Nebraska

Lord won't you tell us tell us what does it mean

Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe

-Bruce Springsteen, Reason to Believe

Starting here with a little different view out the window, looking to the northwest.

It's beginning to look a lot like fall out there, with the morning gloom gradually giving way to blue skies. Wishing I could emulate that, but it's one of those mornings.

I'll stay away from the current political disaster or my own black dog this morning, after the NYT ran a story about the re-mastering and re-release of Bruce Springsteen's 1982 masterpiece, Nebraska.

I figure "masterpiece" is overused, but this album surely fits the definition. Recorded in a low-fidelity environment that sounded like a bathtub, it's just Springsteen, a guitar, and a harmonica. The spareness fits, though, as all of the songs ooze with a sort of existential despair, the lyrics spoken by folks whose posture ranges from resignation to their fate to searching for some sort of hope in a world that doesn't much love them back.

The title song is delivered in almost a mumble, the speaker a convicted murderer waiting on death row after going on a killing spree across the Great Plains with his girlfriend. He sums up the meaning of a life that's about to end in the electric chair thusly:

They declared me unfit to live said into that great void my soul'd

Be hurled

They wanted to know why I did what I did

Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world

A real toe-tapper, that one.

Atlantic City is perhaps the best known song on the album, covered by lots of artists over the years. Its protagonist, if one could call him that, is a down-on-his-luck guy whose redemption comes from a mobster after he agrees "to do a little favor for him".

My favorite track on the album, Open All Night, finds us sitting in a young man's project car as he speeds through the darkness across New Jersey on his way to pick up his girlfriend after working all night. We get the impression he never made it based on the song's last words, a call to heaven from the void of most people's lives:

Hey, mister deejay, won'tcha hear my last prayer?

Hey, ho, rock'n'roll, deliver me from nowhere

I won't drag you through all the songs, but the one that always hit me between the eyes was Johnny 99. I guess I'd mark that one as a milestone in my trek politically leftward, in that I never looked at the criminal justice system the same again after hearing poor Johnny explain at his sentencing why, in a moment of drunken despair, he spiraled out-of-control and shot a store clerk.

Now judge I had debts no honest man could pay

The bank was holdin' my mortgage and they were gonna take my house away

Now I ain't sayin' that makes me an innocent man

But it was more 'n all this that put that gun in my hand

Well your honor I do believe I'd be better off dead

So if you can take a man's life for the thoughts that's in his head

Then sit back in that chair and think it over judge one more time

And let 'em shave off my hair and put me on that execution line

I was in sort of a dark place that should've been a great place when I found that album in the spring of 1983, and played the grooves off it (which sort of dates the story, doesn't it?). I was a freshman at USC, doing poorly with so much drama and awfulness at home that it damned near swallowed me. I guess the NYT article drew me into all that because P and I just returned from a remembrance of my father's life three days ago that invited all of us to dip our toe into that water one last time, and kick up some of those memories that should just as well stay gone. No wonder my stepsister sat there and drank half a bottle of Jameson, which worked out just fine for me because it rendered the foul stuff unavailable for your author.

Sometimes an article about a piece of music leads me to pull it up on Spotify for a trip down memory lane. I reckon not this morning.