NOW SPINNING
NEBRASKA
Bruce Springsteen
PUNK | FOLK • 1982 • COLUMBIA RECORDS
Wait… punk?
Yes. Punk. ‘Nebraska’ is the quietest punk album ever made.
Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh is credited with verbalizing this idea first, when he compared the songs on Nebraska to the Advert’s ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes,’ and we couldn’t agree more.
By now, with a major motion picture having told the story, most music fans are aware that Springsteen recorded this on a four-track Tascam in the bedroom of a rental house in January 1982 as demos for the next E-Street Band record, the follow-up to ‘The River,’ his first album to hit #1 on the Billboard Albums chart. Fans and Columbia Records had massive expectations.
The story goes that Bruce carried a caseless cassette tape of the demos in his pocket, and never much liked anything the band put on tape more than his demo versions, ultimately deciding to release them as is, with no tour behind it. Columbia wasn’t happy, but Bruce ultimately got his way.
The rough recordings and Springsteen’s subsequent treatment of the tape caused distortion that made the grooves difficult to track on record. To fix this, the raw audio from the beat up cassette was transferred onto a high-quality 1/2-inch open-reel tape with an engineer carefully adjusting tape speed and azimuth to fix the worst of the warping while keeping the eerie atmospherics. Then, a partly manual cutting lathe system was used to cut the lacquer, with the depth and spacing of the grooves hand adjusted in real-time to give just enough clearance to prevent the needle from jumping out of the grooves on a standard turntable.
Ten songs about people on the margins in Ronald Regan’s America, sung in whispers or yowls. The central characters are murderers, highway patrolmen, factory workers running out of road, all on the margins of the “new prosperity.” And there were a whole bunch of tracks (including a version of ‘Born in the USA’ that never would’ve been mistaken for a patriotic anthem) that would crop up, in different versions later. Mostly, it’s just guitar, harmonica and Bruce’s voice, searching for something, and maybe finding it.
The re-release after the movie came out includes Demos, a new live recording, outtakes and, crucially, the long rumored “Electric Nebraska.” Those are all great (and linked below). But Bruce was right back in ’82. And it’s still mesmerizing today.
LISTEN & BUY
If at all possible, buy it at your local record store.