Springsteen Challenge Day 6: Favorite Bruce Album (Studio)

If picking my favorite Lyric was tough, this is the exact opposite.  As is the case with all of these writing prompts, I’m going to go ahead and interpret the rules in such a way that allows me to write a bit more.  Otherwise, here’s what this post would look like:

“Springsteen Challenge Day 6: Favorite Bruce Album (Studio): Born to Run.  Moving on.”

Here’s the thing, Born to Run is Bruce’s best album.  It’s my favorite album of his.  It is my favorite album of all time.  So, I’m going to take a cue from ESPN’s Bill Simmons.  Quick story: 

In early 2006, I went to see Bill Simmons at a book signing at Barnes and Noble in Union Square in New York.  It was bitterly cold, and it was on the top floor, where they have all of their book signings.  Simmons has always been a gregarious type.  He was extremely late getting to the event.  A guy next to me kept telling me his favorite Simmons columns from his time at BostonSportsGuy.com. I like Bill Simmons, but I don’t like talking about Simmons columns as a way to prove my fandom of him.  I save that for Bruce Concert stories while standing in the GA line. But I said a quick story.  So, I was getting Bill’s “Now I Can Die In Peace” book, about the 2004 Red Sox (I’m a Yankee fan…) signed. I’d already had it signed once, but I thought it might be cool for him to sign the back page after I’d read it.  He said it was cool, and asked if there was something I would like to have signed.  I told him “I dunno – you’re a Bruce fan, so why not something like “The Door’s Open, but the Ride Ain’t Free?” He looked at me for a second and said, “I like that.”  I made it seem like it came up as a top of my head thing, but I’d been thinking about it in line. He said, “So, you’re a Bruce fan?” I said, “Huge.  What’s your favorite Bruce album?” He said, “Well, aside from Born to Run… I mean, you have to disqualify Born to Run… Tunnel of Love.  He was so bummed out about Julianne Phillips.”

Does this mean my favorite Bruce album aside from “Born to Run” is “Tunnel of Love”? No – I meant you have to disqualify Born to Run, because it is the easiest, and most correct answer.  But, that’s no fun.  I can tell you all about Born to Run, and how Thunder Road is my favorite song (which you probably knew if you read Day 1), or how there isn’t a single song that is under 5 stars on the entire album. I could tell you about how it works as 8 songs individually, or together – a loose ballad over the course of two sides.  I could tell you about how the sides mirror one another.  Thunder Road (side one, track one) is about leaving, and so is Born to Run (side two, track one). I could tell you about how Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out (side one, track two) and She’s the One (side two, track two) are songs about the beginning of something big  - the band, or the love of a woman. There’s Night (side one, track three) and Meeting Across the River (side two, track three) that speak about the duality of life.  Night speaks about the banality and defeat of work, only to throw it off to have a life in the night; Meeting Across the River speaks of the hope of a last chance, despite the droning of the dirge music, which intimates failure of the last chance – and the “they” will be looking for Eddie and the narrator.  And, at last, there is the sinking of Backstreets and Jungleland – failure realized and actualized.  There is the escape, the beginning, the hope in the face of despair, and the failure.  Born to Run was created as an album – the songs work individually, but they work together to create two sides that rise and fall in a similar fashion.

But like I said: disqualified because of its greatness.

What does that leave?  Yes, Tunnel of Love is great – I recently called it a true work of artistic creativity and honesty.  I stand by that claim.  Bruce spoke about what he truly believed as far as what he was feeling – despair, distrust in the institution of marriage and love, and a reversion to a time when he was angry at who he was and his lack of ability to fix himself and his marriage.  But, it’s not my favorite non-BtR album.

The Rising, I’ve said, is an extremely important album – the most authentic response to September 11^th. But it is not my favorite album. It’s amazing, and the symbolism, the understanding, the raw emotion of it is very real, very palpable, and it is educational. It teaches us about that which we now fear, and hate, and destroy. It parallels our culture with the culture that we now identify as our enemy, as evil, as less than.  Bruce’s message was not one of “right or wrong”, but that our anger, despair, and loss do not need to make us a vengeful, warring culture. This was 2002.  We did not listen, and neither Bruce nor I speak of our military response to Afghanistan.  We speak of the intolerance and fear that now permeates our culture.

No, my favorite album of Bruce’s, aside from BtR, is Nebraska. There is something about Nebraska that feels voyeuristic.  Bruce had just finished “The River” – a massive, sprawling collection of songs across four LP sides.  There are some real gems on The River, but there is no sense of album-oriented continuity. It’s a collection of singles.  But, Bruce spent a few years touring, and then felt burned out. He went to Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, and sat in his garage with an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a 4-track cassette recorder.  He sat down and recorded 15 tracks, including Born in the USA, Pink Cadillac, Downbound Train, and Workin’ on the Highway (at the time called Child Bride).  You can hear all the clicks and static and white noise.  There’s a sense of imperfection.  He got most the songs in a take or two. 

In Dave Marsh’s “Glory Days” – the unofficial account of Springsteen in the 1980s, he goes into exhaustive detail about the efforts that Bruce and Jon Landau went to in order to transfer the 4-track tape recorded songs to a master recording with which they could make cassettes and vinyl albums.  They tried to record an E Street recording (Electric Nebraska – the grail of Springsteen unreleased material), they tried to bring Bruce into the studio to record them solo again, but nothing sounded right – nothing sounded like the demos, so, instead, they reverse engineered a way to transfer from the 4-track to the master recording.

What’s more, it sparked the creation of the second phase of Bruce’s career – and the depth he provides for the characters in his songs. There is another layer to his writing – fullness in his characters.  The characters on Tunnel of Love, Lucky Town, The Ghost of Tom Joad, Devils and Dust, and many of the more character driven albums that came after Nebraska.

As for the songs, they are all haunting and dark.  There is no optimism.  There is despair, and the spectre of death and dying over all of them.  Nebraska (the song) is the deep look into the Starkweather homicides.  Bruce did extensive research by calling up the woman at the newspaper who exhaustively covered them. Atlantic City is the gold rush to south Jersey; and there are several repeated lyrics among songs.  One of the themes is “sir.” Bruce spends a great deal of time focusing on the “sir” that exists mostly as the person to whom he is singing the songs.

“Nebraska,” as an album, seems to exist outside the law. Johnny 99 killed a night clerk at a convenience store – he went to jail and asked for the death penalty instead of 99 years in jail. Starkweather was a monster who just felt a bit of meanness in the world. Atlantic City is about the loss of innocence – and the compromise of the human spirit – there’s a guy who needs a “favor.” There are ballads to the State Trooper, and then there’s my favorite song on the album – Highway Patrolman.

“Highway Patrolman” is a song about a man who failed at what he wanted to do – farm, and took a job upholding the law.  His brother is the opposite – no good, and a fighter. He kills a kid in a bar fight, and the Highway Patrolman chases him out of town. He does what he can, and the overriding theme is the thickness of the familial bonds and the pull of societal duty - “a man turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good.”  Highway Patrolman was made into a movie called “The Indian Runner,” directed by Sean Penn.  Aside from it featuring a graphic live birth, and Viggo Mortenson’s penis, it’s pretty darn good. 

There’s something about it that became defining of Bruce. He didn’t tour for it, and didn’t follow the rules of rock stardom.  When you’re one of the biggest rock stars in the world, you don’t release a solo, acoustic folk album and then quietly release it with little fanfare, and no tour.  Yet, it is critically acclaimed, and largely unknown outside Springsteen fans.  Casual fans don’t really know much about it other than “Atlantic City.”

The last bit of advice I can give about Nebraska is to go and listen to the Born in the USA version that was supposed to be on Nebraska – it’s available on the Tracks box set, or on 18 Tracks – the top songs off of Tracks.  It is vastly different than the arena rock anthem.  I suspect that if Mr. Reagan had heard this version, he’d not have considered Bruce a true patriot (the lyrics, though, remain largely unchanged.) 

Tomorrow’s post: Favorite Bruce Album (Live)