Bruce Springsteen
Nebraska ’82 [Expanded Edition]
COLUMBIA
We currently live in the hurricane’s eye of docu-dramatic narrative films based on the lives of our 20th century saints: the rockers, hip-hoppers, and R&B music-makers who enriched our lives, crowded our heads, stirred our souls, moved our bodies, and, as of late, emptied our pockets. For the most part, fortunately, this cinematic glut focuses on single chunks of their lives and eras within their work. We may love Freddie Mercury, but who cares how Queen made Hot Space, or why Bob Dylan chose to sit out the 1980s? Four separate Beatles films is cute, but when it gets to George Harrison’s Gone Troppo, I’ll see you in the lobby.
Presently, we have Deliver Me from Nowhere, a film which happily hones in on Bruce Springsteen’s unhappiest album, Nebraska, and its separation at birth from the bigger-sounding, E-Street-driven Born in the U.S.A. production. And while Jeremy Allen White angsts out and laboriously over-broods atop Nebraska’s lo-fi take on “My Father’s House” and such, what it doesn’t do is capture the spirit of his oft-rumored electric sessions that Springsteen kept to the side, preferring instead the loner-folk of his four-track-recorded material. That’s the work of the newly released, five-disc Nebraska ’82 collection and its Electric Nebraska centerpiece. I’m not saying skip the movie; I am, however, stating that having Nebraska ’82 on cue beforehand will better inform the maudlin medicine, mood-drop dread, and scabby social critique that fills the film.
By using smaller configurations of the E Street Band—Stevie Van Zandt, Garry Tallent, Max Weinberg, Danny Federici, Roy Bittan—the skeletal shakedown of Springsteen’s Nebraska demos album and its searching takes on loss and losers stays intact. In particular, the trio that powers through a curt, unreleased version of “Born in the U.S.A.,” one that strips its usual souped-up synth sound to something roughly rockabilly-esque and nasty, but far less brawnily than the hit that drove his fame. The syncopated crust and dramatic, down-on-one’s-luck ardor of “Atlantic City” is played up in its electric vibe, as is “Mansion on the Hill.” While “Johnny 99” is more Suicide-inspired than in its originally released version, and “Downbound Train” far more Clash-y, the electricity-singed “Nebraska” sounds somewhat less fatalistic and rhetorical than on its home-turf origin story.
Even that origin story is more fully developed with this box set’s outtakes and another full set of home recordings, along with a 1982 studio session that sounds—for my money, by my ear—just as haunted and hunted as his Jersey home-taping stuff. A peeled-back, menacing version of “Pink Cadillac” and equally creepy, never-before-heard tracks such as “Child Bride” (essentially a schematic for “Working on the Highway”) and a too-flustered “Gun in Every Home” are the most necessary of the previously unreleased batch of songs. As for the unnecessary, I don’t know how more recently recorded, live acoustic performances of Nebraska fit into the picture other than that they’re cool to have. Or why one would absolutely need to remaster the lonely, unmasterable Nebraska itself other than to say they did.
Still, as far as historical, occasionally hysterical (as in hot and bothered) documents of a serious moment in time go, the entirety of Nebraska ’82 is a worthy vessel. Plus, you can make your own popcorn at home.
