Music

Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska was always an album that people loved to argue about. So it makes sense that we’re arguing about it now. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere underwhelmed at the box office, pulling in $16.1 million in its opening weekend. That might seem like a colossal success to you or me, except the budget was somehow $55 million, for a movie about an album made on a $400 tape deck. The reviews have been wildly mixed. Electric Nebraska has given fans a whole new perspective on this classic 1982 acoustic album, and how it could have been different if he’d gotten the E Street Band involved. That’s why the Springsteen arguments are blowing up like the Chicken Man.

Just like Radiohead’s Kid A, an extremely similar move that dropped 18 Octobers later, Nebraska gave great entertainment value whether you loved it or hated it, because it was so intensely fun to debate. In the movie’s funniest scene, we hear Jimmy Iovine over the phone, screaming at manager Jon Landau over how idiotic it is to release this folk record. (Iovine plays himself, which is brilliant.) There’s also a moment where Landau says he’s going to play it for Iovine and Stevie Nicks; tragically, the movie does not depict Stevie’s reaction.

The movie has Oscar-bait performances from Jeremy Allen White as the Boss and Jeremy Strong as Landau. But it’s a divisive movie, as befits a divisive album, and even those of us who loved Deliver Me From Nowhere can find plenty to bitch about. It’s a whole movie of men talking about Bruce Springsteen’s problems, one of whom is Bruce. There’s also a couple of women for empathetic nodding. The mastering guy gets more lines than the entire E Street Band. The message is that men will literally make acoustic concept albums about psycho killers instead of going to therapy.

There’s an old-school show-biz melodrama at the heart of the Nebraska story — the evil corporate suits screaming, “It’ll never sell,” while the renegade rocker replies, “An artist’s gotta do what an artist’s gotta do.” But that’s why it makes such a great legend. That’s why there’s a movie about Nebraska and not the Grammy winner for Album of the Year, which was Toto IV. (I, for one, would watch the hell out of the “You know what this song needs? Wild dogs crying out in the night” scene.)

But the movie only gives tiny little tastes of 1982 rock culture, and why Nebraska was so comically unsuitable for airplay. In the movie, Springsteen drives listening to Foreigner’s “Urgent” and Santana’s “Winning,” two ubiquitous radio hits in 1981. The whole album is full of sweaty men driving around alone at night, praying for some rock & roll salvation on the radio. But Nebraska is definitely what they were NOT hearing.

The biggest new star of 1982, as far as rock radio was concerned, was John Cougar, with American Fool, giving the kind of basic crowd-pleasing Springsteen moves that Springsteen himself was refusing to deliver. “Hurts So Good” and “Jack and Diane” were obvious (but effective) Boss-esque hits from the Coug, with more from Bryan Adams and John Cafferty soon on the way. (He was still a year away from reclaiming his name “Mellencamp.”) American Fool was six months old when Nebraska came out — but still in the middle of a nine-week run at Number One. For guys like Mellencamp and Adams, hearing Nebraska must have been one of the happiest moments of their lives.

But it was Billy Joel, more than anyone, who reaped the benefits of Nebraska. He’d just made his own uncommercial art album with The Nylon Curtain, which dropped a week earlier, with the same radio-unfriendly premise, on the same label, and probably inspired the same screaming fits from the label suits. But ironically, The Nylon Curtain became a hit anyway, because Billy ended up filling the Springsteen void — the main reason “Pressure” and “Allentown” became such big hits was they were the next best thing to the AOR-friendly Springsteen songs that the Boss wasn’t serving. 

A full-page magazine ad from Rolling Stone in late 1982: just Billy Joel’s name, a fist clutching a wrench, and the complete lyrics of “Allentown.” No way would he have gotten away with that ad if Springsteen had thrown his base a bone or two on Nebraska. “Pressure” was pretty damn uncommercial by Billy’s standards — an ode to the struggles of rock stars to get their dealers on the phone, with the singer gnashing his teeth like he’s trapped in the final half-hour of Goodfellas. (The excellent five-hour Billy Joel doc And So It Goes doesn’t mention cocaine once, so he probably did his research by asking the big shots at Elaine’s.) But compared to Nebraska, this song was “Just the Way You Are.” 

Rock radio wouldn’t touch Nebraska at all, which was genuinely shocking at the time, considering that it was (after all) the new Bruce album. “I think it’s gonna do one of two things,” a radio tip-sheet expert predicted in Rolling Stone. “Either it’s gonna continue a trend toward softer, more personal music being accepted by radio, or it’s gonna be a complete bomb.” 

My local rock station WBCN, in the Springsteen stronghold of Boston, played “Open All Night” for about a week and then gave up. The song had an electric guitar and a Chuck Berry riff, plus an anomalously upbeat mood (it’s the twin of “State Trooper,” like an alternate-universe version of the guy’s life), but no chorus, sounding dim on the radio. It fizzled at #22 on the Billboard rock “Top Tracks” chart, a certified dud, with even lower placements for “Atlantic City” and “Johnny 99.” That week, the top albums at rock radio were Rush (their controversial synth move Signals), Billy Squier, the Who (their awful farewell It’s Hard), Don Henley (his first solo album), Bad Company, Kenny Loggins, Steve Winwood, and Men at Work. 

When a star blows up into a superstar, as Springsteen did with The River, the cliched joke is that they could get a hit by breaking wind into the microphone — but Nebraska is the all-time test where that theory fails. He couldn’t get this played on the radio even though people were buying it. After debuting at #29, it zoomed right to #4 the next week, a fast seller by 1982 standards. (It was the year’s second-fastest rising album, behind Paul McCartney’s Tug of War.) It peaked at #3, behind Cougar, Fleetwood Mac, and Steve Miller, just ahead of Michael McDonald. But radio wasn’t biting.

The movie has a brief mocking glimpse of MTV, just for a cheap laugh, when Springsteen is flipping channels between Badlands reruns. But it turned out to be MTV that embraced Nebraska after rock radio completely rejected it. The fledgling network picked up on “Atlantic City,” which had a gritty video that Springsteen (wisely) didn’t appear in. At MTV they played “Atlantic City” like it was a monster hit, just because they were so grateful to have any Bruce product at all, but it fit in surprisingly well with all the weirdo Brit synth-pop acts of 1982/1983 — rock radio wasn’t touching those artists either. Hearing it between Soft Cell and the Human League made so much more sense than hearing it between Rush and Journey. What made Nebraska all wrong for rock radio made it perfect for MTV, and it’s fitting the New Wave kids were the ones who took “Atlantic City” to heart, especially considering how Springsteen was inspired by the avant-garde electro of Suicide and “Frankie Teardrop.”

But the key reason Nebraska was a hit with staying power is that people heard themselves in these songs. Ronald Reagan is bizarrely never mentioned in the movie, not even a news clip in the background between reruns of Badlands. Virtually everything said or written about Nebraska in the Eighties, including by Springsteen himself, framed it as the dark side of Reagan’s America. By the end of 1982, unemployment was 10.8 per cent, the highest since the Depression. Springsteen had already written a hit protest song about it, “Out of Work,” for Sixties rocker Gary U.S. Bonds, which (incredibly) went Top 40 that summer, with a third verse aimed right at “Hey Mr. President,” taunting, “Maybe you got a job for me just driving you around?”

Then as now, the president did not care. As Reagan asked in March 1982, “Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?” But Nebraska portrays those losers in South Succotash as real people. As he told Rolling Stone, “Nebraska was about that American isolation: what happens to people when they’re alienated from their friends and their community and their government and their job. Because those are the things that keep you sane, that give meaning to life in some fashion. And if they slip away, and you start to exist in some void where the basic constraints of society are a joke, then life becomes kind of a joke. And anything can happen.”

Nobody now wants to admit they scoffed at Nebraska at the time, just as nobody admits booing Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, as in the year’s other big rock biopic, A Complete Unknown. But people sure did. As a reader complained on the Rolling Stone letters page, “I liked him a whole lot better as a Fifties remake.” This wasn’t the Broooce people wanted, the guy who was already an affectionate caricature all through pop culture, as in Robin Williams doing his “Elmer Fudd Sings Springsteen” routine, or the great Dr. Demento Show parody where Bruce Springstone sings the Flintstones theme. 

That’s why this album opened the door for all the Eighties bar-band faux-Bruce clones. Hell, Hollywood was in the middle of making Eddie and the Cruisers, an E Street fan-fic movie that got wildly popular on cable TV in the long wait between Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. (The flick even has its own Nebraska-esque subplot where Eddie sticks it to the Man with his uncommercial art album, A Season in Hell.) 

But then as now, people cherished the underdog aspect of the album — the artist taking a stand, defying the odds, staying hungry. As people were so fond of saying in 1982, Bruce got back to the eye of the tiger. That’s why the album has gone down in history, the ultimate case of a superstar ripping it up to start again, in the mode of Kid A or Achtung Baby, Bowie in Berlin or Neil Young heading for the ditch. In 2007, when it was time for Kelly Clarkson to follow up “Since U Been Gone,” she pissed off her label with the deeply personal My December and called it her Nebraska — definitely a sign that this cultural myth had entered new territory. But that’s what makes Nebraska one of the all-time great rock & roll arguments.