Tag: Bruce Springsteen

“I lived in this house exactly half a lifetime ago,” said Bruce Springsteen. It may not look like much, but this small bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey, which still sports the original orange shag rug, is where Springsteen made what he considers his masterpiece: his 1982 album “Nebraska,” ten songs dark and mournful. “This is the room where it happened,” he said.

I saw her standing on her front lawn just twirling her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died
From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, with a sawed-off .410 on my lap
Through to the badlands of Wyoming I killed everything in my path 

“If I had to pick one album out and say, ‘This is going to represent you 50 years from now,’ I’d pick ‘Nebraska,” he said.  

It was written 41 years ago at a time of great upheaval in Springsteen’s inner life: “I just hit some sort of personal wall that I didn’t even know was there,” he said. “It was my first real major depression where I realized, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do something about it.’”

“And you can’t succeed your way out of pain,” said Axelrod.

“No, you cannot. That’s a very good way of putting it; you cannot succeed your way out of that pain.”

Coming off a hugely successful tour for “The River” album, he had his first Top 10 hit, “Hungry Heart.” He was 32, a genuine rock star surrounded by success, and learning its limits.

Axelrod said, “Your rock ‘n’ roll meds, singing in front of 40,000 people, all that is, is anesthesia.”

“Yeah, and it worked for me,” Springsteen said. “I think in your 20s, a lotta things work for you. Your 30s is where you start to become an adult. Suddenly I looked around and said, ‘Where is everything? Where is my home? Where is my partner?  Where are the sons or daughters that I thought I might have someday?’ And I realized none of those things are there.

“So, I said, ‘OK, the first thing I gotta do as soon as I get home is remind myself of who I am and where I came from.”

At the fixed-up farmhouse he was renting, he would try to understand why his success left him so alienated. “This is all inside of me,” he said. “You can either take it and transform it into something positive, or it can destroy you.”  

Author Warren Zanes said, “There are records, films, books that don’t just come in the front door. They come in the back door, they come up through a trap door, and stay with you in life.”

Zanes’ new book, “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” offers a deep and moving examination of the making of “Nebraska.” 

Springsteen’s pain was rooted in a lonely childhood. “Here’s Bruce Springsteen making a record from a kind of bottom in his own life,” said Zanes. “They were very poor.  And then he becomes Bruce Springsteen. He felt that his past was making his present complicated. And he wanted to be freed of it.”

For Springsteen, liberation had always come through writing. While he filled notebook after notebook (“It’s funny, because I don’t remember doing all this work!” he mused, leafing through his writings), the album didn’t come together until late one night when he was channel surfing and stumbled across “Badlands,” Terrence Malick’s film about Charles Starkweather, whose murder spree in 1957 and ’58 unfolded mainly in Nebraska. He said, “I actually called the reporter who had reported on that story in Nebraska. And amazingly enough she was still at the newspaper. And she was a lovely woman, and we talked for a half-hour or so. And it just sort of focused me on the feeling of what I wanted to write about.”

In a serial killer, Springsteen had found a muse:

I can’t say that I’m sorry for the things that we done
At least for a little while, sir, me and her, we had us some fun …
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world

“‘There’s a meanness in this world.’ That explains everything Starkweather’s done,” said Axelrod.

“Yeah, I tried to locate where their humanity was, as best as I could,” Springsteen said.

In a surge of creativity, he wrote 15 songs in a matter of weeks, and one January night in 1982, it was time to record, on a 4-track cassette machine. One of rock’s biggest stars sat in this bedroom, alone, and sang, getting exactly the sound he was looking for.

And the acoustics? “Not bad,” Springsteen said. “The orange shag carpet makes it really dead. Not only was it beautiful to look at, it came in handy!”

Some songs explored the confusion left from childhood, like “My Father’s House”:

I walked up the steps and stood on the porch
a woman I didn’t recognize came and spoke to me
Through a chained door
I told her my story and who I’d come for
She said “I’m sorry, son, but no one by that name
Lives here anymore”

Springsteen said, “‘Mansion on the Hill,’ ‘My Father’s House,’ ‘Used Cars,’ they’re all written from kids’ perspectives, children trying to make sense of the world that they were born into.”

Others profiled adults left out, or left behind. The music, Springsteen maintained, possessed a “very stark, dark, lonely sound. Very austere, very bare bones.”  

On a broken-down boom box, Springsteen mixed the songs onto a cassette tape he carried around in his back pocket, for a few weeks. “I hope you had a plastic case on it, at least,” said Axelrod.

“I don’t think I had a case,” he replied. “I’m lucky I didn’t lose it!”

Springsteen’s band would record what he had on the cassette, but bigger and bolder wasn’t what he was looking for:  ”It was a happy accident,” he said. “I planned just to write some good songs, teach ’em to the band, go into the studio and record them.  But every time I tried to improve on that tape I had made in that little room? It’s that old story: if this gets any better, it’s gonna get worse.”

Bruce Springsteen wasn’t working E Street, but another road entirely. According to Zanes, “‘Nebraska’ was muddy. It was imperfect. It wasn’t finished. All the things that you shouldn’t put out, he put out.” 

Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies some day comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

Axelrod asked, “Did any part of you worry, ‘Oh my goodness, what am I putting out there?’”

“I knew what the ‘Nebraska’ record was,” Springsteen said. “It was also a signal that I was sending that, ‘I’ve had some success, but I do what I want to do. I make the records I wanna make. I’m trying to tell a bigger story, and that’s the job that I’m trying to do for you.’”

A few more songs that didn’t make the cut? You probably heard them later, including “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Pink Cadillac,” and “Downbound Train” – songs the guy in the leather jacket who’d written of chrome-wheeled fuel-injected suicide machines kept in a binder with Snoopy on the cover.

In that small bedroom, Springsteen the rocker made an album that fleshed out Springsteen the poet. Imagine for a moment if he hadn’t. Axelrod mused, “And then people might be assessing a career and say, ‘Oh, it was great, man, 70,000 people singing “Rosalita” in the stadium.’ But that might have been closer to where it ended in considering what you’ve done.” 

“Yeah. I was just interested in more, in more than that,” Springsteen said. “I love doin’ it. I still love doin’ it to this day. But I wanted more than that.”

“If they want to enjoy your work, try anything; if they want to understand your work, try ‘Nebraska’?” asked Axelrod.

“Yeah, I’d agree with that,” he replied. “I’d definitely agree with that.”  

READ AN EXCERPT: “Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’”

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Story produced by Jason Sacca. Editor: Ed Givnish. 

     
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Jim Axelrod

Jim Axelrod is the chief investigative correspondent and senior national correspondent for CBS News, reporting for “CBS This Morning,” “CBS Evening News,” “CBS Sunday Morning” and other CBS News broadcasts.

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In his latest book, “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’” (published May 2 by Crown), New York Times bestselling author and Grammy-nominated documentary producer Warren Zanes explores the genesis of one of Springsteen’s most personal albums.

In this excerpt below, Zanes writes of the pleasures and challenges of interviewing a rock legend.

Don’t miss Jim Axelrod’s interview with Zanes and Springsteen on “CBS Sunday Morning” April 30!

“Deliver Me from Nowhere” by Warren Zanes

Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.

Chapter One
The First Question

Photography has something to do with resurrection. —­Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

In the spring of 2021, Bruce Springsteen invited me to spend some time with him in Colts Neck, New Jersey, so that we could talk about Nebraska. When I arrived, he walked out to my car to meet me. When it was all over, he walked me back out. Everything was hand delivered. I was wishing I’d parked three miles away. I’d grown up listening to the guy’s records. I had a lot of questions, not all of which he should have to bother with.

Springsteen has lived with the joy and burden of people wanting his time. The intimacy of the music brings something out in people. He’s probably had to scrape off hundreds of us just to stay on schedule. But that day I was his guest, and he was as good a host as I could ask for. He got me water to drink and then asked if I needed more. Later in the afternoon he wondered if coffee was a good idea. I was at the family house and—­as I think we both understood—­his responsibility. Any mess I made he’d have to clean up.

I wanted to know where Nebraska came from, what it led to. It sat between two of Springsteen’s most celebrated recordings, in its own quiet and turmoil. He described it to me as “an accident start to finish” but also as the album that “still might be [his] best.” The recording came from a place and a time in which Springsteen was facing troubles in his life, troubles that had no name as of yet. Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings … recollected in tranquility.” Quite differently, Nebraska came from the middle of that “overflow,” was not a thing “recollected in tranquility.” It came from the heart of trouble and led to still more, its stark character the lasting reward.

Nebraska was unfinished, imperfect, delivered into a world hovering at the threshold of the digital, when technology would allow recorded music to hang itself on perfect time, carry perfect pitch, but also risk losing its connection to the unfixed and unfixable. Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, recalled for me, over several afternoons at his Westchester home, the way in which Nebraska arrived. Chuck Plotkin, among Springsteen’s producers and a key player in the last stages of Nebraska‘s creation, would talk about the anxious labor of trying to make the album conform to industry standards. But Springsteen knew the most by far, because it came from his bedroom.

While we talked that day in Colts Neck, Patti Scialfa was recording next door. There were a few others around, but everyone left us alone. Patti was in the process of turning a song into a recording. For all the talk of the hours, the sweat, and the persistence involved in making records, it’s worth remembering that the process is also among the highest forms of pleasure, particularly when you’re watching your own song or one you love turn into the recording you feel it’s meant to be … and it happens without complication. Any song could become a thousand different records, but sometimes the recording studio is a place of pure lightness because a song is becoming just the recording it should be. That afternoon in Colts Neck, you got the sense that things were going well in the studio next door.

But I was with Springsteen in another room, doing something very different. On one level, I was probing, asking about a time in his life that wasn’t easy. Given the way Springsteen has interviewed throughout his career, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he seemed to hold back nothing. Where he had no answer or a question of his own, he didn’t pretend all knowingness. Some combination of an investment in the truth and what seemed genuine wonder made him an unguarded collaborator.

I’d been out to the Colts Neck house once before, on that occasion in my capacity as consulting producer on the documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom. The director, Morgan Neville, was conducting the interview that day and had a few pages of good questions. But I always remembered that Springsteen passed on the first of those questions, which surprised me. As a question it was a good opener, appropriate, well delivered. But Springsteen responded by saying something along the lines of “What else you got?”

Whether it was intended to or not, that response shifted the energy in the room. Frankly, I’d never seen an interview start like that. “What else you got?” The room belonged to Springsteen from that point forward. On the second question, he took a room of filmmakers who were slightly off axis to another place. He pictured the singers on Phil Spector recordings, including his friend Darlene Love, helped us hear and consider the youth in their voices. He’d obviously thought deeply about backup singers, the film’s subject, and about the emotional layer those voices added to so many great recordings. This was a storyteller at work, not a Q&A session.

One story he told that day in Colts Neck revolved around his trip by Greyhound to a David Bowie session in Philadelphia, where Bowie was cutting two of Springsteen’s songs. Bruce Springsteen was nobody at that point, just a weird name that suggested anything but what was coming. Luther Vandross, a key figure in Twenty Feet from Stardom, was at those same Bowie sessions, singing and arranging backups on Bowie’s “Young Americans.” The documentary’s early edit already included some clips from that very session, with Luther Vandross leading the small vocal combo that added so much to “Young Americans.” No one would have known that Bruce Spring­steen lurked in the shadows, watching it go down. Pure coincidence. That is, no one knew Springsteen was there that day until he told the story at his Colts Neck home.

Twenty Feet from Stardom was given a fresh edit just after that interview. From that point forward the film opened with Springsteen. He was that good. But I’ll tell you this, the experience made me consider at some length the first question I planned to ask during my Nebraska interview, on my second visit to Colts Neck. I just didn’t want to hear him say, “What else you got?” I wasn’t sure I had the backbone to hear that and still be ready for the next question. So I developed a foolproof method to avoid such a moment: make it a yes-or-­no question.

WZ: Are there any photographs of the room where you recorded Nebraska?

Springsteen: No.

He’d answered my first question. But we arrived at the second question pretty damn fast. Fortunately, I had another one ready to go. But what of the first?

I wanted to see that room because something important was made there, and I wanted to know if by looking at a photograph of the space, I could see traces of what happened, the outlines of Nebraska. And maybe those photographic traces could bring it back to life for me, a resurrection. Photographs of his previous place, the Holmdel farmhouse, are easy to find online. Whether you see Springsteen in them or not, whether the amps and guitars are in the room or not, you look at them knowing who was there once and what got done at the time, Darkness on the Edge of Town and much of The River. The rooms begin to breathe.

Apparently even Bob Dylan had made his own attempt to see one of Springsteen’s creative spaces, empty and well after the fact. There was a rainy night in Long Branch, New Jersey, 2009, when police picked up Dylan in a neighborhood close to where Springsteen wrote most if not all of the Born to Run album. Some quick if speculative reporting captured the incident.

The police had approached Dylan when the future Nobel Prize winner was on the grounds of a home up for sale, apparently investigating the property. The proximity to Springsteen’s former rental, coupled with Dylan’s somewhat recent visits to Neil Young’s and John Lennon’s childhood homes, gave interested journalists a basis from which to work. The Guardian reported it this way:

Probing musicians’ backgrounds who influenced the world of rock in the 1960s and 1970s is a hobby for Dylan. Last November he turned up unannounced at a Winnipeg house where the Canadian rock star Neil Young grew up. Kiernan and Patti Regan came home from shopping to find him waiting on their doorstep and invited him in.

Then, in May, Dylan paid a £16 entrance fee and mingled anonymously with tourists at the childhood home of John Lennon in Woolton, Liverpool.

Finally, last month, homeowners in Long Branch, 30 miles south of New York, phoned the authorities when they noticed a scruffy figure ambling along a residential street and entering the yard of an up-­for-­sale house. 

Soaking wet, Dylan, 68, gave his name to Kristie Buble, a 24-­year-­old police officer, and informed her that he was in town to headline a concert with country star Willie Nelson and rocker John Mellencamp. She was sceptical.

      
Excerpted from “Deliver Me from Nowhere” by Warren Zanes. Copyright © 2023 by Warren Zanes. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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PREVIEW: Bruce Springsteen on the making of his landmark album “Nebraska” | Watch Video

You can stream “Nebraska” by Bruce Springsteen by clicking on the embed below (Free Spotify registration required to hear the tracks in full):0

Bruce Springsteen is entertaining jammed venues around the world on his current tour with the E Street Band. However, he tells correspondent Jim Axelrod that one of his life-changing performances was creating the album “Nebraska” four decades ago. Springsteen talks about his search for meaning in his life in the recording of the album, in an interview to be broadcast on “CBS Sunday Morning” April 30 on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.

“If I had to pick out one album and say, ‘This is going to represent you 50 years from now,” Springsteen told Axelrod, “I’d pick ‘Nebraska.’”

Springsteen recorded “Nebraska” alone 41 years ago in a farmhouse in Colts Neck, N.J. He found himself there in search of meaning for his life, and at a time when he had reached the rock star status he had dreamed of earlier.

Watch a preview clip here: 

“I think in your 20s, a lot of things work for you,” Springsteen said. “Your 30s is where you start to become an adult. Suddenly I looked around and said, ‘Where is everything? Where is my home? Where is my partner? Where are the sons or daughters that I thought I might have someday?’ … I realized none of these things are there. … So I said, ‘OK, the first thing I’ve gotta do as soon as I get home is remind myself of who I am and where I came from.’”

The making of “Nebraska” is the subject of “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” a new book from author Warren Zanes.  Springsteen returned to the Colts Neck farmhouse with Axelrod to revisit the album and what was going on his life at the time. The owners of the home have left the room where Springsteen recorded “Nebraska” largely untouched.  

Springsteen and Zanes talk about the origins of the songs and what the album meant at that pivotal point in the artist’s life.

“Things are going so well here, you know, that you just assumed, like, ‘Oh yeah, well, the rest of your life is going to fall into place,’” Springsteen said. “No, that’s not how it works.”

“And you can’t succeed your way out of pain,” Axelrod responded.

“No, you cannot. That’s a very good way of putting it. You cannot succeed your way outta that pain.”

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You can stream “Nebraska” by Bruce Springsteen by clicking on the embed below (Free Spotify registration required to hear the tracks in full):

     
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