American Nightmare

When I was around the ages of 17-21, I listened to the works of Bruce Springsteen from 1973 to 1987 a lot. I was probably the right age for it, and I was also from a dead end town that had long been in decline.

Of course, I didn't have a car or a girlfriend called Mary. Or called anything. Despite that, those early Springsteen albums did hit a note on days where I'd feel stuck in my room, desperate to get out of town and do something spectacular as the characters in Born To Run and The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle did. The killer here is that by the time you get to Darkness On The Edge of Town and The River, you see those same people never did escape and instead got married/pregnant and stuck in dead end jobs or unemployment. The narrative of the song The River could easily apply to West Cumbria as to New Jersey in 1980: guy is brought up "to do like your daddy done", but the recession puts paid to that despite our man's getting girlfriend getting pregnant. Marriage follows but over time he and Mary are leading empty lives and even the memory of their happy younger days by the river seem cruel - "is a dream a lie if it don't come true?"

Half a decade after The River, Springsteen was one of the biggest stars in the world when Born In The USA sold millions. In between, he released Nebraska, a set of solo acoustic recordings made in his home. Curiously, until very recently I'd never got round to listening to any of it bar Atlantic City until very recently. Perhaps I always associated the man's sound with the 'everything including the kitchen sink' approach of the E Street Band - especially as I found the Human Touch and Lucky Town albums he recorded with other musicians disappointing.

Nebraska is an excellent album, though. Lyrically, it could be his finest work that I've heard. It's filled with crime, desperation and murder from the opening title track, inspired by the film Badlands, which he had of course used for a song title previously. As Springsteen's version of mass murderer Charles Starkweather is led away for execution, he shows no remorse, attributing his actions to there being "a meanness in the world" and that he wishes that they pull the switch that "my pretty baby is sittin' right there in my lap".

Murder and execution appears later on in Johnny 99, a song later covered by Johnny Cash. While Starkweather's crimes were those of a psychopath, Johnny 99 is a man laid off at the auto plant who turns first to drink for answers, which leads to a botched attempted robbery that sees a night clerk dead. Sentenced to 99 years in prison, he instead tells the judge that "I do believe I'd be better off dead" and pleads for the death sentence.

These two songs are the most desperate on the album - there is little of the even vague hope of salvation and redemption that coloured previous works. The narrator of Highway Patrolman is a decent man who turned to working for the law after economics ended his farm life. But when his troubled younger brother returns to town and ends up killing a man in a bar brawl. he chases him as far as the border with Canada before pulling over and letting him escape, insisting that "if it was any other man I'd just put him straight away" but "man turns his back on his family, well he just ain't no good".

At the time (1982), it must have come as a shock to those used to huge-sounding tunes like Hungry Heart, Prove It All Night and Thunder Road. You can imagine the label wouldn't have been too happy, these being the days before the idea of releasing demo-quality recordings was seen as a good idea. It's a little strange to think after that making an album with a timeless quality, he would two years later give the world Born In The USA, his most dated work in terms of production values.

Nearly 30 years on, it's become one of his most well-regarding works, for very good reason. He would go on to cover similar ground again ten years later with The Ghost of Tom Joad, but this remains the place Springsteen explored the true darkness of American life.