thunder Road”, and it symbolizes the almost desperate holding on
to hope of Born to Run slowly flowing into the growing despair of Darkness on the Edge of
Town. The hope, here, is again crystallized in a love relationship, that struggles to persist amid
a backdrop of gang violence. The song opens with the description of the two lovers: the
“Barefoot Girl” and her beloved man nicknamed “Rat”, who has a hard time combining his
‘work’ in the city’s criminal underworld with saving his relationship. The opening lines mirror
the cinematic beauty of “Thunder Road”, describing the “Barefoot Girl sitting on the hood of
a Dodge / Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain / The Rat pulls into town, rolls up his
pants / Together they take a stab at romance and disappear down Flamingo Lane”. Trouble
enters, however, with references to the gang’s conflict with the authorities (“the Maximum
Lawman chasing them down Flamingo”). The atmosphere changes, giving almost morbid
descriptions of the city: “The kids round here look just like shadows, always quiet, holding
hands / From the churches to the jails, tonight all is silence in this world”. The plot builds up
towards a confrontation between the gang and the police as “the midnight gang assembles”
but “the local cops rip this holy night”. As to the exact events of the night, we can only guess,
20
as they are described in a poetic chaos. All we know is that “the streets are alive as secret debts
are paid” and “lonely-hearted lovers struggle in dark corners / desperate as the night moves
on”. The last two stanzas, coming after Clarence Clemons’ extended four-minute saxophone
solo, describe the final fall of the Rat (“soft refusal and then surrender”), and how his “own
dreams gun him down as shots echo down them hallways”.
The structure of the song is emphasized by the musical arrangement, which strictly
demarcates the five parts of Rat’s epic tale. As a whole, the song resembles a classic symphony,
with its division in various pieces, all with their own orchestration. The first verse is
characterized by romantic, joyful piano play and a violin intro. The second verse, the advent of
approaching danger is heralded by the drummer’s beat that sets in. The middle part, which is
made up by verse three and four, serves as a climactic moment, mirrored in the entrance of
several other instruments and a guitar solo. After the illustrious four-minute sax – which could
be interpreted as Rat’s swan song – the sadness following his death is reflect in the minimal
instrumentation and the almost whisper-like tone in which the last part of the story is
unfolded.
The song then ends with a final part that could be seen as Springsteen’s first real
attempt at a protest song. As the band slowly returns to its full sound, the narrator describes
the ironical apathy towards Rat’s tragic fall, and the lack of impact his deeds and death have
on the world around him: “No one watches when the ambulance pulls away, or as the girl
shuts out the bedroom light”. Moreover, Rat’s catastrophic “death waltz between flesh and
fantasy” will not be remembered in history, it seems, since “the poets down here don’t write
nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be” – an ironical comment written by a man
who, with this song and this album, has given a platform to people like the ones living in
“Jungleland”. More than just giving them a voice, he remolds them into characters of an epic
tragedy.
21
CHAPTER 4
| Broken Promises: Darkness and The River
“Is a dream a lie, if it don’t come true,
or is it something worse?”
(“THE RIVER”)
If Born to Run was epic cinema, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) is brutal reality, its
characters not dreaming of idealized escape anymore, but rather trying to live in and make
sense of their circumstances. Some consider it to be about “the people left behind after Born to
Run”36, assuming that the characters back then succeeded in their escape, leaving the others in
their rearview mirror. Personally, I see Darkness as the tale of the people who tried to escape
but failed, and who are now destined to remain in this doomed society.
Shortly after the release of Born to Run, Springsteen artistically arrived at the
crossroads. He won a lawsuit against his former manager Mike Appel, who wanted to take full
control over the artistic direction of the new album, and he hired Jon Landau as his new
mentor and producer. However, the suit lasted for ten long months, in which Springsteen
could not record a single note, on pain of detention. However, he did keep on writing in the
meantime and, just as important, he started reading a lot: Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck,
Flannery O’Connor, and the history books of Henry Steele Commager and Allan Nevins. As
he read about American ideals in the latter’s Pocket History of the United State of America, he
started to fully understand that there were promises made at the very beginning, that were
never delivered. First published in 1942, Commager’s and Nevin’s narrative “maintains an
unwavering faith in the myths of freedom and opportunity”37. They assert that “America is an
interesting country because its people have been conscious of a peculiar destiny, because upon
it have been fastened the hopes and aspirations of the human race, and because it has not
failed to fulfill that destiny or to justify its hopes”38. During the tour that followed the release
of Darkness, Springsteen would comment on this book:
“In Commager and Nevins I found a lot of things that were important to
know, because they helped me understand the way that my life was and the
way it developed. They helped me understand how when I was a kid, all I
remember was my father worked in a factory, his father worked in a factory,
36
Sawyers (2004), 10.
Garman (1996), 71.
38
Commager & Nevins (1986), v-vi.
37
22
and they didn’t know enough about the forces that controlled their lives …
The idea was that in the United States there’d be a place for everybody, no
matter where you came from, no matter what religion you were or what
color. You could make a life that had some decency and dignity to it … But
like all ideals, that idea got real corrupted”39.
Whereas on Born to Run, Springsteen was fighting against this fixed fate, Darkness is
where he “asserted that social status is in part predetermined by social and historical forces that
even the hardest working people cannot overcome”40. As his understanding of these forces
grew, he felt that it was his duty to report the damages they caused. He began composing
shorter, more tightly constructed songs, carefully moving more and more towards Woody
Guthrie’s hurt song tradition41. The mood had altered, too: the fierce optimism had been
eclipsed by a sense of alienation and isolation, shrouding the characters in darkness.
“Badlands”, the opening song of the album, summarizes what had happened to the
dreams that were so much alive in 1975: “Talk about a dream, try to make to make it real /
You wake up in the night, with a fear so real / Spend your life waiting for a moment / that just
don’t come”. The narrator of the song acknowledges his situation, saying that “[he] got [his]
facts learned real good right now” and screams it out in the chorus: “Badlands, you gotta live it
every day / Let the broken hearts stand as the price you gotta pay”. His rebellion becomes
most directly clear in the final lines, where he calls out for resistance: “I wanna find one face
that ain’t looking through me / I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these
badlands!” However, it is clear that the song was written very shortly after the Born to Run
period, given that although the dream of escape may be far away now, it is not entirely gone.
In the song’s bridge, he sings: “I believe in the love that you gave me / I believe in the faith
that could save me / I believe in the hope and I pray / That some day it may raise me above
these badlands”.
The rebellious spirit flares up in one more song on the album, before it is extinguished
by nostalgia and despair. In “The Promised Land”, the narrator sums up his life in two lines,
saying he is “working all day in [his] daddy’s garage” and “driving all night chasing some
mirage”, but convinced that “pretty soon, [he’s] gonna take charge”. He then bursts into the
chorus, which expresses the unfulfilled desire to raise above his oppressors: “The dogs on Main
39
Quoted in Marsh (1987), 57.
Garman (1996), 74.
41
The genre of the ‘hurt song’ is defined by Bryan Garman as “written in working-class language and expressing
the collective pain, suffering and injustice working people have historically suffered … while articulating their
collective hopes and dreams of a less oppressive future” (1996, 70). For a further discussion of Guthrie’s protest
tradition, see CHAPTER 5 on Nebraska, where this influence becomes more prominent.
40
23
Street howl, ‘cause they understand / If I could take one moment into my hands / Mister I
ain’t a boy, no I’m a man / And I believe in a promised land”. The choice for the words could
and one moment, however, reveals his uncertainty – it would have sounded far more
convincing had he said that those dogs would howl because “they understand that I will take
this moment into my hands”. Yet deep down, he begins to recognize that that moment will
never come. His frustration about this turns into real aggression in the second verse:
“I’ve done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start”
At the end of the song, he predicts a storm will come from the desert “to blow
everything down that ain’t got the faith to stand its ground”. It will be a final test to see who
can hold on to his faith. But at the same time, it could be a liberating relief of those false
hopes, as the storm will “blow away the dreams that tear you apart / Blow away the dreams
that break your heart / Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted”.
The fact that he acknowledges the treacherous character of these dreams might imply that he
would rather get rid of them.
Whereas “Badlands” and “The Promised Land” serve as a transitory bridge between
the previous album and the new one (still swinging between rebellion and acceptance), the
songs that came out later in the writing process are more clearly marked by the ‘Darkness’. For
the first time in Springsteen’s oeuvre, we encounter the motif of the father, elaborated in
different manners in various songs. The album’s second song, “Adam Raised a Cain”, gives the
thorny father-son relationship a biblical twist, also introducing another religious notion,
namely that of the (original) sin. The references to the story from the Book of Genesis are
partly inspired by John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden (1952), which offers many parallels to
the Biblical tale. In a raw, aggressive style, Springsteen’s narrator almost spits out the words:
“In the Bible Cain slew Abel, and East of Eden he was cast
You’re born into this life paying, for the sins of somebody else’s past
Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain
Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame
You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames
Adam raised a Cain
24
Lost but not forgotten, from the dark heart of a dream
Adam raised a Cain”
The narrator here interestingly argues that Cain is not to blame for his sins, as they
were inherited from his own sinful father. Likewise, the narrator’s father cannot be held
responsible for his actions, or for the fact that he leads a life of disappointment. He can be seen
as a victim of the age-long oppression of the working class. Nevertheless, the father experiences
a deep sense of personal failure, which “casts a shadow similar to the one that darkened the
Springsteen household, as the father searches for an outlet for the frustration he endures”42.
The autobiographical song “Factory” sketches a more intense portrait of Springsteen’s father,
in the realistic setting of the 3M plastics plant in Freehold where Douglas used to work. In a
poem-like song (consisting of three quatrains with a steady rhythm), Springsteen describes one
day in his father’s life, a day full of “hard and drudgerous labor governed by the factory whistle
and locked in by iron gates. It is a bitterly iron-gated work whose irony is only ever worked
out with pain and hurt”43. Short as it may be, the song succeeds in overwhelming its listener
with a heavy feeling of repetitive weariness, intensified by the monotonous refrain that is
repeated every time. The first four-line stanza deals with the daily morning routine:
“Early in the morning, factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
The working, the working, just the working life”
The second quatrain than describes the working day itself, the eight hours the father
and his co-workers undergo the droning heartbeat of the factory, which terrifies its laborers,
but at the same time seems to give them structure and some kind of ‘life’:
“Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
The working, the working, just the working life”
That life, however, ambiguously disappears when the men walk out of those very same
gates at the end of the working day. The breath that was given to them as long as they were
inside the gates, this meaning to their lives, is taken away from them just as quickly on their
way to home:
“End of the day, factory whistle cries,
42
43
Garman (1996), 74.
Palmer (1997), 4.
25
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes
And you just better believe, boy, somebody’s getting hurt tonight
It’s the working, the working, just the working life”
The earlier lines in “Adam Raised a Cain” about “daddy walk[ing] these empty rooms
looking for something to blame” can then be seen as the logical outcome of the events
described in “Factory”. The fact that Springsteen mentions his father so often – on Darkness as
well as on its successor The River – is quite significant. It proves that his focus has shifted from
the ones that are trying to escape towards the ones that are trying to live with the fact that it
cannot be achieved.
A different way to symbolize this is by means of another familiar motif, namely that of
the streets and cars that were so prominent on Born to Run as the primary way to escape. In
both “Something in the Night” and “Racing in the Street”, however, cars now evoke quite
another sentiment. The first proclaims a bitter, pessimistic message, saying that “you’re born
with nothing and better off that way / Because as soon as you’ve got something they send
someone to try and take it away”. The song’s multiple narrators testify to their attempted
escape – almost as if they are the characters from Born to Run looking back at their failed
endeavor:
“When we found the things we loved
They were crushed and dying in the dirt
We tried to pick up the pieces
And get away without getting hurt
But they caught us at the state line
They burned our cars in one last fight
And left us running burned and blind
Chasing something in the night”
Their cars, the ultimate means to run away, have been burned, symbolizing the
impossibility of escape. For those who still have their wheels, they can do little but ramble
around. Here, the act of driving is not an attempt at a physical escape, but rather at a
psychological one – they simply drive to forget. “Racing in the Street” tells the nostalgic story
of working men who clamp onto their cars because it is the only thing in their lives that gives
them a sense of mental freedom, even though it does not offer any real escape from reality. It
seems to be the only thing that keeps them from surrendering: “Some guys they just give up
living / And start dying little by little, piece by piece / Some guys come home from work and
wash up / And go racing in the street”. The song’s protagonist dredges up memories about the
26
times when his car gave him pride, confidence and seductiveness, as he lured his girlfriend
away from a man he defeated at racing. Now, however, her vitality has deserted her.
“Now there’s wrinkles around my baby’s eyes
And she cries herself to sleep at night
When I come home the house is dark
She sighs ‘baby did you make it all right?’
She sits on the porch of her daddy’s house
But all her pretty dreams are torn
She stares off alone into the night
With the eyes of one who hates for just being born”
The porch is reminiscent of the scenes in “Thunder Road”, where the protagonist
wanted to tempt Mary away from her daddy’s porch. It seems all the more likely that, in the
end, she never answered his call, and that Darkness is indeed about the people who failed to get
out. The song’s accompanying tone also offers a strong suggestion. Whereas the tender piano
intros of Born to Run would often quickly explode into rock ‘n roll, songs like “Racing in the
Street” on Darkness and many songs on its successor, the 1980 double-album The River, are
never able to rise above the melancholic tone of Roy Bittan’s piano. These songs seem to deal
with the life of those who have accepted their faith, or are at least trying to. Describing the
neighboring town of Jackson, New Jersey, as a prison from which there is no escape, the song
“Jackson Cage” demonstrates how acceptance is the only option, since any form of fight is
useless: “You can try with all your might / But you’re reminded every night / That you’ve been
judged and handed life / Down in the Jackson Cage”.
As the people give in to the unassailable forces that keep them down, they become the
easiest prey for nostalgia. Not surprisingly, many songs on The River sound just about as
nostalgic as it can possibly get. “Independence Day”, for instance, tells the story of a tense
farewell between a father and his son, and how the latter cannot bring himself to part with the
father, no matter how much he wants to. The song has little to do with the 4th of July holiday,
but rather indicates the day when the son seeks his own independence – from his father,
house, and hometown. At the heart of the song is the sad realization that the son can only
catch a glimpse of happiness by leaving behind his father and everything he represents. “They
ain’t gonna do to me”, says the son, “what I watched them do to you”. The emotional beauty
of the song is largely made up by the reversal of roles: the son treats his father almost like his
child, whom he is trying to explain why he has to leave. The opening line serves as one of the
clearest examples: “Well Papa, go to bed now, it’s getting late”. Given that the song was
27
originally written to appear on Darkness on the Edge of Town44, it is no surprise that in some
underlying layer, the need for change is still alive, although its fierceness has disappeared.
There is no more “pulling out of here to win”45, and it all seems to mellow to a quiet, resigned
declaration of independence. The fear of being absorbed by the “town full of losers”46 is not
dictated anymore by the conviction that he is different from them, but rather by the
understanding that he is becoming their spitting image. In the second verse, he admits their
similarity: “There was just no way this house could hold the two of us / I guess that we were
just too much of the same kind”. For this reason exactly, he finds it so hard to leave his father.
Instead of bidding him farewell himself, he urges his father to utter the words. For over six
times, the request is repeated, and the last time it is almost screamed out in desperation:
“Won’t you just say goodbye, it’s Independence Day…” However, the song remains a
monologue and, as with so many Springsteen songs, we will never know the outcome.
Also brimming with nostalgia is the album’s title track. During live performances in
the 80s, “The River” was often preceded by a long introductory tale about Springsteen’s own
youth, the time when all of his friends were drafted to fight in Vietnam, and the troubled
relationship he had with his father. The story was not directly linked to the events in the song,
but it set the right nostalgic atmosphere. “The River” is a semi-autobiographical story – it was
inspired by Springsteen’s own sister – about a young couple whose promising relationship is
never given an honest chance, due to the girl’s unexpected pregnancy. Just like Springsteen’s
sister and his brother-in-law, the couple were forced to get married as teenagers, and never
really recovered from this rash decision. In the first verse, the narrator explains how he and
‘Mary’, as he calls her, would ride out of the valley towards the river. The valley symbolizes the
working-class society, “where mister when you’re young / They bring you up to do just like
your daddy done”. Down by the river, however, “where the fields were green”, the two could
forget their troubled life for a while. The stream is a strong symbol of life and, in its biblical
sense, of rebirth and redemption. After the first chorus, the troubles set in, as Mary writes her
boyfriend that she is pregnant (“and that was all she wrote”, as if all the rest did not matter
anymore). The narrator recalls how for his nineteenth birthday, all he got was a union card
and a wedding coat. All of a sudden, his innocent youth was over. The wedding is everything
but the celebration it should have been, as there were “no wedding day smiles, no walk down
44
It remains unsure how much of the original lyrics survived the two years up until the song’s release on The
River, but in the documentary film “The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story” (2010),
Springsteen has hinted that most of the words have remained intact, and that only the musical arrangement had
changed.
45
From “Thunder Road” (Born to Run, 1975). See CHAPTER 3.
46
Ibid.
28
the aisle / No flowers, no wedding dress” – it was strictly an unwished-for formality. The same
night, the couple rides down to the river again and they dive in the water, as if it would make
them forget or as if it would wash away the ‘sin’ they committed47.
The song then skips a few years, as it tells how “on account of the economy”, the
husband loses his job working construction. Now, “all the things that seemed so important”
when they were young, “they vanished right into the air”. Even though the narrator acts like
he does not remember, those memories of bygone days “come back to haunt [him]”. He poses
himself the question that greatly summarizes the main ideas in Darkness and The River: “Is a
dream a lie if it don’t come true / Or is it something worse?” In the end, the couple returns to
the river, against their better judgment (“though I know the river is dry”), driven by an almost
neurotic need to find redemption. Some critics claim that the last ride to the river will be their
final one, since the couple commits suicide – though I believe this reading is quite far-fetched,
as it is nowhere suggested in the lyrics48.
The final songs on the album already move towards Nebraska, as they are dominated
by a grim atmosphere and a sense of hopelessness that has surpassed the stage of sad nostalgia.
Rather than recollecting memories of the past, the narrators are more concerned now with
their current blind-alley situation. In “Point Blank” the narrator describes his life as “You wake
up and you’re dying / You don’t even know what from”. The man driving in his “Stolen Car”
confides to us that he “travels in fear that in this darkness [he] will disappear”. These two
songs are followed by “The Price You Pay”, which literally looks back on some of the
characters in the earlier stories. “Do you remember the story of the Promised Land?” the
narrator asks us, “How he crossed the deserts sands / And could not enter the chosen land /
On the banks of the river he stayed / To face the price you pay”. To emphasize this metacommunication musically, the song also features a piano intro very similar to the one that
sparks off “The Promised Land”. Here, we get the straightforward message, in unmistakable
terms, that any attempt to escape has failed. This assumption is endorsed by the fact that one
of the outstanding symbols of this escape – the night – becomes something to be afraid of:
“Caught in a dream when everything goes wrong / Where the dark of night holds back the
light of day”.
47
Given that Springsteen grew up in a strict catholic society, his sister’s pre-marriage pregnancy would
undoubtedly have been frowned upon, if not condemned by the family as a severe ‘sin of the flesh’.
48
Pamela Moss (1992: 82) subscribes to this interpretation, as does Rolling Stone critic Jonathan Valin.
29
The last song on the album, “Wreck on the Highway”, then opens the gates to the raw
and haunting reality of Nebraska. It relates how a man, who is driving on the freeway on a
rainy night, comes upon a car wreck. He describes how “there was blood and glass all over /
And there was nobody there but me / As the rain tumbled down hard and cold / I seen a
young man lying by the side of the road”. As he witnesses the ambulance driving the man
away, the narrator’s thoughts wander off to “a girlfriend or a young wife / And a state trooper
knocking in the middle of the night / To say your baby died in a wreck on the highway”.
Years later, he would wake up in the dark sometimes, thinking about that night. As in “The
Price You Pay”, the night has become parallel to fear and death.
30
CHAPTER 5
| The Silent Cries of Nebraska
“I guess there is just a meanness in this world”
(“NEBRASKA”)
On previous albums, Springsteen produced sketches of people who successively cherished and
lost their dreams. Eventually, they gave up the fight and had to learn how to live with what
they still had: an unchallenging job, a minimum wage and what family, friends and lovers they
had left. In Nebraska, Springsteen takes this experience even further: what happens when those
basic things that structure one’s life, all of a sudden disappear? In his liner notes on the album,
Springsteen told that “[i]f there’s a theme that runs through the record, it’s the thin line
between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes black, when the
things that connect you to your world fail you. I wanted the music to feel like a waking dream
and the record to move like poetry. I wanted the blood on it to feel destined and fateful”49. In
another interview, with Mark Hagen, he added that “[t]here are things that make sense of life
for people: their friends, the work they do, their community, their relationship with their
family and partner. What if you lose those things… then what are you left with?”50 In one
word: Nebraska.
The stories on the album are linked with the “dangerous consequences of living a life
in isolation”51 and what Springsteen often perceived to be “the loss of community in the
United States”52. “Nebraska was about that American isolation”, he told his biographer, “what
happens to people when they are 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 your life in some fashion, no matter how horrible that life might be. And if they slip away,
and you start to exist in some void where the basic constraints of society are a joke, then life
itself becomes a joke, and anything can happen”53. Springsteen’s method of recording for
Nebraska contributes to the ghastly atmosphere: the whole album stems from a set of
recordings he taped on a little cassette player in his rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
49
Songs (1998), 35.
Hagen (1999).
51
Marsh (1987), 118.
52
Ibid, 119.
53
Ibid, 121.
50
31
The technique, nowadays known as lo-fi recording54, leads to the typical raw and harrowing
sound that suits these poignant tales.
The inspiration for Nebraska came from different angles. During the previous tour of
The River, Springsteen buried himself in the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, as he was
“fascinated by the Southern writer’s dark spirituality and grotesque characters”55. He also
started listening intently to the “eerie ballads and laments”56 that dominated Harry Smith’s
Anthology of American Folk Music. One of the main sources of inspiration in this tradition was
Woody Guthrie, whose tradition of the ‘hurt song’ really spoke to Springsteen’s mind. The
genre is defined by Bryan Garman as “written in working-class language and expressing the
collective pain, suffering and injustice working people have historically suffered”57, while at the
same time “articulating their collective hopes and dreams of a less oppressive future”58. As the
traveled through 1930s America, Guthrie had used genres like the rural blues and traditional
ballad to connect his own pain and suffering with those that had become the casualties of the
Great Depression, and to encourage them to join him in his pursuit of social justice.
Employing the language and representational strategies of the hurt song, Springsteen “reclaims
popular music as a cultural space in which class relations are both taken seriously and
historicized”59. He places his work in the context of a recognizable cultural and political
tradition, which affords his characters dignity, even in their deepest suffering. Darkness
included some of his earlier attempts at protest song writing, but it is through Nebraska and –
in many ways its true successor – The Ghost of Tom Joad, that Springsteen connects this
tradition to the social and economic conditions that shaped it, “reconstructing a history which
often contrasts sharply with conventional histories written about the United States”60.
The direct influence for many of the songs on Nebraska came in the figure of Charles
Starkweather, an American teenaged spree killer who murdered numerous people in various
locations across Nebraska and Wyoming. The events, which took place in 1958, during a twomonth road trip with his 14-year-old girlfriend, were also the basis for the 1973 movie
dramatization Badlands, directed by Terrence Malick and starring Martin Sheen as the
54
As opposed to the usual standard of hi-fi, the specific sound of lo-fi music is usually achieved by either
degrading the quality of the recorded audio afterwards, or by using certain equipment, for example inexpensive
cassette tape recorders or elementary instruments.
55
Sawyers (2004), 11.
56
Ibid.
57
Garman (1996), 70.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid, 71.
60
Ibid.
32
notorious murderer61. Since childhood, Starkweather had developed “a severe inferiority
complex” and he had become “very self-loathing, believing that he was unable to do anything
correctly and that his own inherent failures would cause him to live in misery”62. A high school
dropout, he was employed as a garbage collector for minimum wage. Starkweather began
progressing towards very nihilistic views on life, and finally conceived his own personal
philosophy, in which he considered himself a “supreme bringer of justice”63. One night, a
heated discussion at a Lincoln service station led him to steal a shotgun and kill one of the
station’s attendants. It was the horrible starting point of a two-month terror scare across the
Great Plains, where eleven people were killed, including the mother, stepfather and 2-year old
sister of Starkweather’s girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate – who nonetheless decided to accompany
him on his deadly raid. Eventually, the two were arrested after a fierce pursuit in Douglas,
Wyoming. Starkweather was sentenced to death and executed on the electric chair, while
Fugate was given a lifelong prison sentence64. At only 14 years old, she became the youngest
female in United States history to have been tried for first-degree murder.
The story became the subject of the opening song and title track “Nebraska”, while its
spirit haunts almost the entire album. The first words of the 13-line short song describe how
Starkweather and Fugate meet each other, as she is “standin’ on her front lawn just twirlin’ her
baton”, right before they “went for a ride and ten innocent people died / From the town of
Lincoln, Nebraska … / Through the badlands of Wyoming”. While the characters on
Springsteen’s first five albums were innocent victims of society, those on Nebraska are far from
guiltless. However, just like Starkweather, they do not consider themselves culpable of their
crimes. “I can’t say that I’m sorry for the things that we done”, the protagonist says, “[a]t least
for a little while, sir, me and her was had us some fun”, preposterously minimizing the impact
of his deeds. The absurdity becomes total when he asks for his final favor: “Sheriff, when the
man pulls that switch, sir, and snaps my poor head back / You make sure my pretty baby is
sittin’ right there on my lap”. Bizarrely enough, this is also based on reality, as this it was
Starkweather’s final wish that the couple would be executed in the same chair. (As Ann Fugate
was underage, however, she could not be sentenced to death.) In the last lines, it is described
how the jury asks him for the motive behind his crimes, upon which he replies: “Well sir, I
guess there’s just a meanness in this world”, putting the blame on society and the true nature
of humankind, rather than on himself.
61
Springsteen had seen Badlands in 1976, which inspired him to write the eponymous song on Darkness.
Ibid, 36.
63
Ibid, 132.
64
In 1976, however, she was paroled in 1976 after serving 17 years as a “model prisoner” (Newton 1998, 318).
62
33
“State Trooper”, the sixth song on Nebraska, briefly returns to the moment when a
criminal gets caught on the highway – and it seems to be an attempt to discover what was
going on in Starkweather’s mind the moments before his arrest. In a neurotic, anxious style,
we get a stream of consciousness description of a man behind the wheel, waiting for the state
trooper to stop him: “License, registration, I ain’t got none / But I got a clear conscience ‘bout
the things that I’ve done”. He dreads a confrontation, since he knows he will probably end up
killing the officer, something he would rather avoid: “Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a
pretty wife / The only thing that I got’s been bothering me my whole life”. The man’s anxiety
is stressed by the constant hasty repetition of the phrase “Please don’t stop me”, and it is
mirrored in the two-chord pattern of the song. As discussed in CHAPTER 2, the symbolic value
of cars and highways has shifted drastically since Born to Run. Whereas on the 1975 album,
the streets were the way of possibility, they became a broken promise on Darkness and a place
of crime, death and doom on Nebraska.
The album’s fourth song is quite similar to these ‘criminal songs’. “Johnny 99” also
deals with morality and murder, and just like “Nebraska” it was based on real events. In the
shadow of Ronald Reagan’s decidedly anti-labor policies, the unemployment rate had reached
a high of 11% in 1982, and as industrial cities and towns rapidly decayed, homelessness
became a visible national problem65. To address these large economic issues as tangibly as
possible, Springsteen focuses on the individual stories of its victims – who become, in turn,
malefactors themselves. “Johnny 99” focuses on the life of a young worker who loses his job at
the Ford Motor Company plant in Mahwah, New Jersey. In June 1980, the facility was closed
and two years after the shutdown, “more than half of the 3,359 workers who had lost their
jobs remained unemployed”66. Further indicating the gravity of the situation, Bryan Garman
quotes Douglas Fraser, president of the United Auto Workers Union, “who saw nearly
250,000 workers lose their jobs in the early 80s” and explains that “the kind of permanent
layoff at Mahwah was much more shattering than anything that happened in the Depression.
At least in the 1930s, workers had hopes of being called back to work”67.
Springsteen tells the story of Ralph, who lost his job when they “closed down the auto
plant in Mahwah late that month”. He “went out lookin’ for a job but couldn’t find none”.
One night, he goes out drinking and upon his return, he “got a gun and shot a night clerk”.
From this moment on, Ralph becomes ‘Johnny 99’, a depersonalized icon for all those outlaws
65
Aronowitz (1992), cited in Garman (1996), 85.
Garman (1996), 84.
67
Ibid.
66
34
who lost their way after they lost their jobs. He is arrested and tried at the city court, where he
stands face to face with the power of the state. A fight breaks out, in which Ralph/Johnny is
literally ‘alienated’ from the people around him – “they had to drag Johnny’s girl away”, while
his mother “stood up and shouted no to take [her] boy away”. The judge, who is nicknamed
“Mean John Brown”, sentences him for a symbolic ninety-nine years, saying: “the evidence is
clear, let the sentence fit the crime / Prison for 98 and a year, we’ll call it even, Johnny 99”.
When the judge asks him for a final statement, he partly blames society for his deeds: “Now
judge, I had debts no honest man could pay / The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and takin’
my house away / Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man / But it was more ‘n all
this that put that gun in my hand” Instead of his prison sentence, he prefers the death penalty,
as it would release him out of his misery (“Well your honor, I do believe I’d be better off dead
/ … let ‘m shave off my hair and put me on that execution line”).
Throughout the Nebraska album, Springsteen represents the lack of power given to the
working class and its individuals by having his protagonists formally address both the audience
and other characters in the songs with the polite titles of “mister” and “sir”. In turn, the
oppressors underscore this unequal relationship, for instance when the judge in “Johnny 99”
refers to the accused as “son”. Sociologist Alan Rauch asserts that “through such language,
Springsteen’s characters defer to their social superiors, and while titles may indeed connote
genuine feelings of respect, they can also mask feelings of resentment”68. While the protagonist
of “The Promised Land” persevered that he would rise to their height (“Mister, I ain’t a boy,
no I’m a man”), the characters on Nebraska reconcile themselves to the facts.
While this murder song considers the rather drastic effects of class oppression,
“Mansion on the Hill” represents what Garman calls “the daily humiliations of working-class
life”. A rewriting of the 1947 song by Alabama songwriter Hank Williams, it portrays the
unattainable hopes and dreams of the poor, in sharp contrast with the wealthy richer class.
Springsteen relies on geography to sketch this difference: the working-class people live, quite
literally, at the foot of the mountain, while the upper class society enjoys a rich life inside their
mansion on the hill. To indicate the inaccessibility of wealth for the workers, the mansion is
not only geographically remote (the house is described as “rising above the factories and fields”
of Linden Town), but also fenced-off by impenetrable “gates of hardened steel”. Ironically, the
steel would probably have been produced by the laborers in Linden Town’s steel factory.
Garman goes further in his interpretation that “as the fruit of their labor are transformed into
68
Rauch (1988, 35), quoted in Garman (1996), 87.
35
the ornaments of wealth which segregate them from comfort and success, Springsteen suggests
that labor does not deliver workers to the American dream, but rather isolates them only
further from it”69. In the song’s third verse, it is described how a father takes his son “through
the streets of town so silent and still” to a parking spot from which they can watch the
mansion. The fourth verse gives a similar depiction of the son and his sister, “hiding out in the
tall corn fields [to] sit and listen to the mansion on the hill”. Although they are obviously
drawn towards the mansion, they remain strictly on their own territory, realizing the “virtual
impossibility of moving from the dark, still and silent streets of Linden Town to the light,
laughter and enjoyment of the mansion”70. With their hiding out in the fields or sneaking
through the streets, they are expressing a sense of shame associated with their social status. The
Born to Run desire to break out of these social boundaries has now completely settled into their
sorrowful acceptance.
The gloominess of everyday working-class life is probably best portrayed in “Used
Cars”, an autobiographical song told from the perspective of a boy whose father goes out to
buy a car. Normally, a new car would be a showpiece to display wealth and luxury, but not in
this case. The narrator recounts how, after the family had taken the car for a test drive, the
salesman “stares at my old man’s hands”, recognizing that the father is a factory worker – and
therefore an unreliable client to offer a payment deal. He tells the family “all about the break
he’d give us if he could, but he just can’t”. The family ends up buying a second-hand car and
the son expresses the shame he felt when “the neighbors came from near and far / As we pulled
up in our brand new used car” – even the rhythm in the lyrics seems to be disturbed by the
insertion of “used”. The son then summarizes life in their working-class town: “My dad, he
sweats the same job from mornin’ to morn / Me, I walk home on the same dirty streets where
I was born”. The chances of escaping from this life are virtually nonexistent, as they are
compared to drawing a winning number in a lottery: “Now, mister, the day the lottery I win /
I ain’t even gonna ride no used car again / Now, mister, the day my numbers come in / I ain’t
ever gonna ride no used again”.
Around the release of Nebraska, Springsteen told his biographer that the “tricky thing
about getting older is not giving in to cynicism”71. The album’s last song “Reason to Believe”,
however, is as skeptical as it gets. In the four verses, each telling a different but similar
anecdote, Springsteen appears to be offering a “cynical look at a species that despite all
69
Garman (1996), 89.
Ibid, 90.
71
Marsh (1987), 132.
70
36
evidence to the contrary, absurdly insists on believing in something”72. The first verse tells how
a man accidentally runs over a dog on the highway. The narrator witnesses the man “lookin’
down kinda puzzled, pokin’ that dog with a stick” in the middle of the road, “like if he stood
there long enough, that dog’d get up and run”. He then confesses that it “struck [him] kinda
funny” how “at the end of every hard earned day, people find some reason to believe”. The
second anecdote relates how Mary Lou, left by her husband a long time ago, still “waits down
at the end of that dirt road for young Johnny to come back”. The third verse deals with the
irony of life and death, as the narrator describes simultaneously the baptism of a newborn
child and the death of an old man, and the people who “pray Lord won’t you tell us, tell us
what does it mean”. The final story mirrors the second, as a groom waits for his bride at the
altar, even when all the guests for their romantic riverside wedding, including the preacher, are
gone. He “stands alone and watches the river rush on so effortlessly / Wonderin’ where can his
baby be still / At the end of every hard earned day, people find some reason to believe.”
72
Branscomb (1993), 38.
37
CHAPTER 6
| Bombastic Sadness in Born in the USA
“There is a war outside still raging
But it ain’t ours anymore to win”
(“NO SURRENDER”)
Although Nebraska was one Springsteen’s most critically acclaimed albums, it did not reach a
wide audience, and being a self-proclaimed protest singer, few things were harder to deal with
than not getting your message across. This led him to the conclusion that he needed to
reinvent himself – not just his music and lyrics, but his entire presence on stage (dressing as a
warrior-like figure, a champion of working class rights). Although he first cast some doubts
about ‘going big’, he was ultimately persuaded by the fact that many of his biggest heroes
(from Sinatra to Elvis to Dylan) had – at a certain point in their respective careers – performed
for a crowd of millions. “Reaching a mass community of like-minded souls thus was,” as
Springsteen thought, “a worthwhile and worthy goal”73. More than with Born to Run, which
was a largely unexpected commercial success, he wanted this time to consciously bring a clear
message across to the American people.
Released in the early summer of 1984, Born in the USA is actually the product of two
historical periods combined. Past events from the 60s are connected to the 80s present,
together forming the backdrop for a series of bombastic protest songs that bleed from a deep
sadness, impotence and melancholia. The album serves as one of the main blue-collar
antidotes for Ronald Reagan’s presidential actions74. While Reagan’s two terms resulted in a
welcome sensation of growing optimism, under the surface his Reaganomics exacted a high
price in return. While the American dream came within reach for the rich, the poorer working
class had to bury its aspirations completely. As Springsteen was writing the songs for his
upcoming album, national unemployment rate rose to a height of 10,8%75 and strict antilabor policies were putting thousands of factory workers out of business.
73
Sawyers (2004), 12.
Since Reagan could easily sweep away all kinds of political opposition, the most notable forms of protest
against his presidency stemmed from the artistic world – in the form of music, art and literature (Cullen 1992,
14).
75
Statistics found in “Employment status of the civilian non-institutional population 16 years and over, 1940 to
date.” United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved July 10, 2012.
74
38
Despite their great differences in terms of background, politics and personality,
Jefferson Morley highlighted the notable similarities between Springsteen and Reagan. In his
1987 article in the New Republic, he observed that “both have become cultural icons by giving
the American people a reflection, a vision of themselves. Both deftly used the mass media to
define what is American, to present a seemingly natural but carefully molded persona with
which their audience can identify: Reagan as a patriarch of ‘traditional’ middle-class values;
Springsteen as an exuberant yet sensitive son of the working class”76. An interesting difference
between the two, however, is found in the way each recalls events from the past in order to
define the present and future. In his fierce optimism, Reagan is quite blind for the lessons
from the past and the consequences of his present actions for the future. For instance, he
largely neglected the traumatic impact of America’s earlier wars in Europe, Korea and Vietnam
on both the soldiers abroad and their families at the home front77. Another example of his
shortsighted decision-making was the way in which he radically changed the American
industrial landscape, aiming solely on short-term profits for the wealthy classes of society.
Encouraging people to contracting loans, borrowing money the ultimately could not pay back.
The number of personal bankruptcies augmented by 600%, the sale of anti-depressants
astonishingly increased threefold78. Reagan allowed the welfare state to enlarge and the military
budget to explode causing monstrous budget deficits. At a certain point, he made a notorious
statement, saying that “the federal deficit is so big, it can take of itself”79. Paying little attention
to the lessons learned in the Great Depression of the 30s, Reagan’s fierce optimism led him to
belief that the past was “literally priceless – valuable beyond measure, yet costing nothing
today”80.
Springsteen, on the other hand, is almost obsessed with confronting painful memories
from the past. For both men, however, the 1960s are a critical point of reference. As Reagan
first won office in California in 1966, based on the strength of his opposition to the emerging
student movement, Springsteen’s music and childhood memories are deeply embedded in this
period of rebellion and progressivism. Meanwhile, his native New Jersey was afflicted by the
loss of its young men, who were drafted to fight in Vietnam – a deeply personal issue which is
never completely absent from Springsteen’s work.
76
Morley (1987), quoted in Sawyers (2004), 146.
Bartles (1991), 464.
78
Statistics originate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (published online at www.bls.gov/bls).
79
Reagan made this remark at the annual dinner party at the Gridiron Club, on March 24, 1984.
80
Morley (1987), quoted in Sawyers (2004), 147.
77
39
As said in the introduction to this paper, most of Springsteen’s lyrical work can be
analyzed strictly through the words themselves, since the music largely matches the expected
atmosphere evoked by the lyrics. For “Born in the USA”, however, this is not the case. Music
and words compose a complex whole, which seems contradictory at first, but becomes
coherent once you understand the underlying idea. The loudness of the accompanying tune is
sharply contrasted with the actual theme of the song, being existential and political silence.
The song starts with twenty seconds of an anthemic instrumental melody, which radiates
power and conviction. Though Springsteen is screaming his voice hoarse, he barely manages to
take control over this wall of sound. Jefferson Cowie makes a telling comparison to “a man
caught in a musical cage, overpowered by the anthem of his own country”81. In the same
article, Cowie summarizes the controversy that arose upon the song’s release:
“The song’s narrative, buried beneath the pounding music and the patriotic
hollers of the chorus, explores a working-class man burning in the despair of
deindustrialized, post-Vietnam America. Like the neopatriotism of the
Reagan era itself, the power of the national chorus conceals the pain below
it.”82
“The narrative-chorus contrast of the song has been much fought over by
rock critics, activists, and scholars. Was the song part of a patriotic revival or
a tale of working-class betrayal? A symptom of Reagan’s America or antidote
to it? Protest song or national anthem? Both sides assumed that the words
and the music could not go together, and in picking one over the other,
each disregarded the song’s unity for its individual parts.”83
Before judging the song’s different interpretations, one should of course first
thoroughly examine the work itself. Originally written for the Nebraska album, “Born in the
USA” tells the story of a Vietnam veteran who returns home, suffering from injuries for which
there is no cure. Mentally exhausted, he musters up his courage to find a job, only to discover
that there is nothing left for him anymore. He reminisces about his brother, who died fighting
alongside him at Khe Sahn. Every four lines, all this misery gets drowned out by a desperate
exclamation. The narrator was indeed born in the United States, but where are all these
promises that are the birthright of every American, born in this ‘great nation’? As a veteran,
who risked his life and lost a brother in this country’s dubious war, he wonders if he does not
have the right to have these promises fulfilled.
81
Cowie (2006), 359.
Ibid.
83
Ibid.
82
40
The first verse tells how, born in a working-class family, he was not destined for
greatness. The main concern would be to “cover up” from what Bryan Garman calls “the
wounds of class”84. As he was “born down in a dead man’s town”, he never had much of a
chance to live the life he wanted, and the narrator tells that, living in this world, you quickly
“end up like a dog that’s been beat too much / ‘Till you spend half your life just covering up”.
His condition is immediately contrasted with the first chorus, suggesting that – contrary to the
reigning belief and the promise of the American dream – being born on American soil does
not necessarily imply a happy life. The fact that a song called “Born in the USA” starts with
the line “Born down in a dead man’s town” (suggesting their equality) sets the critical and
highly cynical tone for the rest of the story.
Although for the entire narrative, the narrator is an American located in the United
States, it is this narrator’s experience in Vietnam that deeply dominates the story. “Born in the
USA”, argues Cowie, “is further proof of how deeply the jungles of Vietnam have made their
way into the ideological landscape of the US”85. The second verse relates how the protagonist
ended up in the Asian forests in the first place. After he “got in a little hometown jam”, the
authorities offered him the choice that was commonly given to young male offenders in the
1960s: the choice between prison and enlistment. The American blue-collar youth became the
great marketplace for new recruits during the Vietnam era, since many sons of richer
households escaped the draft through the “loopholes” that were created after World War II. As
historian Christian Appy explains, “Vietnam, more than any other American war in the 20th
century, was a working-class war. The college draft-exemption was the most infamous aspect
of the 1960s class divide. In a society in which education is one of the best proxies for class,
those in college generally did not serve”86. The song’s working-class narrator, financially
unable to receive higher education, then forms an easy target. The army thus “puts a rifle in
[his] hand” and “sent [him] off to a foreign land / To go and kill the yellow man”. The fact
that he calls it “a foreign land” (while a certain pronunciation of Viet-nam would have fitted
even better in the rhyme scheme), indicates the obscurity and the confusion of the workingclass youth, who were forced to fight in a war “they did not support, nor understand”87.
Significantly, the wartime itself is not described. After an extended version of the
chorus (with five exclamations instead of four), the protagonist returns to his home soil in the
84
Garman (1996), 91.
Cowie (2006), 362.
86
Appy (1993), 30.
87
Cowie (2006), 365.
85
41
third verse. The oil refinery where used to work, will not take him back, and the Department
of Veteran Affairs cannot help him any further on his quest for a job. Another striking
observation is that we do not hear the question, only the answers: “Come back home to the
refinery / Hiring man says ‘Son, if it was up to me’ / Went down to see my VA man / He said
‘Son, don’t you understand’”. Both the hiring and VA man represent forms of institutional
protection, the latter provided on behalf of the state to support former soldiers upon their
return to native soil. Neither, though, offers help, and we are left to guess at the explanation
why. “If it was up to me” and “don’t you understand” are but vague allusions to the
underlying cause. Is it the failing economy that prevents him from picking up a job again, or
are the narrator’s physical or mental injuries an impassable obstacle? As Cowie interprets, the
narrator’s “supposed allies become uncertain, and the hometown takes on the same darkness as
the guerilla jungle it was previously defined against”88.
This is taken even further in the following verses, were – in contrast to the vaguely
described hometown – the Vietnam environment is suddenly given specific details and
realities. The uncertainty of “foreign land” becomes a specific designation of place: “I had a
brother at Khe Sahn / fighting off the Viet Cong”. Instead of the previous four-line verses, this
one is stripped to just three, as the third line (“They’re still there, he’s all gone”) is followed by
four beats of instrumental bombast, ironically symbolizing a powerless silence. The
penultimate verse obeys this evolution, as it counts only two lines, in which the assumed
adversary (the “yellow men” that he was supposed to kill in the second verse) unexpectedly
becomes more than an ally, as the narrator tells his brother “had a woman in Saigon / I got a
picture of him in her arms now”. All of a sudden, the Vietnamese and the American working
class are united as co-victims of the mysterious “they” (the government that brought them
together to die while fighting each other). While the foreign land becomes a final home and
resting-place for his brother, the so-called ‘hometown’ remains one big uncertainty. The last
verse describes how he roams its streets, looking for meaning: “Down in the shadows of the
penitentiary / Out by the gas fires of the refinery / I’m ten years burning down the road /
Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go”. Indeed, it has been ten long years since Born to
Run, but the dreams of escape described in 1975, are long lost and faded. While back then the
highway was jammed with heroes who were “out on the run tonight” with “no place left to
hide”, the only option in “Born in the USA” becomes hiding and slowly pining away from
grief.
88
Cowie (2006), 366.
42
After having listened intently to the lyrics, it is almost incomprehensible how, upon its
release, many Americans misinterpreted the song as a glorious national anthem of pride and
patriotism. In September 1984, as “Born in the USA” became a top-ten hit on the American
radio charts, conservative columnist George Will claimed Springsteen as a “repository of
Republican values” in his opinion column entitled “A Yankee Doodle Springsteen”. Will had
been to an E Street Band show the other night, and he asserted that “Springsteen is no whiner,
as the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand,
cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’”89. Of course, Will could not have been more
wrong about the cheerfulness in Springsteen’s music. It did not prevent him from getting the
notion pushed up to the office of Reagan’s campaign advisor Michael Deaver. The
Republicans were in the midst of the presidential re-election promo tour, and New Jersey was
their next stop on the way. Will wrote to Deaver that “if all Americans – in labor and
management, who make steel or cars or shoes or textiles – made their products with as much
energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need
for Congress to be thinking about protectionism”90. Less than a week later, Reagan’s made a
campaign stop in Springsteen’s home state, claiming him as a Republican ally, saying the
“future of our youth lies in the hope and dreams in the songs of New Jersey’s own Bruce
Springsteen. And making those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about”91.
Disgusted by the unauthorized abuse of his name and fame, Springsteen tried to
disassociate himself from the president’s words. A few nights later, at a performance in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he decided to respond to the president’s statement. “The president
was mentioning my name the other day,” he said with a bemused laugh, “and I kinda got to
wondering what his favorite album might have been. I don’t think it was this one”92. After
which he launched into a passionate acoustic version of “Johnny 99” from Nebraska – a song
he wrote, along with the other tunes on Nebraska, “in response to the malignant public and
political atmosphere that had been fostered by Reagan’s social policies”93. As another antimovement, Springsteen started performing versions of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your
Land”, originally written in 1940 as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” (which
he considered “unrealistic and complacent”94). Before playing the song on stage in
Philadelphia, Springsteen commented upon its topicality: “if you talk to the steelworkers out
89
George Will wrote this in his column of September 13, 1984 in the Washington Post.
Quoted in Garman (1996), 92.
91
Quoted in Gilmore (1998), 274.
92
Ibid. 275.
93
Ibid.
94
Klein (1992), 44.
90
43
there who have lost their jobs, I don’t know if they’d believe this song is what we’re about
anymore. And maybe we’re not. As we sit here, this song’s promise is eroding every day”95.
As with The River, the sadness and powerlessness of the characters translates into a lot
of nostalgic narratives. Though largely missing on Nebraska, nostalgia is – next to anger – the
main mood of Born in the USA. Most of the other songs on the album deal with stories of
personal or collective decay. The narrator of “No Surrender”, for instance, recalls an oath he
had sworn with his friends when they were young. They had promised never to yield to
anything or anyone, no matter how hard the circumstances would be. He melancholically
reminisces about their childhood: “We busted out of class / Had to get away from those fools /
We learned more from a three-minute record / Than we ever learned in school”. Years later,
however, the narrator’s friends seem to have given up. He sees how “young faces grow sad and
cold / And hearts of fire grow cold”. The last verse describes how “on the street tonight the
lights grow dim / The walls of my room are closing in / There’s a war outside still raging / But
it ain’t ours anymore to win”. The refrain then is nothing but an unavailing call to his
(former) friends: “We made a promise we swore we’d always remember / No retreat, baby, no
surrender / Like soldiers in the winter’s night with a vow to defend / No retreat, baby, no
surrender”. The only way out of this misery, it seems, is to sleep and dream (a softer precursor
for the theme of escape through death in The Ghost of Tom Joad). First, the narrator tells his
friend “You say you’re tired and you just want to close your eyes / And follow your dreams
down”. In the song’s last lines, he expresses his own desire “to sleep beneath peaceful skies in
my lover’s bed / With a wide-open country in my eyes / And these romantic dreams in my
head”. The “wide open country” – the land of opportunity, hopes and dreams; the promised
land from sea to shining sea – only exists in romantic dreams, not in reality.
Personal decay is most explicitly rendered in “Downbound Train”, where the first
verse summarizes the narrator’s life is decomposed step by step: “I had a job, I had a girl / I
had something going, mister, in this world / I got laid off down at the lumber yard / Our love
went bad, times got hard / Now I work down at the carwash / Where all it ever does is rain /
Don’t you feel like you’re a rider / On a downbound train”. The second verse elaborates on
the narrator’s wife, who left him, with the simple excuse that “We had it once, we ain’t got it
anymore”. At night, the man keeps on reliving the moment when she packed her bags and got
on the Central Line train. The chorus-less song continues in two additional verses, the first
containing some of the most cinematic lines Springsteen has ever written:
95
Quoted in Marsh (2003), 466.
44
Last night, I heard your voice
You were crying, crying, you were so alone
You said your love had never died
You were waiting for me at home
Put on my jacket, I ran through the woods
I ran ‘till I thought my chest would explode
There in the clearing, beyond the highway
In the moonlight, our wedding house shone
I rushed through the yard, I burst through the front door
My head pounding hard, up the stairs I climbed
The room was dark, our bed was empty
Then I heard that long whistle whine
And I dropped to my knees, hung my head and cried
Similar to the factory whistle on songs like “Out in the Street” and “Factory”, the
whistle of the train serves as a literal wake-up call from his anxious, nostalgic dreams, and as a
recurring symbol of reality. In the last lines, the narrator recounts how he ironically found a
job “swinging a sledge hammer on a railroad gang”, where the brutal sounds of reality are now
all he hears.
“Bobby Jean” is a first-person narrative about someone who comes by the house of an
old friend he has known since they were sixteen, and hears that this friend “went away”. It is
not clear what exactly happened to this Bobby Jean: some argue that she is the narrator’s lover
who committed suicide, while others claim that she is actually a he and that this friend joined
the army to go to Vietnam (which would then of course repeat some of the elements from the
album’s title track). Still others try to combine these two arguments in saying that the narrator
and this Bobby Jean were homosexual lovers – making it possible for the latter to enlist, while
at the same time accounting for the fact that the narrator addresses him as “baby” in the last
verse96. No matter from which perspective the song is analyzed, one comes to the same
conclusion: the narrator feels powerless realizing he cannot change the past, the present or the
course of life in general. He says “I wish I would have known / I wish I could have called you”,
but it would have been “just to say goodbye”. He thereby acknowledges the words of Bobby
Jean’s mother, who “said there was nothing that I could have done / There was nothing
nobody could say”.
Similar themes of nostalgia and powerlessness also pervade songs like “Dancing in the
Dark”, “Glory Days”, “Working on the Highway” and “Cover Me”. With the exception of
96
Springsteen never explicitly revealed the true meaning of the song, though he hinted that the departure of his
old friend Steven Van Zandt from the E Street Band was the main inspiration for the song (Marsh 2003, 233).
45
“I’m On Fire”, which deals with its protagonist’s sexual frustrations, all the songs in Born in
the USA are strongly characterized by this melancholic mood. The album’s last feature,
entitled “My Hometown”, draws the clearest sketch of combined personal and societal decay.
The narrator remembers how, when he was eight years old, his father would drive him around
town on his car, and “he’d tousle my hair and say, son, take a good look around / This is your
hometown”. This happy nostalgic memory of the 50s, however, is disturbed when the
narrative shifts to 1965. The autobiographical narrator remembers the race riots that took
place in Springsteen’s native Freehold, New Jersey, during several periods in the 60s97:
In ’65 tension was running high, at my high school
There was a lot of fights between the black and white
There was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night, in the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed, in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come
To my hometown
Ever since these “troubled times”, the whole place has almost become a ghost town.
The narrator describes how now “Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores /
Seems like there ain’t nobody wanting to come down here no more / They’re closing down the
textile mill across the railroad racks / Foreman says these jobs are going boys, and they ain’t
coming back / To your hometown”. The description of the town in decay is redolent of the
situation of Youngstown, which Springsteen would later describe on The Ghost of Tom Joad
(cf. CHAPTER 7). In the song’s last verse, the narrator and his wife talk about leaving this
godforsaken place. At the age of thirty-five, they now have a boy of their own. Driving around
town with the little boy, the narrator repeats the words of his own father. The bitter irony is
telling, as the son knows how charming the town was once, before riots and
deindustrialization crossed its path. Although the young boy might not know any better, the
father certainly does, and we can almost tell the bitterness from his face as he says: “Son, take a
good look around / This is your hometown”.
Because of the music that accompanies the lyrics on Born in the USA, the album is
often misinterpreted as a less dark ‘interlude’ between the grim folk records Nebraska and The
Ghost of Tom Joad. Although the music at times reinforces the song’s message (for instance, as
97
The riots would eventually lead to the climactic racially charged shooting of May 19, 1969, on the corner of
Freehold’s Route 33 and South Street, where two young boys were shot. Springsteen used to live on South Street
during his high school years, and even though he had moved to Asbury Park by the time of the shooting, the
events made a big impact on him, as they did on the entire town of Freehold (Marsh 1987, 56).
46
discussed, in “Born in the USA”), it can simultaneously deceit the inattentive listener. “Glory
Days” and “Working on the Highway” are both set to a rather cheerful tune, while their
content is far from optimistic. Only “My Hometown” and “Downbound Train” are
accompanied by a sound that can only suggest melancholia. Therefore, it is no wonder that
Springsteen often chose to perform these songs acoustically, since he noticed that in the early
months after the release, his songs were often mistaken for positive cheers, not in the least by
the Republicans supporting the new Reaganistic optimism. The acoustic versions of “Born in
the USA” (a stinging performance on a twelve-string slide guitar) and “No Surrender”
(featuring on the Live 1975-85 album) tell the more straightforward story, one that is not to
be misunderstood, and often preceded on stage by a sharp criticism of the Republican Party.
Ironically, 1984 turned out to be an unprecedented success story for both Reagan and
Springsteen. The latter managed to reach the huge audience he had wished for, with the
album selling more than 18 million copies in the US alone, and the accompanying 156
concert shows sometimes luring more than 100,000 attendants a night. However, he did not
look back upon the whole Born in the USA period as a complete success, as Ronald Reagan
was re-elected with a landslide victory (winning 49 out of 50 states), five months after the
album’s release. Springsteen came to understand that reaching a big audience did not
necessarily imply that all of those people would go home with a full understanding of (or a
like-minded view on) the issues he had been addressing. A great part of his audience only came
for the musical hype, missing the social commentary altogether. This led to great
disappointment, and Springsteen decided to stay away from the political spotlight for a while,
as he disbanded his E Street Band and went on to produce a number of solo records, filled
with reflection on other themes, predominantly the beauty and danger of love. It was not until
1995, eleven years after Born in the USA, that he would regain his critical voice.
47
CHAPTER 7
| Dead and Defeated: The Ghost of Tom Joad
“You got a one-way ticket to the promised land
You got a hole in your belly and a gun in your hand”
(“THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD”)
Apart from a few efforts for fundraising (from local food banks to an Amnesty International
concert tour), Springsteen retired from the social and political scene for a long time – a period
that would last until 1995. The intervening albums Tunnel of Love, Human Touch and Lucky
Town are strongly typified by the two-sidedness of love: while Tunnel of Love is marked by his
failed marriage with and divorce from Julianne Philips, the latter two are optimistic cheers
following his marriage to Patti Scialfa and the birth of his children.
With the Born in the USA tour still underway, Springsteen married Julianne Phillips,
only to separate less than two years later, and finally divorcing in 1989. As always, he “turned
to music to reconcile his roiling emotions”98. Consequently, Tunnel of Love features some of
the most beautiful songs written about love gone wrong. Some consider the album his “most
perceptive one to date”, comparing his lyrics to the short stories of Raymond Carver “in their
deceptive simplicity of people struggling to find themselves a physical, emotional and spiritual
place in the world”99. Human Touch and Lucky Town, released simultaneously in March 1992,
“continue to plumb these domesticity”100. In the five years since Tunnel of Love, Springsteen’s
private life took a sharp turn towards a happy and steady life, after his marriage to E Street
Band-member Patti Scialfa and the birth of his first two children. This translates into a widely
optimistic record, which celebrates love rather than questioning its deceitfulness. Lyrics such as
“Tonight I’m lying in your arms carvin’ lucky charms”101 and “Looking for a little bit of God’s
mercy, I’ve found living proof”102 (written upon the birth of his son), proof that on these
records, Springsteen took a long break from the social criticism that pervaded the first 15 years
of his career. While the songs on Tunnel of Love are valuable in terms of their affecting lyrics
and melodies, Tunnel’s two successors are far from memorable. With the exceptions of a few
lesser-known gems (“Leap of Faith” and “I Wish I Were Blind” are worthy of mention), the
98
Sawyers (2004), 12.
Alterman (1999), 185.
100
Sawyers (2004), 13.
101
From “Better Days” (Lucky Town, 1992).
102
From “Living Proof” (ibid).
99
48
songs written in the late eighties and early nineties belong to Springsteen’s weaker efforts at
songwriting. Springsteen later admitted this himself, calling the Human Touch and Lucky
Town albums “generic material”103. Tellingly, these songs rarely appeared during any of his
recent concert tours, as they “don’t tell the right story, and they would only distract the
audience from the message [he] want[s] to convey”104.
With The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), Springsteen made a celebrated return to the social
realism that characterized his earlier classics. Rather than writing another Nebraska or
Darkness, however, this time he broadened his area of research. Crossing the borders of his
native New Jersey, he moved to California where he was affected and inspired by the stories of
Mexican and Asian immigrants and “bewildered members of the new underclass”105 of Los
Angeles and San Diego. Yet he did not restrict his interest to the Southern border alone.
Reading as much as he could about the underprivileged all over America, he came upon the
heartrending stories of the deindustrialized ghost towns of Ohio, the Asian folks who were
stigmatized after Pearl Harbor and Vietnam, and the roaming families who left the bone-dry
plains of Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma. On The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen truly became
an all-round social critic, releasing himself from the mark of ‘working-class hero’. Taking this
important step, he became more and more the American poet he is today, putting himself in
the great company of like-minded souls “ranging from Walt Whitman to Jack London, Mark
Twain to Jack Kerouac, and Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan”106.
The core of inspiration for The Ghost of Tom Joad is found in John Steinbeck’s realist
classic The Grapes of Wrath, first published in 1939. Set during the Great Depression, the
novel focuses on a family of roaming ‘Okies’ – Oklahomans who were driven out of their
lands by the infamous Dust Bowl storms, economic hardship, and changes in financial and
agricultural industries. Due to their hopeless situation, the Joads set out to California in search
for jobs, lands, and – above all – in hopes of a better, dignified future. The story sets in as
Tom Joad, the family’s second son and protagonist of the novel, is paroled from prison and
finds upon his return that the family’s Oklahoma farm has been distrained by the banks,
which are dispelling the farmers from their lands on a large scale. Seduced by an advertising
campaign promoting California as a ‘land of opportunity’, young Tom takes leadership of his
family on their westward journey. Even though leaving the state of Oklahoma is a violation of
his parole conditions, Tom decides it is worth the risk. Traveling along Route 66, they are
103
Sawyers (2004), 148.
Marsh (2003), 594.
105
Garman (1996), 82.
106
Sawyers (2004), 15.
104
49
confronted by the disillusioned people voyaging in the opposite direction, severely testing the
Joads’ faith in the Californian promises. Gradually, the family falls apart, as some of its
members leave and both paternal grandparents die during the journey. Upon their arrival, they
quickly find themselves in the middle of an on-going dispute between big corporations and
little farmers, and between employers and their underpaid workers, who are uniting themselves
in labor unions. The Joads find a temporary trade as strikebreakers on a peach orchard.
During a strike on the ranch, Tom watches his companion Casy get shot, and revenges him by
killing the attacker. From this moment on, Tom knows he will remain a fugitive forever, and
bids farewell to his mother, promising her that no matter where he goes, he will remain the
fiercest advocate for the oppressed.
A year after the novel’s release, it had already been adapted for the screen by John
Ford, who followed Steinbeck’s narrative rather dutifully, though his alternative ending sheds
a more optimistic light on the future of the Joads. While the novel ends with the family in
very dire straits, fleeing a rising flood, the film version gives them a spark of hope by picturing
them as stabilized and placing them in a safe refugee camp provided by the federal government
– a subtle switch in the chronology of the novel, where this scene appears earlier on in the
story. At the time, the novel’s ending was “considered far too controversial” for a Hollywood
movie107. Also, the producers of Ford’s adaption strongly soften Steinbeck’s political message,
which was rather anti-Republican. An interesting observation concerning the two versions is
that Springsteen had first watched Ford’s film version in 1978, while writing songs for
Darkness on the Edge of Town. It was not until 1993 that he read Steinbeck’s original, and it
served as another eye-opener, significantly influencing the album he was to write a year later108.
Notably, the tone of the Ghost of Tom Joad is definitely more pessimistic than in his earlier
work, as the tiny spark of redemption is now gone. More than a collection of inciting protest
songs, Ghost is a voiced lamentation which citizens how little has changed since Steinbeck’s
and Ford’s era of the Great Depression. Taking their characters as an important source of
inspiration, he places them in a contemporary setting. Instead of being hopeless Dust Bowl
wanderers, they now become lost in George H.W. Bush’s confusing ‘New World Order’.
Next to Steinbeck and Ford, another important figure from the same period played a
part in bringing Springsteen’s attention to the tragic characters in The Grapes of Wrath. A
native of Oklahoma, Woody Guthrie was consulted to make his contribution to the
soundtrack of Ford’s film. Despite his affection for both Ford and Steinbeck, Guthrie,
107
108
Ford (1982), 152.
Marsh (2003), 314.
50
however, raised objections to their project. He argued that neither literature nor film were the
right medium to express the laments of the Dust Bowl people. To Guthrie, “only folk music, a
form which captured the voice of the people, could represents the real class struggle” and “use
the truth as a spring of cold water” to bring about social reform109. Bryan Garman notes that
“Steinbeck and Ford had done much to publicize the plight of America’s displaced farm
workers, but because they had not lived the experience as completely as Guthrie had, they
could not, in his view, understand the Okie and working-class ‘hurt songs’ as well as he
did”110. Indeed, Guthrie had suffered first-handedly from the drastic changes that occurred in
Oklahoma in the twenties and thirties. He saw how his father’s fortunes drastically decayed
when the oil boom came to his native Okemah. “Unable to maintain his business in the
town’s fast-paced economy, [Guthrie’s father] Charley lost his political connections and was
forced to move from job to job, house to house, town to town”111. Family tragedies
deteriorated things, as the Guthries’ daughter Clara burned to death in 1919, and Charley was
badly injured in 1927, when his increasingly unstable wife threw a kerosene lamp at him112.
Young Woody Guthrie began to “describe these misfortunes in musical terms and commenced
to sing sadder songs in a luster voice”113.
In the end, Guthrie wrote “The Ballad of Tom Joad” – inspired by Steinbeck, but
largely based on what he witnessed himself – as a soundtrack to the movie. The same year, the
song appeared on his Dust Bowl Ballads (1940), which also included “Vigilante Man” and “I
Ain’t Got No Home”, two songs that Springsteen cited as inspirations for his own album, and
that he performed several times on stage. Recalling a problematic childhood in a troubled
household himself, Springsteen could relate to Guthrie’s sorrow. “Reawakening Joad’s ghost
and putting his spirit to work in contemporary America”, Springsteen thus reconnects with
the hurt song tradition and strengthens his cultural ties to both Guthrie and Steinbeck114.
With his contemporary setting, Springsteen adds a new dimension to this cry for social justice.
As Garman introduces the album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad subjects the American conscience to
though moral questions, dismantles the national and religious myths that structure
109
Klein (1992), 68-69.
Garman (1996), 70.
111
Klein (1992), 1-39.
112
Ibid, 40.
113
Ibid, 41.
114
Garman (1996), 94.
110
51
conventional historical narratives, and once again constructs a repressed history which
represents the brutality of the real world”115.
The album opens with the title track, which immediately presents this combination of
Steinbeck’s past and Springsteen’s present. The first lines describe a group of refugees “walkin’
‘long the railroad tracks / Going someplace where there’s no going back”, an image that is very
reminiscent of Steinbeck’s Joad family on their journey from Oklahoma to California. The
next lines, however, introduce a modern element in the form of “highway patrol choppers
comin’ up over the ridge”. Surprisingly, this introduction of helicopters does not come across
as a disturbing break, but rather as a natural continuity. The “shelter line stretchin’ round the
corner” then welcomes the homeless “to the new world order” – a very ironic remark referring
to the promise made by George H.W. Bush during the First Gulf War. In his address to a
joint session of Congress, Bush had prophesied a new era, unprecedented in world history in
its emphasis on peace and justice:
A new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and
extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also
offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation.
Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can
emerge. A new era—free from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of
justice and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations
of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in
harmony.
A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a
thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor, and today that new
world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we have
known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A
world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and
justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.116
The ironic failure of Bush’s utopian promise becomes particularly painful when
reading the last sentence of this excerpt. With “strong” and “weak”, Bush was referring to
wealthy superpowers and oppressed or developing countries – the US used the Iraqi invasion
in the “weak” neighbor-state of Kuwait as the main argument for the Gulf War117. Inside
Bush’s own country, however, the gap between rich and poor was becoming wider every day.
When Springsteen welcomes the refugees to “the new world order”, it serves as a very cynical
115
Garman (1996), 95.
Bush (1990).
117
Toft & Mingst (2010), 252.
116
52
comment on the fact that, 5 years since this great promise, nothing has changed, and “the new
era” is everything but “different from the one we have known” – worse still, it was still bearing
a strong resemblance to Steinbeck’s age of the Great Depression. The last phrases of the first
verse concisely summarize the situation of the poor and powerless: “Families sleepin’ in their
cars in the Southwest / No home, no job, no peace, no rest”.
In most of his earlier work, Springsteen had embedded a certain pattern. Songs would
usually commence quite neutrally, before falling into the description of a pessimistic situation
from which there is no escape. In the end, however, most often there is still a spark of
redemption left. In “Thunder Road”, for example, the song begins with the dreamy depiction
of Mary, after which her futureless life is portrayed. The song’s finale nonetheless leaves the
ending quite open to interpretation, as the protagonist sings he is “pulling out of here to win”.
We do not know if he succeeded (and judging by the later stories on Darkness and The River,
it is most likely that he did not), but at least there is some hope. In the chorus of “The Ghost
of Tom Joad”, on the other hand, one can note a reversal of this process. The first line – where
the “highway is alive tonight” – seems positive, but is immediately cancelled out by the dismal
second line – “But nobody’s kidding nobody about where it goes”. The protagonist then
describes himself as “sitting down here in the campfire light / Searchin’ for the ghost of Tom
Joad”. Quite literally, the ghost of Steinbeck’s tragic hero still wanders amidst his modern
fellow-sufferers.
The second verse sketches a revealing picture of one of the group’s individuals. He is a
Catholic priest, who carries along a prayer book, but seems to find more comfort in his box of
cigarettes than he gets from his religion. Using popular slang expressions, Springsteen degrades
the priest – normally a higher member of society – to nothing but one of the many miserable
people wandering towards a dead end. The preacher is “waitin’ for when the last shall be first
and the first shall be last”, but his current position (“in a cardboard box neath’ the underpass”)
does not bode very well. The people who are “sleeping on a pillow of solid rock” are given one
final solution to their problems: “Got one-way ticket to the promised land / You got a hole in
your belly and a gun in your hand”. It seems as if death is the only way to the hereafter,
although it is to be doubted that suicide would actually get them there – since this is of course
considered a sin in Christianity. The second chorus is a repetition of the first, but with two
minor adjustments that bring the song closer towards its doomed ending. “Nobody’s kidding
nobody ‘bout where it goes” becomes a more direct “where it’s headed, everybody knows”, and
53
the protagonist is no longer “searchin’”, as much as “waitin’ on the ghost of Tom Joad” – as if
he is certain of his approaching fate.
The third and final verse of the song directly borrows from Steinbeck’s novel. It
rephrases Tom Joad’s key words in his farewell to his mother, which are mostly similar in both
novel and film. The following excerpt comes from Ford’s screen adaptation, which drops some
of the references to marginal characters, making Tom’s speech a bit more cogent and
powerful:
“I’ll be around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere. Wherever there’s a fight so
hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy, I’ll
be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids
laugh when they know supper’s ready. And when the people are eatin’ the
stuff they raise, and livin’ the houses they build, I’ll be there too.”118
In his “Ballad of Tom Joad”, Woody Guthrie adopted the essence of this passage:
Wherever people ain’t free
Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights
That’s where I’m gonna be119
In his own song, however, Springsteen relied more on the original text, merely
adapting and shortening it to give it its rhythm and musicality:
Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there’s a fight ‘gainst blood and hatred in the air
Look for me, Mom, I’ll be there
Wherever somebody’s fightin’ for a place to stand
Or a decent job or a helpin’ hand
Wherever sombody’s strugglin’ to be free
Look in their eyes, Mom, you’ll see me
Notably, Springsteen’s message is still more pessimistic than Steinbeck’s and Ford’s.
Whereas they mentioned the possibility of a positive outcome (a world where people could
freely raise their own food and build their own houses), Springsteen’s protagonist only pays
attention to the struggle and the hurt. Indeed, Jim Cullen also notices that “there is a
bitterness in “The Ghost of Tom Joad” that may even exceed that of Steinbeck”120. Upon the
118
Ford (1940).
From “The Ballad of Tom Joad” (Dust Bowl Ballads, 1940).
120
Cullen (1996), quoted in Sawyers (2004), 235.
119
54
cynical false optimism in the chorus (“the highway is alive tonight”, only to be followed by
“where it’s headed, everybody knows”), he aptly comments: “Thunder Road, it seems, is a
dead end”121.
As with nearly all of Springsteen’s albums, the first song sets the mood for the entire
collection. It introduces a theme, which is then elaborated in various ways in the particular
songs. Frequently, this is done by way of numerous character sketches of short stories about
people’s lives. Yet, in “Youngstown”, Springsteen displays his special talent for granting life,
memory and emotion to otherwise inanimate objects such as towns, factories and steel mills122.
Here, the story of decay and hopelessness is symbolized in a factory town in northeast Ohio.
Youngstown was industrialized in the 19th century when iron ore was discovered, and its mines
became one of the great sources of weaponry during the Civil War. Its steel plants went on to
produce arms for all of its country’s battles, including those of World War II and Vietnam. In
1979, however, three of Youngstown’s biggest steel mills were closed down and local people
protested, “searching in vain to negotiate a buyout and taking the matter to court”123. The
judge, though, ruled against them – yet another example of how the poor, no matter their
number, stand no chance due to structural oppression. As a result, “the town’s working people
were devastated when US Steel closed operations, putting thousands of people out of work,
and as support jobs to the mills also folded, the city’s unemployment rate approached 30% in
the early 1980s”124. The rise and fall of Youngstown, from its foundation to the decline of the
steel industry in the 1970s, is described in the five verses of the song125. The recurring chorus
tells how the unemployed protagonist is desperately looking for existential answers, while he is
“sinkin’ down / Here darling in Youngstown”. He is singing his song to “Jenny”, which was a
local nickname for the Jeanette Blast Furnace, one of the largest furnaces owned by the YST
steel factory that was shut down in 1979.
Returning from Vietnam, the protagonist does just like his daddy done (as the lyrics of
“The River” would say) when he came home from World War II. He takes on a job in the
121
Cullen (1996), quoted in Sawyers (2004), 235.
On his latest album Wrecking Ball (2012), the title track is a narrative told from the perspective of a sports
stadium (the Giants Stadium in New Jersey), which stands on the brink of destruction. In the song, the building
is melancholically recalling its great history. It then dares the demolition workers to tear down its walls, knowing
that they will be tearing down all those memories as well. Springsteen wrote this song in honor of the stadium,
where he played many of his most famous concerts.
123
Linkon & Russo (2002), 30.
124
Maharidge (1985), 35.
125
In 1982, Billy Joel wrote a similar song about the city of Allentown, Pennsylvania (“Allentown”, which
appeared on The Nylon Curtain). Joel’s version, however, was less harsh and pessimistic than Springsteen’s
portrayal of Youngstown.
122
55
local “hotter-than-hell” steel furnaces, describing it as “a job that’d suit the devil as well”. The
conditions in the forges are so severe that they would kill the veterans that survived the Second
World War (the father used to say that “them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do”). As work
in the factories becomes more and more unstable, the narrator wonders what was the real
reason behind all these wars. Indeed, wars marked the time in Youngstown – wartime meant a
considerable boost for the industry, which produced primarily army weaponry (from
cannonballs to tanks and bombs)126. As Springsteen “structures his narrative around a history
of military service”, Bryan Garman notes that “this structure identifies and critically questions
the role that the state plays in advancing interests of big business”127. What is important to
Springsteen is “how both industry and the state promoted this economic ideal at the expense
of Youngstown – the town, the resources, and the people”128. He sharply alludes that the real
winners of these wars – no matter what their outcome might be – are the great steel
corporations.
They built a blast furnace
Here along the shore
And they made the cannon balls
That helped the union win the war
…
These mills they built the tanks and bombs
That won this country’s wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam
Now we’re wondering what they were ‘dying for
By the late 1970s, however, “it was clear that the economic system for which they had
sacrificed their lives could no longer utilize them”129. Having completely exploited and
depleted the people and resources of Youngstown, these corporations left the area, taking away
over 10,000 jobs130. In the penultimate verse, the narrator indicates that the situation in his
town is not unique in America. Standing amidst the ashes of what was once an economic
center, he refers to similar ‘victims’ of deindustrialization, such as the Monongahela Valley or
the mines of Appalachia, revealing “the deep wounds that this dramatic economic
transformation has inflicted on people and place”131:
From the Monongahela Valley
126
Maharidge (1985), 42.
Garman (1996), 97.
128
Garman (1996), 97.
129
Garman (1996), 98.
130
Maharidge (1984), 21-22.
131
Garman (1996), 98.
127
56
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story’s always the same
Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world has changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name
Here in Youngstown
Here in Youngstown
My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down
Here darlin’ in Youngstown
The last verse synthesizes the collapse of faith in blue collar America. The dreams of
the working class are no longer aspirations to escape towards a better life. Rather, their desired
escape is found in the anticipation of death. Moreover, the narrator tells he is not even
interested in heaven, as he feels like he would not belong there:
When I die, I don’t want no part of heaven
I would not do heaven’s work well
I pray the devil comes and takes me
To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell
Where Steinbeck and Ford focused on the life of white families from Oklahoma and
Arkansas, Springsteen widened his scope, as he started to realize that the story of faded dreams
and broken promises, the one he had been telling for all those years, really was an all-American
story. Having moved to California, he came in touch with many people who knew both the
attractiveness and the danger of the Mexican-American borderline. Every year, thousands of
Mexicans tried to cross the border, and many of them lost their lives in the attempt. For those
who succeeded, life on the American side was not necessarily a better one. In “Sinaloa
Cowboys”, the brothers Miguel and Louis Rosales leave their family in Northern Mexico to go
and find work in the United States. Having successfully crossed the border at the river levee,
they find a job in the orchards of San Joaquin (just outside the San Francisco Bay Area),
working “from morning ‘till the day was through / Doing the work the hueros132 wouldn’t
do”. Looking to earn more money, they take on another job, cooking methamphetamine on a
deserted chicken ranch, “in a small tin shack on the edge of a ravine”. The narrator explains
how “You could spend a year in the orchards / Or make half as much in one ten hour shift”.
132
Mexican slang word to indicate “white people” – in this case the Americans, for whom the work in the
orchards was too heavy a job to take.
57
However, with the bigger paycheck also comes a greater risk: one slip can be enough to let the
acid “burn right through your skin” and “leave you spittin’ up blood in the desert / If you
breathed those fumes in”. One winter evening, fate catches up with the Rosales brothers, as
the shack explodes and Louis is killed in the inferno. When they left their home in Mexico,
their father had told them: “My sons, one thing you will learn / For everything the North
gives, it exacts a price in return”. Indeed, before Miguel places his brother in his grave, he digs
up the ten thousand dollars they had saved over the years. The symbolism could not be
stronger: working on American soil, this new ground has given him more money than he
could have ever earned in Mexico. But the price to be paid in return is much too high, and can
be expressed in neither dollars nor pesetas.
While Springsteen was adding the final touches on the album, Paramount Pictures
launched its latest blockbuster movie, Forrest Gump. In the movie (which would eventually
win six Academy Awards and three Golden Globes), Tom Hanks portrays the naive and slowwitted title character Forrest, who witnesses (and in some cases influences) some of the
defining moments in 20th century history. The film is filled with inspiring quotes and
optimistic clichés, and although Springsteen acknowledged that the movie was “an artistic
masterpiece”133, he did not like the message it was conveying. As Bryan Garman explains,
“when considered alongside the songs of Ghost, romantic stories about upward mobility and
the American dream such as appear in Forrest Gump trivialize and misrepresent the actual
struggles in which laborers, veterans, and underprivileged people engage everyday”134. In “My
Best Was Never Good Enough”, Springsteen coldly rejects all these clichés and maxims that
are so much embedded in the ‘American spirit’. With this song, he wanted to make clear that
this optimism could not be reconciled with American reality. In this reality, it is not enough
simply to do your best, as some people – and by extension some classes of society – are not
destined to lead happy lives.
If God gives you nothin’ but lemons, then you make some lemonade
The early bird catches the fuckin’ worm, Rome wasn’t built in a day
Now life’s like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get
Stupid is as stupid does, and all the rest of that shit
Come on baby, call my bluff
‘Cause for you, my best was never good enough
133
134
Garman (1996), 104.
Ibid.
58
Still, Garman also notes that “forging an alternative to this optimistic culture is a
difficult proposition, particularly when American popular imagination remains solidly infused
with the idea that American is set off from all other societies, by the opportunities it affords to
vertical mobility”135. For Springsteen, who had become one of the world’s best-known and
wealthiest artists, the complications were perhaps even more challenging. However, “with the
release of Ghost, he made a concerted effort to elucidate his intentions”136. Steering clear of the
mythic four-hour stadium marathons of earlier concert tours, Springsteen now performed
shorter shows in smaller venues, literally asking the audience “to pay quite attention to what
he was singing”137. As he told one of his first audiences on the tour, “a lot of the songs were
written with a lot of silence, and they need silence to work. So if you like clapping and singing
along… Please don’t”. And even if they tried, the songs of Ghost were nearly impossible to
anticipate and engage in as an audience. Many of these songs were written “without choruses
or refrains, and peppered with unusual, if not forced, rhyme schemes”. By stripping down his
performances, almost to a lecture, Springsteen tried to evade the trap of the Born in the USA
tour, where people would shout the lyrics without really thinking about them.
Also musically, the atmosphere becomes more straightforward. The accompanying
melodies are very sober, the instruments very few. The at times angry guitar riffs of Nebraska,
which conveyed the characters escape into rage, are absent from Ghost. In his review, music
journalist Mikal Gilmore comprehensively describes the new atmosphere:
In Tom Joad, there are few escapes and almost no musical relief from the
numbing circumstances of the character’s lives. You could almost say that
the music gets caught in meandering motions, or drifts into circles that
never break. The effect is brilliant – there’s something almost lulling in the
music’s blend of acoustic arpeggios and moody keyboard textures,
something that lures you into the melodies’ dark dreaminess and loose
mellifluence. But make no mistake: what you are being drawn into are
scenarios of hell. American hell.
Gilmore would, few years later, sketch the broader context of the work in his book
Night Beat: a Shadow History of Rock & Roll. While Springsteen was retreating from the
political scene in the late eighties and early nineties, withdrawing in his new marriage and
family, “much had changed about the larger family that Springsteen and the rest of us live in –
the tormented home we still call America – and too little of it for the better … Some of the
135
Garman (1996), 104-105.
Ibid, 105.
137
Ibid, 106.
136
59
most valuable instruments of opportunity and justice had been curtailed or ended – tools such
as affirmative action, immigration rights, welfare protection for children in poverty, and our
criminal justice system imprisoning poor and young people at increasing rates”138. At the time
when Springsteen decided it was time to mount the platform again, the message had become
clear: “No more help for people on the fringe, no more chances for the losers. These were
pitiless times, and there had been too few voices in either arts or politics who dared to tell us
that the America we were making would be a more perilous, bloodier place than might ever
have imagined”139. For this America, thoroughly transformed by the twelve years of
Republican presidency under Reagan and Bush, there was little hope left, according to
Springsteen. Therefore, The Ghost of Tom Joad, documenting the stories of the poor and
doomed, is by far the darkest, most pessimistic album of his entire career. The American
promise has failed its people, and as a result, their hearts are broken beyond repair.
138
139
Gilmore (1998), 279.
Ibid, 280.
60
CHAPTER 8
| Twenty Years Burning Down The Road
In the twenty years from his major breakthrough with Born to Run to the Grammy-winning
Ghost of Tom Joad, Bruce Springsteen has documented the struggle of working-class people to
cope with the fact that their inherent birthrights are different from those of the rich and
wealthy. For these workers, the American creed that every citizen has the right to live in liberty
and pursue his happiness, proves to be a false promise. As Springsteen grows older himself, he
gradually renounces his initial message of optimism, and starts to speak in defense of those
who are not given a voice in America’s political arena. By telling their different individual
stories, he brings attention to the fact that this is not just ‘an entire societal class’ or ‘a large
section of the population’. Rather than functioning as a spokesman for the greater body of ‘the
working class’, he speaks for every single one of them individually – from the young people,
who resent the fact that they were born with in financial, social and educational inequality, to
their fathers, who carry the burden of indelible guilt, anger and sorrow.
Nearly all of the stories depart from the assumption that life as it is, is undesirable.
Therefore, one simply has to escape this current life. But the possibilities of getting out are
gradually changing and decreasing as experience grows. On Born to Run, the belief that a
breakout can be successfully achieved is still very much alive. Young lovers encourage their
sweethearts to escort them on their way out, away from this “town full of losers”140, as they
pull out to win. Glorious saxophones, harps and violins accompany their faithful creed. Yet,
near the end of the album, doubt drops by like an unwelcome guest. The story of Rat and his
Barefoot Girl in “Jungleland” ends in bitter tragedy, described in a song so epically gripping,
that it would test the faith of the fiercest believer.
As the literal breakout becomes gradually more improbable, other ways to work off
steam rise to the surface. On Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, the most prominent
are rebellion (“Badlands”, “The Promised Land”) and nostalgia (“Racing in the Street”, “The
River”). Both are but temporary solutions, though, and another way to vent these emotions –
the angry rage already suggested in “Adam Raised a Cain” – completely takes over on the next
album, the 1982 folk record Nebraska. The melancholic piano melodies make room for an
oppressively raw sound of acoustic steel strings and a howling harmonica. Against this
140
From “Thunder Road” (Born to Run, 1975).
61
background, Springsteen tells the stories of people who have utterly lost their way and who
descended to crime and madness.
Whereas the haunting silence of Nebraska implied a loud cry for help, the bombastic
melodies of its successor Born in the USA really symbolized existential silence. Although the
narrators bellow with pain and scream with rage, their voicelessness and powerlessness is
painfully demonstrated by the fact that they rarely rise above the music (“Born in the USA”)
or by the sharp contrast between the anthemic music and the cheerless lyrics (“No Surrender”,
“Glory Days”). Notably, whereas Born to Run was about looking forward (because past and
present are unattractive), the albums that follow it are more about looking back (because there
is no belief in a better future, suddenly the past does not seem so bad in retrospect). The past
becomes a vital part of Springsteen’s writing and history takes an important place in his
stories. The Ghost of Tom Joad subtly combines two versions of the same story: that of 1930s
Dust Bowl refugees portrayed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath mixed with elements from
contemporary 1990s America. The combination exposes the glaring similarity between these
two, revealing how little has changed since the Great Depression. It is also on this last album
that Springsteen’s personal contribution to the tradition of protest song writing (initiated on
Darkness and blossoming on Nebraska and Born in the USA) reaches its climax.
The evolution that runs through these albums can best be demonstrated using the
recurring motifs in his work. For example, the highways that once were “jammed with broken
heroes on a last chance power drive”141 become filled with “the dispossessed and
downtrodden”142. The two lanes that could “take us anywhere”143 gradually change into a
predestined way to hell. Furthermore, the cars that were once symbols of freedom and flight
turn into places “in which people of the fallen working class must now sleep and await
death”144. The highway may be “alive tonight”, but Springsteen quickly adds that “nobody’s
kiddin’ nobody about where it goes”145. As Bryan Garman concludes his argument, “the myth
of upward mobility, the hackneyed promise of rock and roll, the opportunity of the West, and
the highly romanticized life of the hobo have taken these people precisely nowhere”146.
In the end, one could say that Springsteen did reach his main goal: to create a platform
where the problems of working class people could be seen and heard. Throughout his canon,
141
From “Born to Run” (Born to Run, 1975).
Garman (1996), 95.
143
From “Thunder Road” (Born to Run, 1975).
144
Garman (1996), 95.
145
From “The Ghost of Tom Joad” (The Ghost of Tom Joad, 1995).
146
Garman (1996), 95.
142
62
Springsteen used true stories – most of them based on what he had seen during his childhood
and had read about later on in his life – to “pick at the scabs of a complacent white middleclass conscience which generously applies to itself such ointments as the work ethic and
individualism to heal the moral trauma inflicted by capitalism”147. Springsteen knows that this
cannot be achieved by talking about general issues and statistics. It can be done, however, by
drawing attention to these people’s individual experiences. “You can’t tell people what to
think,” he explains, “but you can show them something by saying, ‘Put these shoes on, walk in
these shoes for a while’. People then recognize themselves in those characters whose lives on
the surface seem to have no relation to theirs”148. While much of American popular culture
“ignores, trivializes, demonizes, and caricatures the working class”, Springsteen significantly
uses their traditions and language to reclaim this cultural space, in which the lives of these
people are represented with dignity149.
With an estimated number of fifty million albums sold in the US alone, and about
twice as much on a global scale, he certainly lived up to this ambition. He gave a recognizable
face to people who would otherwise be anonymous numbers in government data. And he
allowed them to tell their story – not by reporting their actions, but by allowing them speak
for themselves. From convicted criminals to war veterans from Vietnam and from factory
workers to illegal immigrants, these are all people who we normally encounter in news reports
as statistics: three hundred workers were fired, another thousand immigrants were killed last
year trying to cross the border, while crime rates for the young and unemployed have risen by
six percent… Now we know their names, their face, and their history. In 1995, however, their
future had never looked darker.
After the Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen expanded his social engagement to a wider
public. Following the events of September 11, 2001, he started working on The Rising, his first
original record with the E Street Band since Born in the USA. As with many Americans, the
traumatic experience of the 9/11 attacks ironically inspired him to bring a new message of
hope and faith. The belief in a better world, through collective salvation – a thought that had
disappeared on The Ghost of Tom Joad – is restored in these new songs and a concert tour that
would function almost as a communal healing process. Accepting his new role, he reinvented
himself once again – as he had done so many times in his career. Taking up the role of a
shepherd, he has lead his flock through the nation’s most defining moments of the 21st
147
Garman (1996), 108.
Hagen (1999).
149
Garman (1996), 108.
148
63
century: the impact of 9/11 on The Rising, its dark aftermath on Devils & Dust, the arduous
War in Iraq on Magic, and the renewed hope that came with Barack Obama’s election on
Working on a Dream. On his latest album Wrecking Ball, this hope is severely tested during the
current economic crisis, and in a set of ten stinging songs, Springsteen once again takes up the
cudgels for the weak and poor, for those workers who, once again, will have to pay the highest
price. It looks like you can take a man out the working class, but no matter how much money
he makes telling their stories, you can never take the working class out of Bruce Springsteen.
64
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