“…I Know the River is Dry”: Economic Realism in the Music of
Bruce Springsteen, 1977 – 1984”.
Thomas Willis
Student ID: 4182135
Year 4
Single Honours American & Canadian Studies
Dissertation supervisor: Maria Ryan
Acknowledgments:
Firstly, I would like to extend a thank you to my friends, family and
academics who have read my finished draft and offered invaluable comments,
considerations and corrections. Also, to my supervisor Maria Ryan who has
remained enthusiastic and constantly helpful regarding my research for this
dissertation.
Secondly, a thank you to the online community of ‘Brucebook’. Springsteen’s
fans have often reminded me of the accurate perceptiveness of Bruce
Springsteen’s music. They are the real people of the communities of
Youngstown, the people whose fathers lost their lives as a result of corporate
industrial negligence and the individuals who have struggled to comprehend
their identity in a society that takes from them but does not give back.
This research is dedicated to the working-class as it simultaneously aims to
strengthen the discourse surrounding them and to highlight their visibility.
For the workers from California, to the Midwest, to New York, to the
Canadian border, to the paternal side of my family who stood strong in the
miners strike of 1984-1985 and opposed the industrial disinvestment and
ignorance of the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher.
Finally, to my parents, who taught me everything. Without you, none of the
past four years would have been possible - you are both “Living Proof”.
Dedicated to my granddad, Thomas Buller Willis, 1937-2007.
Abstract:
The following chapters are organized chronologically across periods of two
years and analyse the context of Bruce Springsteen’s music. The main
proposition of the dissertation is to demonstrate that this artistic period is an
important cultural element in academic study that sets out to understand the
decline of the American working class.
Chapter one concerns the years of 1977-1978. It explores the development of
the theme of labour in Darkness on the Edge of Town and Springsteen’s early
engagement with the decline of the working class.
Chapter two considers the development of a more direct political
consciousness in Springsteen’s writing during 1979-1980. The song-writing
during this period directly considered themes of economic deprivation and
displacement.
Chapter three analyses Nebraska during 1981-1982 and how the album
portrayed the damaged humanity of former industrial workers and the
beginning of Springsteen’s depiction of income equality.
Chapter four from 1983-1984 involves Springsteen’s release of Born in the
USA alongside the Reagan administration and how the politics of Neoliberalism and the New Right collided with his music.
Word count (including footnotes): 13,250
CONTENTS
PAGE NUMBER
Introduction
P. 1
1. “Finding the Light in the Darkness on the Edge of Town”: The Emotional
Past and the Theme of Labour – 1977 – 1978.
P. 6
2. “Down to the River”: The Past of Hurt Songs Make Sense of the Present –
1979 – 1980.
P. 16
3. “…Debts that No Honest Man Can Pay”: Winners and Losers – 1981 –
1982.
P. 28
4. “This Hard Land”: The Reality of Vietnam, Ronald Reagan and the Tale of
Two Americas – 1983 – 1984.
P. 39
Conclusion
P. 48
Bibliography
P. 51
1
Introduction:
“When you read about workers today, they are discussed mainly in terms of
statistics (the unemployed), trade, (the need to eliminate and offshore their
jobs in the name of increased profit), and unions (usually depicted as a purely
negative drag on the economy). In reality, the lives of American workers, as
well of those of the unemployed and the homeless, make up a critically
important cornerstone of our country’s story, past and present…”1
-
Bruce Springsteen.
“We construct stories to reflect on the past, to comprehend the present, and
to anticipate the future”.2
-
Steve May & Laura Morrison.
Definitions of what constitutes the working-class in American history are
“notoriously porous,” according to Kathryn Marie Dudley.3 Dudley argues
that structural considerations are crucial to understanding the place workingclass people inhabit in society and how they are distinguishable from the
middle-class.4 Although Dudley proposes that structure is important to
consider when analysing the working class, it can be argued that the decline
1
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinDaleMaharidge,SomeplaceLikeAmerica:Talesfrom
theNewDepression(Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress,2013),p.x.
2
SteveMay,LaurenMorrison,“MakingSenseofRestructuring:Narrativesof
AccommodationamongDownsizedWorkers,”inBeyondtheRuins:TheMeaningsof
Deindustrialization,editedbyJeffersonCowieandJosephHeathcott(NewYork:
CornellUniversityPress,2003),p.268.
3
KathrynMarieDudley,TheEndoftheLine:LostJobs,NewLivesinPost-industrial
America(London:TheUniversityofChicagoPress,1997),p.xxi.
4
Ibid.
2
of the working class itself has led to an era of post-structural academic
literature. Rather than just a theoretical approach, this body of literature
actually explores the place of the working-class as the physical structures of
industry can no longer be seen. Rather than deconstructing a grand narrative
of American labour, post-structural literature on the working-class explores
what becomes of the people “beyond the ruins”. 5 Or in Ruth Milkman’s
terms, as capitalist economies shift away from manufacturing and industry,
“what is happening to industrial workers and their way of life?”6 To come to
terms with this, Steve May and Laura Morrison note that it is better to
understand the “lived experiences”.7 May and Morrison argue that to better
understand the decline of the working class it is appropriate to engage with
the story-like narratives of workers who have faced deindustrialization headon.8
The effects of deindustrialization on the American working class was
enormous during the late seventies and early eighties. Barry Bluestone writes
that as a consequence of private disinvestment and the relocation of
American business, the loss of jobs from the seventies onwards was
“cataclysmic,” reaching an estimate as high as thirty-eight million.9 The study
of how the working class is represented in culture has seen to play an
5
JeffersonCowie,JosephHeathcott,BeyondtheRuins,p.1.
RuthMilkman,FarewelltotheFactory(London,UniversityofCaliforniaPress,
1997),p.1.
7
SteveMay,LaurenMorrison,“MakingSenseofRestructuring:Narrativesof
accommodationamongDownsizedWorkers,”p.259.
8
Ibid.
9
BarryBluestone,quotedinBeyondtheRuins:TheMeaningsofDeindustrialization,
p.ix.
6
3
important part in academic disciplines that are concerned with exploring
industrial decline from the seventies onwards. Rather than simply relying on
figure-based research, the study of culture contextualises the decline of the
working class and achieves a more comprehensive explication of what this
means. According to Dudley, this means an examination of “the cultural
meanings that ordinary people draw upon to understand their place in
American society”.10 Cultural representations often humanise the workingclass as they offer a bottom-up perspective of workers. Iton, for example,
argues that the dramatization of workers in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath and in the music of Woody Guthrie has “helped bring wider attention
to labour’s issues”.11
A study of Bruce Springsteen’s music from 1977-1984 fits within the approach
of humanising the decline of the working class for a number of reasons.
Firstly, as Jim Cullen notes, Springsteen’s music is “…not music of
musicology but of politics, history, literature, sociology”.12 A study of
Springsteen’s music is much more than a study of musical form and sound, it
is an exploration of culture and historical context. Secondly, Springsteen’s
songs are essentially grounded in ‘economic realism’. Economic realism is an
appropriate term to describe Springsteen’s concerns across this period of six
years as it describes how Springsteen’s songs are contextualized by real
economic circumstances and therefore a legitimate means of academic
10
KathrynMarieDudley,TheEndoftheLine,p.xxi.
RichardIton,SolidarityBlues(NorthCarolina:UniversityofNorthCarolinaPress,
2000),p.201.
12
JimCullen,BornintheU.S.A.:BruceSpringsteenandtheAmericanTradition,
(Connecticut:WesleyanUniversity,1997),p.xv.
11
4
investigation. The shift in song-writing after Born to Run is essentially a shift
from epistemology to ontology – from tracks that yearned for a decent grasp
of life’s knowledge to songs that made sense of the present, of living, of being
working class. The songs in Born to Run demand the listener’s attention and
ask questions. However, starting with 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town,
this shifted towards an analysis of the answers of those questions. Or, if there
are any answers at all. Thus, Born to Run’s “runaway American dream” often
leads to an examination of the “soured American dream” in later albums.13
The central proposition of this thesis is to demonstrate that Bruce
Springsteen’s portrait of the working class from 1977-1984 is an imperative
cultural element in the structure of academic study. ‘Economic realism’ in
Bruce Springsteen’s music promotes the study of a humanistic approach to
the decline of working class communities and leads investigation into the
cause and effect of the decline of labour. The study of ‘economic realism’ in
Springsteen’s music is often only anecdotal in contemporary literature. The
economic themes of his music are often overlooked and underdeveloped in
favour of a much broader discussion of his body of work. For example, Jim
Cullen’s Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition
places Springsteen in the wider context of American political philosophy but
largely overlooks the implications of economic realism in Springsteen’s
music.14 Similarly, Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive is a detailed explication of
the decline of the working class from the seventies onwards and how the
13
JuneSkinner-Sawyers,RacingintheStreet:TheBruceSpringsteenReader(New
York:PenguinBooks,2004),p.20.
14
JimCullen,BornintheUSA,pp.xv-100.
5
working-class have been represented in popular culture, but Springsteen
features only briefly in his discussion.15 This dissertation will show the
disadvantages in overlooking the effects of economic realism in Bruce
Springsteen’s music. Notably, an examination of this theme in his music leads
to the findings of urban disinvestment and deprivation, the psychical and
psychologically effects of industrial work, the decline of industrial
productivity and the exponential growth of income inequality in America.
Therefore, this dissertation will focus solely on the economic realism of
Springsteen’s music, how this contextualizes his body of work and how this
subsequently widens the discourse on using culture to analyse the decline of
the working class in the United States.
15
JeffersonCowie,Stayin’Alive(London:NewPress,2010),pp.1-360.
6
1 “Finding the Light in the Darkness on the Edge of Town”: The
Emotional Past and the Theme of Labour - 1977 - 1978.
When I started, I wanted to document what it felt like to grow up in America
during the time that I was growing up in. And I wanted to follow those
characters, not just when they were teenagers or in their twenties, but into the
middle parts of their lives… The idea was to draw my own map and maybe
help other people draw their maps”.16
-
Bruce Springsteen.
“I done my best to live the the right way,
I get up every morning and go to work each day”.17
-
Bruce Springsteen – ‘The Promised Land’.
A day etched into the memory of Youngstown, Ohio is 19 September, 1977.
Many people may still remember it by that simple date, but Youngstown
locals know it by “Black Monday”.18 Youngstown, a town in the Mahoning
Valley would undergo a dramatic economic transformation that day as
Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company decided to halt the furnaces of the
Campbell Works factory, leading to the closure of the plant and the
immediate loss of 5,000 jobs.19 Many more jobs would be lost in the following
16
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinSkinnerSawyers,RacingintheStreet:TheBruce
SpringsteenReader,pp.21-22.
17
BruceSpringsteen,‘ThePromisedLand’,DarknessontheEdgeofTown(New
York:ColumbiaRecords,1978).
18
StaughtonLynd,TheFightAgainstShutdowns(SanPedro:SinglejackBooks,1982),
p.21.
19
Ibid.
7
decades – employees of the steel industry declined by 40 percent from 1979 to
1984.20 The closure of Campbell Works marked the “cutting of the cord,”
according to one mill worker.21 However, as symbolic of deindustrialization
the closing of the steel mills in Youngstown on that day seems, the economic
decline in the small town of Ohio was not an isolated incident.22 The following
spring, in 1978, Bruce Springsteen would release Darkness on the Edge of
Town. As soon as the economic collapse of communities such as Youngstown
had begun, Bruce Springsteen was already beginning to formulate his own
ideas about the aftermath.
Darkness is a much more isolated record in terms of sound, sense of place
and the role of the narrator. Although Springsteen stated that Darkness was
not so much a new epoch in his career, stating it was rather a continuation of
his earlier thematic concerns, Springsteen views society through the lens of
the working class for the first time in Darkness.23 Born to Run, Springsteen
expresses, “…had a certain romantic feel. [Darkness] is more realistic”.24 The
theme of work, of faith in work, institutional obligation and civic
responsibility is sowed in the fabric of Darkness as Springsteen examines the
kind of people that he wrote about in Born to Run that did not manage to
escape the mundane reality of small-town life. Unlike the latter characters on
his albums, the majority of characters found on Darkness are still employed,
20
StevenHigh,IndustrialSunset(Toronto:UniversityofTorontoPressInc.,2003),
eBookversion,accessed13April2016,pp.12-13.
21
StaughtonLynd,TheFightAgainstShutdowns,p.21.
22
StevenHigh,IndustrialSunset,p.11.
23
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinJeffBurger,SpringsteenonSpringsteen(London:
OmnibusPress,2013),p.58.
24
Ibid.,p.85
8
and the album marks Springsteen’s effort to capture the realism of that
working life. Specifically, the working life of his parents that he experienced
during his childhood.
Springsteen’s view and depiction of work from Darkness onwards has been
analysed by Jim Cullen. Cullen affirms that Springsteen’s characters from
1978 onwards, rarely “…celebrate the dignity of work, declaim it as a strength
of self-worth or as a cure for personal or social ills,” Cullen argues that their
interests lie elsewhere.25 However, Springsteen’s view of work on Darkness is
much more ambivalent than this. The characters in Darkness do regard a
working life as a strength and element of self-worth even if they are aware of
its un-fulfilment at times. The narrator of “The Promised Land’, for example,
believes his working life makes him an honest man, a man with a strong faith.
This obligatory faith in work is grounded in the upbringing of Springsteen
personally. Springsteen explains, “my parents struggles, it’s the subject of my
life,” embodying tracks like ‘Factory’ with a much deeper economic realism.26
Springsteen remarks that he understands the faith in work but also
understands unemployment because he grew up in a house “with a sense of
dispossession”.27 His father was often in between jobs, but he remembers his
mother’s committed work ethic – “her life had a considerable consistency,
25
JimCullen,BornintheUSA:BruceSpringsteenandtheAmericanTradition,p.100.
DavidRemnick,“WeAreAlive,”NewYorker(July30,2012),accessed20April,
2016,http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/30/we-are-alive
27
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinAbbeSmith,“TheDignityandHumanityof
Springsteen’sCriminals,”GeorgetownLawFacultyPublications(February2010),p.
818.
26
9
work, work, work every day, and I admired that greatly,” he recalls.28 The
characters in Darkness fall in the middle of these two attitudes of labour
influenced by both Springsteen’s parents, of a commitment to work while
exhibiting a feeling of dispossession.
A prime example of the theme of labour, ‘Factory’ acts as a paean to the
working individuals of the factories. Its industrial imagery and biographical
detail demonstrate the economic reality of factory work. Springsteen explains
that ‘Factory’ is essentially a song about a paradox - “the paradox of earning
your living and getting life from a place that also takes a lot out of you”.29
There is an understated yet distinct sound of a chain clanging in the opening
bars of the music, arguably symbolic of not only the materials that the
working individuals are using but also the confinement that the individuals
feel bound by working in the factory. The song is notably personal and semi
auto-biographical for Springsteen, as it recalls the memories of his father and
the nature of his employment routine at the various jobs that he held such as
working at Freehold’s A&M Karagheusian Rug Mill.30 The rug mill in
Freehold had once employed 17,000 workers at the height of its operations,
but had since fallen out of fortune.31 The experience of his father’s factory
28
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinClintonHeylin,EStreetShuffle:TheGloryDaysof
BruceSpringsteen&TheEStreetBand,(London:Constable&Robinson,2013),p.8.
29
ThePromise:TheMakingofDarknessontheEdgeofTown,directedbyThom
Zimny,(NewYork:ThrillHillProductions,2010).
30
MarcDolan,BruceSpringsteenandthePromiseofRockn’Roll,(NewYork:W.W
NortonandCompany,2012),p.154.
31
KarenDeMasters,“OntheMap;AFactorythatWoveRugsandBoundaTown
Together,”TheNewYorkTimes(April9,2000),accessed26thApril,2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/09/nyregion/on-the-map-a-factory-that-woverugs-and-bound-a-town-together.html
10
work would have undoubtedly influenced the song. Springsteen notes about
his father that “he lost a lot of his hearing when he worked in a plastics
factory”.32 This is an experience also discussed by Springsteen in Thom
Zimnys documentary, with Springsteen recalling how he would take his
fathers lunch to the factory and his father would not be able to hear him call
out as the machines around him in the plastics factory would be so loud.33
This brings greater meaning to the lines, “factory takes his hearing, factory
gives him life,” - the factory work fulfils an employment status yet it affects
his father physiologically.34 The track ultimately cuts through “industry
nostalgia,” in that it rejects the myth of factory work as a great, stable job.35
Rather, it was simply a well-paid job, as Cowie and Heathcott contend.36
‘Factory’, considered in its autobiographical context of Springsteen’s
experience of his father’s labour, is perhaps the most direct reflection of the
complex effects of labour on the worker - emotionally and physically - on
Darkness.
Springsteen’s appearance changed during the Darkness tour. The image of a
bearded, t-shirt wearing, Jersey-Shore poet gave way to a musician who
frequently wore dress shirts, ties and sports jackets, as seen in Chris Rushby’s
photographic book on Springsteen.37 The physical landscape of America was
32
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinJimBeviglia,CountingDownBruceSpringsteen:His
100FinestSongs(Plymouth:Rowman&Littlefield,2014),p.72.
33
ThePromise:TheMakingofDarknessontheEdgeofTown(2010).
34
BruceSpringsteen,‘Factory,’DarknessontheEdgeofTown(NewYork:Columbia
Records,1978).
35
JeffersonCowie,JosephHeathcott,BeyondtheRuins,p.14.
36
Ibid.
37
ChrisRushby,BruceSpringsteen:TheIllustratedBiography(Hertfordshire:
TransatlanticPress,2010),pp.33-37.
11
also beginning to change as the social cohesion in working-class communities
began to fragment. Staughton Lynd notes that that strains on family life such
as alcoholism, divorce, child and spouse abuse, and suicide were exacerbated
by unemployment.38 In 1979, after the mills closed in Youngstown, child
abuse cases increased by 35 percent.39 Comparably, suicide rates climbed by
70 percent in two years after the mills closed as personal bankruptcies
reached two thousand in just one year.40 Youngstown became a town of mass
unemployment, fore closured houses, bankrupt citizens, frequent arson
attacks, and between 1970 and 1990, the population of the city declined from
140,000 to 95,000.41 In 1978, as vandalism erupted in cities and stagflation
dominated the economy nationwide, the country became frustratingly cynical
and sour, according to George Packer.42 Major cities were undergoing
transformations like never before. Camden, NJ, once a manufacturing hub for
the Campbell Soup company, also suffered considerable industrial decline
and massive unemployment as jobs in the Camden base declined from
38,900 in 1948 to just 10,200 in 1982 and between 1967 and 1977 the average
number of workers on strike climbed by 30 percent.43 Many workers during
the seventies participated in mass organised action against their employers.
Striking postal workers from New York to Connecticut and the United Auto
38
StaughtonLynd,TheFightAgainstShutdowns,p.4.
DaleMaharidge,SomeplacelikeAmerica,pp.44-45.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid,pp.51-52.
42
GeorgePacker,TheUnwinding:ThirtyYearsofAmericanDecline(London:Faber&
FaberLtd,2013),p.21.
43
JoshuaZeitz,“BorntoRunandtheDeclineoftheAmericanDream,”TheAtlantic,
(August24,2015),accessed16December,2015,
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/born-to-run-at40/402137/
39
12
Workers walk out against General Motors are some of the examples given by
Joshua Zeitz.44 It was a seemingly suffocating time socio-economically, and
there is a sense of geographical suffocation on Darkness in the image of the
desert.
The narrator of ‘The Promised Land’ is a working character living in the Utah
desert who “…picks up [his] money and heads back into town”.45 The
individual works all day in their father’s garage yet feels no relief from work
or from his life outside of work. Like many of the protagonists of Darkness,
the protagonist of the track is stuck in a life of boredom, repetitiveness - he
spends his nights “killing time”46 while listening to the radio, “…driving all
night chasing some mirage”.47 The fact that the narrator of ‘The Promised
Land’ lives in the desert is evocative of this theme of anxiety and being
bonded to a repetitive and unfulfilled working life. Often in popular American
culture, the desert is a dichotomous symbol; it represents the wide open
embrace of a rugged individualistic type of freedom and solitary emptiness at
the same time. It is clear to see that the language that Springsteen employs in
the track while describing the restlessness of the narrator, invokes the desert
not as a space of freedom but ironically, something which heightens his
alienation from his working life and closes him up. The image of the desert as
an alienating landscape also compares to the use of the “bad lands” in the
44
Ibid.
BruceSpringsteen,‘ThePromisedLand’(1978).
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid.
45
13
opening track - both are landscapes that induce anxiety in the protagonists
and they are landscapes that emphasize a sense of economic entrapment.
Springsteen was not a stranger to long drives across America, some of which
were coast to coast, which allowed him to absorb the power and grandeur of
the American landscape. Springsteen’s parents had moved out west to
California when he was a teenager leaving Springsteen voluntarily in New
Jersey. Springsteen drove out west to see them, notably with Vini Lopez
around Christmastime in 1969 and with Carl “Tinker” West the following
year.48 Over half a decade later, Springsteen would take a road trip while
working on the material for Darkness and this arguably inspired the imagery
in the lyrics of such songs as ‘The Promised Land’.49 A photograph by Eric
Meola in August, 1977 shows Springsteen sitting on the hood of his car in the
Utah desert watching the dark clouds move in the sky above, a direct
inspiration for the narrative and sense of place in ‘The Promised Land’.50
During this photo shoot, Ames Carlin informs that Meola intended to capture
the same economic melancholy as Robert Frank did in The Americans, a
collection of portraits of the underclass of the 1950’s and 1960’s, ultimately
emphasising the aesthetic of economic realism in the album.51
48
ClintonHeylin,EStreetShuffle,p.36-38.
N.A.,“The100GreatestBruceSpringsteenSongsofAllTime:ThePromisedLand,”
RollingStone,(January16,2014),accessedMarch25,2016,
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-bruce-springsteen-songs-ofall-time-20140116
50
PhotographbyEricMeolainPeterAmesCarlin,Bruce,(London:Simon&
Schuster,2012),p.242-243.
51
Ibid.,p.249.
49
14
Yet, it is also true that the interest of Springsteen’s characters in Darkness lie
in recreation outside of work. Indeed, car modification and drag racing serve
as an away-from-work recreational activity for the narrator of ‘Racing in the
Street’. Marc Dolan states that “Racing in the Street” presents a haunting
“what if” situation - what if you cant get out of town, what if you have to stay
stuck in the same job for the rest of your years?52 The crucial couplet of lines
in the track follows as:
“Some guys they just give up living,
And start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up,
And go racing in the street”.53
This set of lines demonstrates Springsteen’s efforts to construct a dichotomy
between two different sets of workers: the worker who finishes their day and
is trapped in an endless cycle or a “dead-end job,” and the worker who holds
onto something more, something which sets him free from the shackles that
binds the former. It is clear to see that the narrator takes pride in his
automobile, he describes in detail its features, that the car is a “1969 Chevy
with a 396, Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor,” and built “…straight from
scratch”.54 The automobile and the racing that he performs in are an escape
for the narrator and a way to establish himself against the working man
whose life is dominated by work. Interestingly, as Jefferson Cowie documents
in his book Stayin’ Alive, Nixom plant worker Dewey Burton also participated
in car modifications as a hobby that helped him to escape from the routine of
52
MarcDolan,BruceSpringsteenandthePromiseofRock‘n’Roll,p.152.
BruceSpringsteen,‘RacingintheStreet’(1978).
54
Ibid.
53
15
daily work.55 Dewey stated that “he wanted to be somebody” as his car
modifications were part of a way to supress the mundane reality of industrial
production.56 Cowie notes that the modification of automobiles was “one of
the last, great post-war refuges for the victims of Fordism and Taylorism,” as
workers attempted to combat the oppressiveness of cyclical work.57 The relief
from work is not an uncommon occurrence as Milkman notes that factory
work was essentially problematic and that most workers in auto factories
wished to escape its rhythms.58 This reinforces the space between work and
home and how recreational activity is demonstrated as a relief from work.
Although the correlation of the stories of Burton and the protagonist of
‘Racing in the Street’ is most likely coincidence, it demonstrates that
Springsteen’s depictions of work and especially the retreat from work is often
emblematic of his accurate portrayal of blue-collar workers.
55
JeffersonCowie,Stayin’Alive,p.9.
Ibid.,pp,1-11.
57
Ibid.,341.
58
RuthMilkman,quotedinBeyondtheRuins,p.15.
56
16
2 “Down to the River”: The Past of the Hurt Songs Make Sense of
the Present – 1979 – 1980.
“…Lately there ain’t been no work,
on account of the economy”.1
-
Bruce Springsteen, ‘The River’, 1980.
“That’s my life”.2
-
Virginia Springsteen to Bruce Springsteen about ‘The River’.
Like life itself, The River is a record that encompasses many different moods
and feelings. 3 The album continued Bruce Springsteen’s efforts to document
the real lives of American individuals who were in difficult economic
situations. The River is essentially a communal record, in the sense that its
rock tracks serve as the function of relief for the characters of its socially
realistic ballads. Springsteen notes that the rock tracks are the types of songs
that the characters in the record themselves would listen to - out-of-work-onFriday-night types of songs.4 According to Mikal Gilmore, The River would
begin Springsteen’s look at the “social conditions that bred lives split between
dilemmas of flight and ruin,” as Springsteen began to look at history as a way
to understand the forces that surround people and shape them into decisions
1
BruceSpringsteen,‘TheRiver’,TheRiver(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,1980).
VirginiaSpringsteen,quotedinBruceSpringsteen,prefacetobookletinTheTies
thatBind:TheRiverCollection,(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,2015).
3
JuneSkinnerSawyers,RacingintheStreet:TheBruceSpringsteenReader,(New
York:PenguinBooks,2004),p.10.
4
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinTheTiesthatBind,directedbyThomZimny(New
York:ThrillHillProductions,2015),Blu-Ray,time0:33:23.
2
17
and circumstances beyond their control.5 Springsteen stated that the voice on
The River was a political voice in the sense that it was “…dealing with the
Carter recession and its effects on just, working people”.6 Furthermore,
Garman notes that during the Darkness tour, Springsteen began to cultivate
an interest in history after reading Henry Steele Commager and Allan Nevin’s
A Pocket History Of the United States of America and had acquired a gradual
political consciousness by 1979 when the band and he performed at a benefit
concert for Musicians for Safe Energy, an alliance against the harmful aspects
of nuclear energy.7 Cowie notes that Commager, whom Springsteen was
reading, had been posing the debate of a nation that stood at the “divide of
disillusionment” years earlier in 1974.8 Nevertheless, there was a clear
determination by Springsteen to include songs in The River that were
grounded in economic and political reality as he examined the human
consequences of the 1970’s recession and created a community of music in
which they could live. As Springsteen stated, “it’s time that someone took on
the reality of the eighties”.9
Around the time of the benefit concert for safe energy Springsteen wrote
‘Roulette’ and ‘Held Up Without a Gun’, two of the most politically explicit
and direct tracks he had written up to that point and they demonstrated
5
MikalGilmore,“BruceSpringsteen’sAmerica,”fromNightBeat:AShadowHistory
ofRock&Roll,inRacingintheStreet:TheBruceSpringsteenReader,editedbyJune
SkinnerSawyers,(NewYork:Penguin,2004),p.269.
6
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinTheTiesthatBind(2015).
7
BryanK.Garman,“TheGhostofHistory:BruceSpringsteen,WoodyGuthrieand
theHurtSong,”inRacingintheStreet:TheBruceSpringsteenReader,editedbyJune
SkinnerSawyers(NewYork:Penguin,2004),p.223.
8
JeffersonCowie,Stayin’Alive,p.219.
9
ClintonHeylin,EStreetShuffle,p.289.
18
Springsteen’s intention to capture the current political climate. Both tracks
were recorded for The River but they did not make the album, later making
appearances elsewhere as outtake tracks. 1011 ‘Held Up Without a Gun’ is a
track in which the narrator, running low on fuel, pulls into a Exxon station
where they find themselves “held up without a gun”.12 The song is a short
track and its pace is quickening even though the narrator talks about driving
slow and containing his own joy.13 Commentators on the track such as Dolan
have noted that the political issue of the gas crisis towards the end of the
1970’s inspired ‘Held Up Without a Gun’ as the rising gas prices, fuel
shortages and long lines at gas station pumps directly contrasted to the
automobile imagery of Springsteen’s work with its connotations of freedom
and endless roads, imagery that had been a stable part of Springsteen’s songwriting mythos since Born to Run. In ‘Held up Without a Gun’ Springsteen
was capturing the atmosphere of the gas crisis through a individual character
as the oil crisis inhibited their ability to move. Being held up by a gun
demonstrating through metaphor that the price of gas during the crisis
essentially equated to theft.
The circumstances of the oil crisis in the late 1970’s was also indicative of a
widening disparity in wealth between the service suppliers and the
consumers. Howard Zinn writes that while the oil crisis drastically affected
10
BruceSpringsteen,‘HeldupWithoutaGun,’TheTiesThatBand:TheRiver
Collection(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,2015).
11
BruceSpringsteen,‘Roulette,’TheTiesThatBand:TheRiverCollection(NewYork:
ColumbiaRecords,2015).
12
BruceSpringsteen,‘HeldupWithoutaGun’(2015).
13
Ibid.
19
the everyday lives of Americans, “the salary of the chairman of Exxon oil was
being raised to $830,00 a year and that of the chairman of Mobil Oil to over a
million dollars a year”.14 As Exxon experienced a sharp increase in profits,
many small and independent gas stations went out of business.15 Although
‘Held Up Without a Gun’ is a little over a minute long, it captures the frantic
energy of the individual who was scrambling to conserve fuel and afford the
higher prices they were forced to pay as the management of large
corporations were continuing to profit. Similarly, ‘Roulette’ is a track that is
inspired by real-life events. Inspired by the Three Mile Island accident that
occurred in Pennsylvania in 1979, it is a track in which the narrator, a fireman
who describes himself as the “big expendable,” frantically escapes the home
and the town that he lives in.16 The frantic pace and rapidly delivered lyrics
reflect the cloud of anxiety and fear that enveloped Dauphin County as the
narrator struggles to escape the nuclear disaster. Eventually, Springsteen
conceded to Mark Hagen in an interview that ‘Roulette” was too “specific”
and that the narrative trajectory he would prefer to tell on The River was
more of a general one.17 However, both ‘Roulette’ and ‘Held Up Without a
Gun’ mark a departure in Springsteen’s song-writing towards the
documentation of real-life socio-economic circumstances of the present.
14
HowardZinn,ThePeople’sHistoryoftheUnitedStates,(NewYork:
HarperPerennialModernClassicsEdition,2015),p.571.
15
Ibid.
16
BruceSpringsteen,“Roulette”(2015).
17
MarkHagen,Mojo,(January1999),inTalkAboutaDream:TheEssential
InterviewsofBruceSpringsteen(NewYork:BloomsburyPress,2013),p.243.
20
The songs that Springsteen did include on the The River when it was released
reflected the intention to create a more “general” story. It was a story that
would again draw on past experiences to establish the music in the economic
realism of the present. According to Garman, Springsteen drew on “hurt
songs,” songs in a similar vein to artists such as Woody Guthrie and Hank
Williams, in order to depict the type of economic realism on The River.18
“Hurt songs,” Garman notes, are certain songs in which artists use a workingclass language to construct narratives that “express the collective pain,
suffering and injustice working people have historically suffered”.19 This
influence of “hurt songs” is articulated by Springsteen on The Ties that Bind,
as he notes that the formulation of the songs on The River was largely a
synthesis of writing “for his age” and an influence of music older than rock
music, such as country and western.20 Further developing on his political
consciousness though “hurt songs,” Springsteen had also read Joe Klein’s
biography of Woody Guthrie towards the end of the seventies and was
impressed by Guthrie’s affirmation of the use of music for political action and
its ability to facilitate an emerging political consciousness within oneself.21
The evidence of a hurt song and a developing political consciousness in
Springsteen is no clearer than on the title track. ‘The River’ is a semi-fictional
and semi-biographical account of a man and a woman who get married young
after the conception of a child, find themselves in the middle of a recessive job
18
BryanK.Garman,“TheGhostofHistory:BruceSpringsteen,WoodyGuthrieand
theHurtSong,”p.223.
19
Ibid.p.222.
20
TheTiesthatBind,directedbyThomZimny(2015).
21
MikalGilmore,“BruceSpringsteen’sAmerica,”p.270.
21
market and suffer the effects of unemployment as it draws them further
apart. The songs biographical element is due to the inspiration that
Springsteen’s sister and his brother-in-law would have on the track.
Springsteen’s sister Virginia has noted the title track is an almost verbatim
account of her pregnancy at 18 and her marriage to Mickey Shave,
Springsteen’s future brother-in-law. She notes about ‘The River’ that “…every
bit of it was true,” as she realised the strong connection between the story of
Mary and herself.22 ‘The River’ was first played at a benefit concert for the
alliance of Musicians United for Safe Energy at Madison Square Garden, the
concert around the time of Springsteen’s development of ideas about history
and class.23 The narrator of the track explains that he is brought up to do
what his “daddy does” and he comes from “down in the valley,” invoking the
geographical vision of the Mahoning Valley of Ohio.24 The characters in the
song are a product of a class system themselves, in which they are expected to
follow in the footsteps of their parents employment plans, a life in which you
are gifted a union card and a wedding coat for your 19th birthday.25 The
density of trade union membership had fell rapidly during the 1970’s and
Cowie notes that the union card the character receives in the track does not
symbolise economic solidarity or material liberation but it is “a symbol of
those not chosen, those left behind”.2627 As opposed to the 1930’s with the
establishment of the NRLA act in 1935 that guaranteed the right to form
22
PeterAmesCarlin,Bruce,pp.271-272.
Ibid.,p.272.
24
Ibid.
25
BruceSpringsteen,‘TheRiver’(1980).
26
LeonFink,WorkersinHardTimes:ALongViewofEconomicCrisis(Urbana,
UniversityofIllinoisPress,2014),p.124.
27
JeffersonCowie,Stayin’Alive,p.342.
23
22
unions during the era of the Great Depression, by 1979, unions were seen as a
“last resort rather than as a natural or preferred means of improving job
conditions”.28
The central metaphor in the track is the river itself. During their former years,
the couple would drive to where “fields were green,” go down to the river and
swim in it together.29 The river serves as pastoral emblem of hope, freedom
and solace for the couple who were thrown into a life of responsibility from a
young age. We then learn that the narrator was employed in the construction
industry for the “Johnstown Company,” but has since lost their job due to the
economy. There is little to no record of a Johnstown Company within the
history of the construction industry, but Springsteen has stated that “I based
the song on the crash of the construction industry in late 1970’s New Jersey
and the hard times that fell on my sister and her family”.30 There is much
evidence, however, to suggest that the construction industry suffered a sharp
decline nationally during the time that ‘The River’ was written.
The construction industry was a huge component of the economy when The
River was released, a sector that not only involved manufacturing but also
transportation and services.31 The industry was largely male-dominated and
the job itself exhibited a certain masculine stereotype, as Kris Paap
28
Ibid.,pp.235-237.
Ibid.
30
BruceSpringsteen,prefacetobookletinTheTiesthatBind:TheRiverCollection
(2015).
31
JulianE.Lange,DanielQuinnMills,TheConstructionIndustry,(Lexington,
Massachusetts:LexingtonBooks,D.C.HeathandCompany,1979),p.1.
29
23
observes.32 Paap states that construction workers in the 1970’s were in their
“heyday,” earning good wages and doing work that was respected. 33 Yet, the
structure of working in the industry was essentially insecure due to unstable
opportunities, dangerous work conditions and high levels of self
supervision.34 Although a large and crucial exponent of the economy of the
U.S, the productivity of the construction industry reached a peak in 1968 only
to decline from 1976 onwards, according to Steven G. Allen.35 Also, between
1979 and 1983, due to the considerably slow growth of the U.S economy, the
housing industry suffered a decline with residential construction in 1982 at
only 60 percent of the level it was previously in 1979.36 Expenses for the
construction industry had also led to the decline of productivity. Federal tax
on motor fuel, which was the source of funds for the Highway Trust Fund was
the same level that it was in 1959, despite the high levels of inflation towards
the end of the seventies and the Federal Highway Administration estimated
that highway maintenance expense had risen 328 percent between 1967 and
1979.37 The maintenance of the highways in the U.S was an important aspect
of the construction industry as much as building them in the first place and as
William R. Haycraft notes, “by the early 1980’s, highways and bridges were
beginning to fall apart”.38 Congress finally decided to act in 1982 to provide
32
KrisPaap,WorkingConstruction:WhyWhiteWorking-ClassMenPutThemselves
andtheLabourMovementinHarm’sWay(Ithaca,London:CornellUniversityPress,
2006),p.5-6.
33
Ibid,p.30
34
JulianE.Lange,DanielQuinnMills,TheConstructionIndustry(1979),p.6.
35
StevenG.Allen,“WhyConstructionIndustryProductivityisDeclining,”TheReview
ofEconomicsandStatistics,Vol.67,No.4(Nov.,1985),pp.661-669. 36
WilliamR.Haycraft,YellowSteel:TheStoryoftheEarthmovingEquipment
Industry,(Urbana,Chicago:UniversityofIllinoisPress,2000),p.244.
37
Ibid.,p.244-245.
38
Ibid.,p.245.
24
emergency relief to the situation of the roads and the declining productivity of
the construction industry.39 Yet, as ‘The River’ had documented the struggle
of the unemployed construction worker two years earlier, the relief program
would have been too late for Mickey Shave who left the industry to become a
janitor at a local high school.40
Although ‘The River’ appears as Springsteen’s most strikingly accurate
portrayal of economic realism so far, there are also references to other socioeconomic patterns in other tracks. Often on The River, and in many of
Springsteen’s tracks in his discography, short and seemingly indispensable
lines actually reflect the economic realism of the time in which they were
written. ‘Cadillac Ranch’, for example is a seemingly straight-forward rock
track. Yet, the song shares its name with an art instillation by an art group in
Amarillo, Texas, a photograph of which adorns the lyric booklet to The
River.41 The public project, envisioned by the group Ant Farm and Stanley
Marsh, consists of ten vintage Cadillac’s encased in concrete and buried nose
deep in the earth.42 The Cadillac’s of the project became a long-lasting fixture
of the landscape of America as the project was a monument of old, distinctly
American-produced relics in combination with the gritty landscape of Texas
39
Ibid.
JonStewart,“BruceSpringsteen’sStateoftheUnion,”RollingStone(March29,
2012),accessed20April,2016,http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/brucespringsteens-state-of-the-union-20120329
41
SeeinnerpagesoflyricsheetintheU.K.,1980vinylreleaseof,BruceSpringsteen,
TheRiver(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,1980).
42
JimMcBride,“AmericanMonumenttotheDream:CadillacRanchCelebrates30
Years,”TheAmarilloGlobeNews(June20,2004),accessed12April,2016,
http://amarillo.com/stories/062004/new_cadillacranch.shtml#.Vw7KPZMrLVo
40
25
alongside Interstate 40; the collide of nature and mankind.43 During the time
of the writing for The River, the market for large cars in America had
vanished.44 Thus, ‘Cadillac Ranch’ acts as a “full-throttled paean to the sort of
long, sleek gas guzzlers that would soon disappear off America’s highways”.45
With ‘Cadillac Ranch’, Springsteen had further enforced the economic
significance of the Cadillac’s decline of status and the general decline of the
auto industry in America of the time, something which would be written
about in more detail in Nebraska.
Springsteen also makes reference to the welfare system in ‘Point Blank’ and
‘Sherry Darling’. The narrator in ‘Point Blank’ describes a woman who has
been lied to, shot in the back, and who the narrator chases after to capture the
happier times that they shared together, only to find himself a stranger to
her.46 The woman does not rely on her Romeo, on a love interest, but instead
on her “welfare check” and all the things that she knows she can not have.47
Comparably, in ‘Sherry Darling’, the narrator notes how he has to drive his
companion down to the “unemployment agency”.48 Welfare was indeed a
contentious issue in mainstream politics at the time The River was released.
The United States was one of the last of the major economic powers in the
world to establish social security programs for not only the unemployed but
43
Ibid.
JohnB.Rae,TheAmericanAutomobileIndustry,(Boston:TwaynePublishers,
1985),p.154.
45
MikalGilmore,“AmericanRiver,”TheTiesthatBind,insidebooklet,p.1.
46
BruceSpringsteen,‘PointBlank’,TheRiver(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,1980).
47
Ibid.
48
BruceSpringsteen,‘SherryDarling,’TheRiver(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,
1980).
44
26
the elderly, the disabled and the sick.49 According to Richard Iton, many
established welfare programs were defunded throughout the 1970’s and
1980’s and welfare recipients were “demonized,” as they were perceived to be
a drag on the economy.50 In comparison, Dale Maharidge documents that as
welfare become part of a national discourse on economic recovery, figures
such as Charles Murray began to criticize welfare as being a cause of poverty
and called for the end of welfare programs even though the programs only
reached around 5 percent of Americans, leaving millions of the working-class
without help.51 Thus, welfare in the United States never really became an
“inalienable entitlement for the working class”.52
Politically, Ronald Reagan framed the discourse around “welfare queens,” as
Maharidge notes, and there was very little serious debate regarding the
positive effects of welfare for those who needed a helping hand in desperate
times.53 The fact that were was a discussion but seemingly no imperative to
organise the welfare system so it helped those who needed it the most is
partially due to the working class being part of a “silent depression,”
characterized by low purchasing power and growing inequality.54 This type of
economic depression contrasts greatly to the Great Depression of the 1920’s
and 1930’s, when the stock market crash brought issues of welfare into a
49
Seetable1.3on“DatesofFirstStatutoryPrograms,”inRichardIton,Solidarity
Blues,p.9.
50
Ibid.,p,170.
51
DaleMaharidge,SomeplacelikeAmerica,p.41.
52
LeonFink,WorkersinHardTimes:ALongViewofEconomicCrisis(Urbana,
UniversityofIllinoisPress,2014),p.3.
53
Ibid.
54
LeonFink,WorkersinHardTimes,p.4.
27
national political discourse with shocking effect. No such day during the
seventies, not even Black Monday, could bring an urgent need to the
restructuring and de-stigmatizing of the welfare system to help the working
class. Including references to the welfare system in the tracks of The River is
emblematic of Springsteen’s economic realism in the album. Its fleeting
references make short comments about economic discussions that were very
much part of the national discourse. Yet, the importance of it was seemingly
ignored by leading policy makers.
28
3 “…Debts that No Honest Man Can Pay”: Winners and Losers–
1981 – 1982.
“[Nebraska] provides stark human testimony to the destruction of all forms
of communal, psychological, and political support for working people in
Ronald Reagan’s America… In the realm of popular art, to find blue-collar
men speaking in a blue-collar language about blue-collar concerns, you had to
go over to the turntable and put on a record by Springsteen”.1
-
Eric Alterman
“Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong
side of that line”.2
-
Bruce Springsteen.
In 1980, after huge job losses were being announced, John Baldwin, a fortyeight-year-old production worker at the Ford assembly plant in Mahwah,
New Jersey expressed the anxiety that he and the other workers at the plant
were experiencing. In short, Baldwin, a father of four children, stated that the
plants closing was “the kiss of death – boom”. 3 Baldwin captured the simple
reality of workers at the plant, it was their livelihood, their source of economic
1
EricAltermanquotedinAbbeSmith,“TheDignityandHumanityofSpringsteen’s
Criminals,”p.810.
2
BruceSpringsteen,‘AtlanticCity,’Nebraska(NewYork,ColumbiaRecords,1982).
3
RobertHanley,“EchoesfromDetroit:FordDecisiontoCloseNewJerseyAutoPlant
HasWideImpact,”TheMilwaukeeJournal(April201980),BusinessNews,Part9,
accessed14April,2016,
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19800420&id=_WUaAAAAIB
AJ&sjid=ACsEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6394,5765621&hl=en
29
stability and the means to support their families. Likewise, another worker
who was in the process of being laid off joined in the chorus of discontent
with Baldwin. The worker stated, “what can you say?... I’m 36. I’m a Vietnam
veteran… I got a wife and kid, and I don’t know where I’m gonna make
enough money to support them”.4 On the other hand, Ron Morianni, who was
an electrician at the time but who had family members that worked in the
auto industry was cynical about the American auto industry in general, “we
mass produced garbage,” he remarked.5 The closing of the plant left the soon
to be former workers, “worried about paying for mortgages, food and utility
bills as well as finding new work in depressed job markets near their homes”.6
Two years later, Springsteen would capture their economic reality and
frustrated anxiety.
Nebraska was released in 1982 as the national unemployment rate reached 11
percent and when “very little artistic attention was being paid to working
people”.78 The album is largely populated by criminals, some of whom are
suffering the economic plight of an elusive job market. Yet, Springsteen as a
writer never offers judgment on his protagonists, he rather “identifies with
[the] common criminal”.9 Nebraska was not only Springsteen’s darkest and
most painfully accurate album yet, but it captured the extreme consequences
of the effects of unemployment and mapped the cultivation of a gulf that was
4
Ibid.
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
JuneSkinnerSawyers,TougherThantheRest,p.79.
8
AbbeSmith,“TheDignityandHumanityofSpringsteen’sCriminals,”p.810.
9
Ibid.,789.
5
30
beginning to form between the wealthy and the struggling workers and the
poor. Springsteen notes that, at its thematic core, Nebraska was an album
about isolation. About isolation within individuals from “..their jobs, from
their friends, their fathers, their mothers, just not feeling connected to
anything that’s going on”.10
The closing of the plant in Mahwah would be immortalized in the following
lines:
Well, they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah, late that month.
Ralph went out looking for a job, but he couldn’t find none”.11
The “they” that Springsteen sang about in ‘Johnny 99’ is Ford, who owned the
assembly plant in Mahwah and Ralph is a character, albeit fictional, that
shares the same anger, frustration and disillusionment that John Baldwin
did. After losing his job at the Mahwah plant and his failed attempts to find
other employment, Ralph, in a drunken stupor from “mixing Tanqueray and
wine,” acquires a gun and shoots a night clerk.12 The dangerous combination
of unemployment and free access to firearms with alcohol in ‘Johnny 99’,
leads to “things… that cannot be undone”.13 The song deals largely with the
justifications that Ralph provides when in court, which are economical. The
justifications contrast to the protagonist of the Charles Starkwether-inspired
title track, in which the criminal notes his crimes are the product of the
“meanness in the world” or the narrator of ‘State Trooper’, who wanders the
10
Quotedin,JeffBurger,SpringsteenonSpringsteen,p.134.
BruceSpringsteen,‘Johnny99,’Nebraska(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,1982).
12
Ibid.
13
AbbeSmith,“TheDignityandHumanityofSpringsteen’sCriminals,”p.828.
11
31
New Jersey turnpike in a stolen car with no driving license or registration yet
who seems to have a “clear conscience for all the things that [he’s] done”.1415
Instead, Ralph, not economically prosperous enough for his own lawyer and
instead is provided with a public defender, states to the judge that he has
“debts that no honest man can pay”.16 This statement, which is a line repeated
throughout the album, demonstrates the effects of unemployment on Ralph;
the mounting debt of bills and a burdening mortgage have greatly influenced,
if not directly led him to commit the crime he has. Yet, like the other
criminals that appear in Nebraska, Ralph affirms that this simple economic
fact does not make him “innocent,” only remarking that “it was more than all
this that put this gun in my hand”.17 Ralph does not ask for forgiveness, but
rather only asks for recognition of the economic circumstances that led to the
crime.
Interestingly, in his account of economically displaced individuals in the early
eighties, Dale Maharidge met Jim Alexander, a former U.S Marine that served
in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in Houston, Texas in 1983. Frustrated
with the lack of a well-paid job and the means in which to support his family,
Alexander produced a gun before Maharidge and stated, “first, I’ll go hunting
for food. If that doesn’t work, I hit a 7-Eleven. I’ll hold up a store. I wont take
money. But I’ll take food. My kids wont starve”.18 Although coincidental, the
14
BruceSpringsteen,‘Nebraska,’Nebraska(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,1982).
BruceSpringsteen,‘StateTrooper,’Nebraska(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,
1982).
16
BruceSpringsteen,‘Johnny99,’(1982).
17
Ibid.
18
DaleMaharidge,SomeplacelikeAmerica,p.60-61.
15
32
story of Jim Alexander is a hauntingly similar tale to that of Springsteen’s
character of Ralph in ‘Johnny 99’, a year earlier. Both are displaced workers
at the the end of their tether and they find themselves forced into a criminal
situation. Thus, ‘Johnny 99’, offers a direct reflection of the economic reality
of the closed Mahwah plant in New Jersey, and attempts to humanely portray
the tragic decline in livelihood that occurs in unemployed workers such as
with John Baldwin and Jim Alexander.
The association of automobiles and the decline of the auto industry with
economic deprivation is also evident in ‘Used Cars’.19 The song is in some
way, another one of Springsteen’s ‘car’ songs, his tracks that make extensive
use of cars as symbolic of freedom and opportunity, as a means of escape. Yet,
in ‘Used Cars’, automobiles are symptomatic of poverty and humiliation, they
trap the family in the song rather than allow them to escape. The voice of the
track pins their hopes on winning the lottery and it being the day that he and
his family do not have to ride in “used cars” anymore.20 The song is somewhat
autobiographical as well, as Springsteen taps into his often painful memories
of his childhood poverty. Carlin writes that ‘Used Cars’ is a track in which
Springsteen uses “memories of accompanying his father on trips to an auto
dealership” which then “play as an exercise in humiliation”.21 Although used
as a metaphor for economic deprivation in ‘Used Cars’, the idea of second
hand cars is something very much real to the period of the early 1980’s. The
demand for American made cars and the national industry that they were
19
BruceSpringsteen,‘UsedCars,’Nebraska(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,1982).
Ibid.
21
PeterAmesCarlin,Bruce,p.292.
20
33
dependant on was very much on a downward slope in the early eighties.
Automobile sales declined from 15,423,158 in 1978 to 10,540,018 in 1982,
with foreign made cars rather than American made cars much more popular
with consumers during this period.22 Springsteen has noted that the
experience in ‘Used Cars’, like ‘Mansion on the Hill’ and ‘My Father’s House’,
was an attempt to write from a child’s perspective as “…these were all stories
that came directly out of my experience”.23 Therefore, the track is deeply
personal for Springsteen and based upon his past experiences as a child with
his working-class family, and it is also emblematic of the decline of the auto
industry of the present in which it was written. ‘Used Cars’, works effectively
as a metaphor for the decline of American made cars as it invokes the same
image of the Cadillac Ranch, previously industry-dominated vehicles that
over the course of half a decade became relics to the American past.
Nebraska is also a departure for Springsteen’s writing in terms of a sense of
place. A sense of place is crucial to Springsteen’s songs. Coleen Sheehy notes
that Springsteen’s home county of Monmouth in his music is “as rich a social
and cultural place as William Faulkner’s [fictional] Yoknapatawpha county in
Mississippi”.24 However, ‘Atlantic City’ marks a drastic change from the
depiction of the boardwalk of Asbury Park with its sandy beaches and
fireworks in his earlier tracks such as ‘4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy), into a
22
JohnB.Rae,TheAmericanAutomobileIndustry,seetable12-1,“Domesticand
ImportPassengerCarandTrickRetailSalesbyTypes,1978-1982,”p.151.
23
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinJeffBurger,SpringsteenonSpringsteen,p.xviii.
24
ColeenSheehy,quotedinBobCrane’sAPlacetoStand:AGuidetoBruce
Springsteen’sSenseofPlace,inRacingintheStreet:TheBruceSpringsteenReader,
editedbyJuneSkinnerSawyers,(NewYork:Penguin,2004),p.339.
34
depiction of metropolitan decay and unfulfilled urban redevelopment.25
Atlantic City had once been a famed seaside resort that attracted a great
number of vacationers and it was known for its beaches and its boardwalk,
but the city had been on an economic downturn since the years of the Great
Depression that was “representative of resort cycles in general”.26 The
attraction of the city was due no spike in popularity and by the early 1970’s,
when unemployment in the city was double that of Atlantic County,
vacationers were more inclined to chose more “exotic” locations to holiday in,
passing Atlantic City’s boardwalk by.27 Due to its declining fortunes and lack
of popularity with tourists, the city decided to remedy its problems by greatly
expanding the entertainment industry with the legalization of gambling in
1976.28 The first casinos and entertainment complexes were officially opened
two years later in May 1978, when Atlantic City stood close to the top of the
federal agency’s list of the worst places for murder, burglaries and muggings
in the nation.29 Nebraska was released four years later, as the cities promise
of redevelopment, economic regeneration and return to the heyday of the
early 20th century was unfulfilled. Although the city was the most visited city
in the entire U.S in 1981 and 1982, the entertainment industry claimed a
monopoly on the share of economic prosperity.30 The redevelopment
25
BruceSpringsteen,‘4thofJuly,AsburyPark(Sandy),’TheWild,theInnocent&the
EStreetShuffle(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,1973).
26
JosephRubenstein,“CasinoGamblinginAtlanticCity:IssuesofDevelopmentand
Redevelopment,”TheAnnalsoftheAmericanAcademyofPoliticalandSocial
Science,Vol.474,Gambling:ViewsfromtheSocialSciences(July1984),p.61.
27
Ibid.,62.
28
Ibid.,p.61.
29
BryantSimon,BoardwalkofDreams:AtlanticCityandtheFateofUrbanAmerica,
(NewYork:OxfordUniversityPress,2006),pp.6-12.
30
JosephRubenstein,“CasinoGamblinginAtlanticCity:IssuesofDevelopmentand
Redevelopment,”p.65.
35
proposed by the city was overwhelmingly distributed to the creation of the
entertainment industry and the local economy of restaurants, clothing stores
and hotels fell by the wayside.31 As Rubenstein notes, “casino gambling was
supposed to revitalize Atlantic City and generate jobs and revenue for New
Jersey. While the casinos have become successful, and jobs and revenue have
been created, the revitalisation of Atlantic City beyond the boardwalk remains
to be achieved”.32
The couple at the centre of the narrative in Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City’, find
themselves caught in hard times and hope for renewal just like the city did.
The narrator states that he attempted to save the money that he made at his
job yet he has “debts that no honest man can pay,” echoing Ralph’s statement
in ‘Johnny 99’.33 The couple use all the money they have to buy tickets on a
cross-country bus in the hopes of reaching the shore of Atlantic City, “where
the sand’s turnin’ to gold,” in the hope that the city brings them a greater
fortune then what they currently have.34 Although the narrator sings that the
couple’s “luck may have died and our love may be cold,” he is still ardently
committed to his lover, telling her that “with you forever I’ll stay”.35 Yet, when
the couple make it to Atlantic City, the narrator still struggles to find
employment and states “down here it’s just winners and losers”.36 The central
31
Ibid.,pp.68-69.
Ibid.,61.
33
BruceSpringsteen,‘AtlanticCity,’Nebraska(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,1982).
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
32
36
hook of the track demonstrates the remaining hope that the narrator holds as
the couple’s economic depression sets in:
“Everything dies baby, that’s a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back”.37
Its oxymoronic quality is tragic in the sense that the narrator still believes the
things that die will come back, while simultaneously recognising the fallacy of
this belief. In his portrait of Atlantic City’s decline, Simon writes that when
Springsteen fans were waiting in line for performance of his at the newly
refurbished Boardwalk Hall in 2003, they were directly across from the
construction site of a proposed new Donald Trump owned casino, the
Borgata.38 He notes that even over two decades after Nebraska’s release,
many of the people in the line were “probably convinced that the city, will,
someday, come back,” tying together the individuals waiting in line with the
couple in Springsteen’s narrative, both united through an unrealized idea of
Atlantic City’s rebirth.39
As mentioned earlier, Springsteen sought to write from a personal, child’s
perspective in Nebraska. ‘Mansion on a Hill’ was one of the tracks with this
method in mind, and although it is a seemingly personal reflection of an
adolescent drive through his old neighbourhood in Freehold, it acts as a
metaphor for the gulf between rich and poor in the U.S at the time.
Springsteen recalls that during the period after The River he contemplated
his earlier life as he grew older into his thirties and he notes that something
37
Ibid.
BryantSimon,BoardwalkofDreams,p.218.
39
Ibid.
38
37
“turned me back around toward my early childhood”.40 After The River tour,
Springsteen began to take time alone to drive around, to observe the social
conditions around him and to contemplate the emotional realities of his own
personal experiences.41 Springsteen also began to take nightly drives to
Freehold and observed the empty space on Randolph Street where the house
that he lived in with his grandparents during his youth would have been.42
Thus, this leads Bob Crane to conclude that ‘Mansion on the Hill’ can be
typified as a narrated “late night drive through the social-economic strata of
Freehold”.43 Wages for service sector workers grew higher in comparison to
the wages of low-level, working-class individuals during this time and there is
also evidence of increasing segregation in neighbourhoods along class lines.44
As Robert D. Putnam notes, from 1970 “more and more families [lived] either
in uniformly affluent neighbourhoods or in uniformly poor neighbourhoods”
as families were grouped together based upon social class.45 Thus, this leads
‘Mansion on the Hill’ to create a geographical dichotomy based upon class.
The mansion on the edge of town is a place “risin’ above the factories and the
fields,” and the road that leads up to the mansion is surrounded by gates of
40
Quotedin,PeterAmesCarlin,Bruce,p.291.
MikalGilmore,“BruceSpringsteen’sAmerica,”fromNightBeat:AShadowHistory
ofRock&Roll,inRacingintheStreet:TheBruceSpringsteenReader,editedbyJune
SkinnerSawyers,p.270.
42
Ibid.
43
BobCrane,APlacetoStand:AGuidetoBruceSpringsteen’sSenseofPlace,in
RacingintheStreet:TheBruceSpringsteenReader,editedbyJuneSkinnerSawyers,
p.341.
44
JohnEhrman,TheEighties:AmericaintheAgeofReagan(NewHaven:Yale
UniversityPress,2005),p.65.
45
RobertD.Putnam,OurKids(NewYork:Simon&Schuster,2015),pp.37-38.
41
38
“hardened steel”.46 The mansion is clearly isolated from the town below it.
The gates of “hardened steel” that Springsteen refers to in the track are,
according to Garman, symbolic of the steel mill workers that would have
made them and emphasizes the place of the workers in their own community
as they pass them on the drive home from work.47 In the summer, the
narrator and his sister would hide in the corn fields and listen to the music
and lights of the mansion on the hill, a lack of access evident to both of them,
the party not available to everyone.48 Thus, the actual mansion in ‘Mansion
on the Hill’, is a metaphorical representation of the economic reality of
geographical sectors that the working-class were excluded from. Like the “no
trespassing sign” found by the narrator of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your
Land’ in one of its more political and often omitted verses, or the sign with
the same words upon it on the gates of Charles Foster Kane’s mansion in
Citizen Kane, the closed gates of the mansion are self-explanatory. 4950 It is
very much a parable of this-is-us and that-is-you.
46
BruceSpringsteen,‘MansionontheHill,’Nebraska(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,
1982).
47
BryanKGarman,“TheGhostofHistory:BruceSpringsteen,WoodyGuthrie,and
theHurtSong,”inJuneSkinnerSawyersRacingintheStreet:TheBruceSpringsteen
Reader,p.227.
48
Ibid.
49
WoodyGuthrie,‘ThisLandisYourLand,’(BMI:1956),seelyricsat,
http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm
50
CitizenKane,directedbyOrsonWelles(NewYork:RKOPictures,1941).
39
4 “This Hard Land”: The Reality of Vietnam, Ronald Reagan and
the Tale of Two Americas – 1983-1984.
“There’s something really dangerous happening to us out there. We’re slowly
getting split up into two different Americas. Things are getting taken away
from people that need them and given to people that don’t need ‘em”.1
-
Bruce Springsteen.
“…Together with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now
confront us. And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans”.2
-
Ronald Reagan.
Born in the USA is largely a synthesis of the thematic connections in
Springsteen’s albums explored thus far. The theme of work and
unemployment is present in ‘Downbound Train’, Springsteen explores the
cynical view of the romanticized past in ‘Glory Days’, and there is semiautobiographical social commentary on community decline, urban decay and
racial tensions in ‘My Hometown’. But the albums release and popularity
within the context of the political trajectory of Ronald Reagan forced the
album to function as much more.
1
BruceSpringsteen,quotedinRichardIton,SolidarityBlues,p.221-222.
RonaldReagan,"InauguralAddress,"January20,1981.OnlinebyGerhardPeters
andJohnT.Woolley,TheAmericanPresidencyProject.Link:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43130.
2
40
There were two types of America that were apparent to Springsteen during
the time of its recording; a nation in which the working-class were still
struggling to survive and the mythic America invoked by Ronald Reagan
when campaigning towards his victories over his political opponents.
According to Cowie, Reagan’s New Right “offered a restoration of the glory
days by bolstering morale on the basis of patriotism, god, race, patriarchy and
nostalgia for community”.3 Reagan’s political idealism leads the narrator of
the title track of Born in the USA into a deep longing to “…strip away that
mythic America which was Reagan’s image of America”.4 Set against the
backdrop of a post-Vietnam national homecoming, Born in the USA arguably
attempts to offer an antithetical version of America to Reagans. The title
track, with its bitter verses and cynical, seemingly ambiguous chorus would
become arguably one of the most misinterpreted songs in the history of rock
and roll and mainstream popular music as a whole, as Cowie questions the
track as, “part of a patriotic revival or a tale of working class betrayal? A
symptom of Reagan’s America or the antidote to it?”5 The popularity of Born
in the USA made Bruce Springsteen a household name worldwide and
became one of the best-selling albums in American history.6 This attention
made Springsteen the household name of popular culture as another man
became the household name of American and global politics. Ronald Reagan,
coming to the end of his first term as President of the United States,
3
JeffersonCowie,Stayin’Alive,p.16.
BruceSpringsteenquotedinJeffersonCowie,Stayin’Alive,p.360.
5
JeffersonCowie,Stayin’Alive,p.358.
6
SeealbumfiguresforBornintheUSAat:http://www.riaa.com/goldplatinum/?tab_active=defaultaward&ar=BRUCE+SPRINGSTEEN&ti=BORN+IN+THE+U.S.A.
4
41
campaigned for re-election during the release of the album. Born in the USA
would become the soundtrack the people left in the margins of Reagan’s
utopian vision of America.
‘‘Born in the USA’ is of course not the only facet of American popular culture
to engage with the fallout of Vietnam. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter,
released not long after Darkness, explores the effects of returning home from
the jungles on a microscopic level, through the lens of a small working-class
town in Pennsylvania, populated by characters who work at its steel mill.7
Cullen notes that this certain depiction of Vietnam in late 1970’s cinema is
emblematic of the “noble grunt” narrative, portraying Vietnam not so much
as a fight between combatants but as an “inner civil war”. 8 The difference in
Springsteen’s track is that it does not deal with coming to terms with the
political failure of Vietnam and the human casualties lost in the jungles, but it
deals with the human consequences at home on a domestic level.
The protagonist of ‘Born in the USA’ is instantly established as an
impoverished individual, they are “born in a dead mans town,” who’s entry
into combat in Vietnam is precipitated by a “hometown jam,” an act of
wrongdoing at home.9 The major problems that the protagonist has to
confront happen when they return home to their job at the refinery only to
find that there is no need for his labour anymore. The character’s contact at
7
TheDeerHunter,directedbyMichaelCimino(California:UniversalPictures,1978).
JimCullen,BornintheUSA:BruceSpringsteenandtheRepublicTradition,pp.8186.
9
BruceSpringsteen,‘BornintheUSA’,BornintheUSA,(NewYork:Columbia
Records:1984).
8
42
the Veterans Administration also offers him no economic opportunity and
only tells him “son, don’t you understand?”10 These problems and the
displacement of the worker upon his arrival leads to the creation of a central
image in the final verse, of the penitentiary and the refinery. The protagonist
has “nowhere to run, nowhere to go,” and like the characters that populate
Nebraska the spectre of prison and crime, hangs over them as it is, ironically,
the only institution that the protagonist feels included within.11 Outtakes
from Born in the USA such as ‘Shut Out the Light’ powerfully considers PostTraumatic-Stress Disorder alongside the same theme of finding
unemployment when returning from combat. ‘Shut Out the Light’ developed
from the opening verses of a track Springsteen had written named ‘Vietnam
Blues’, the fragments of that track became ‘Born in the USA’ and ‘Shut Out
the Light’, the latter track serving as the flipside to the full band version of the
Vietnam experience.12 The narrator returns from Vietnam and immediately
takes a taxi to the local bar, to hide in a dark corner.13 He returns to a woman
only to find himself awake at 4am and unable to move his hands.14 He then
pleads to his mother to “shut out the light,” as it makes him sick.15 Both
tracks, formed from one singular idea portray the distorted sense of place and
meaning of returning Vietnam veterans, which was mostly economical.
10
Ibid.
Ibid.
12
ClintonHeylin,EStreetShuffle,p.335.
13
BruceSpringsteen,‘ShutOuttheLight,’Tracks(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,
1998.)
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
11
43
Springsteen’s version of Vietnam and the fallout is particularly engaging
because it is a similar situation to many real-life veterans during the 1980’s.
The title track for example is inspired by the experience of Vietnam veteran
Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July, whom Springsteen met in
1978 in Arizona.16 Kovic subsequently brought Springsteen to a veteran centre
where he met Vietnam veterans such as Bobby Muller who established
Vietnam Veterans of America and Springsteen notes, “I was moved a lot by
the veterans I’d met”.1718 Springsteen accompanied Kovic to a screening of
The Deer Hunter and observed how Kovic watched the film and looked for
something that reflected his own experience of the war, and this is how the
idea for ‘Born in the USA’ was formed.19 Thus, Vietnam clearly had a
profound effect on Springsteen during the writing for Born in the USA,
particularly on a domestic front and the Vietnam tracks capture his intention
to record the economic circumstances of veterans post-Vietnam.
When campaigning for re-election in 1984, Reagan attempted to translate
Springsteen’s track into a superficial cry for national patriotism. When
Springsteen refused to let Reagan adopt the song, the president invoked
Springsteen nevertheless at a campaign stop in New Jersey. Reagan stated,
“America’s future rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many
young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping
16
WillPercy,TalkAboutaDream,editedbyChristopherPhillips&LouisP.Masur,
pp.219-220.
17
Ibid.,p.220.
18
PhilSutcliffe,TalkAboutaDream,editedbyChristopherPhillips&LouisP.Masur,
p.309.
19
ClintonHeylin,EStreetShuffle,pp.289-290.
44
you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about”.20
Reagan had invoked the idea of dreams coming true in 1984, but the idealised
version of nationalism he invoked was much different to the reality. With a
favoured de-centralisation and federal deregulation21 famed by statements
such as “in the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem”22, Reagan’s domestic policies undermined
“economic restructure and urban renewal”.23 His political ideology lacked the
imperative for federal subsidies in order to confront problems of social and
economic deprivation24 and eliminated such programs as the fairness
doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission which required air time
for political dissenting views, undermining cultural and social freedom of
speech25. Furthermore, his dismissal of the striking workers of PATCO
devastated the effectiveness of organised strikes and union power.26 Also,
income inequality grew substantially during the era of Reagan and Born in
the USA. The nation was quickly becoming a kind of two Americas that was
invoked by Springsteen during his speech to an audience in Pittsburgh.
Robert Putnam writes that between 1910 and 1970, income equality became
relatively stable as the structure of New Deal programs and the influence of
two World Wars kept poverty rates down, and incomes steadily increasing.27
20
RonaldReagan,quotedinBryanK.Garman,ARaceofSingers(London:The
UniversityofNorthCarolinaPress,2000),p.213.
21
RobertM.Collins,TransformingAmerica:PoliticsandCultureDuringtheReagan
Years(NewYork:ColumbiaUniversityPress,2006),p.68.
22
RonaldReaganquotedinDaleMaharidge,SomeplacelikeAmerica,p.30.
23
AnnePoweretal,PhoenixCities,p.306.
24
Ibid.
25
HowardZinn,APeople’sHistoryoftheUnitedStates,p.564.
26
KrisPaap,WorkingConstruction,p.35.
27
RobertD.Putnam,OurKids,p.34.
45
However, the upward trends of income equality began to reverse during the
early 1970’s and by the 1980’s, the top rate of income began to pull away
sharply from the rest and grow exponentially relative to the lower rates.28
With regards to labour, according to the Economic Policy Institute, on an
average CEO’s were being paid 35 times the amount an average worker was
making.29 Springsteen notes, not a great number of public figures were
discussing economic inequality during this era. “No one was listening,” he
states.30
The working-class were hit particularly hard during the Reagan
administration due to the the increasing demand in the job market for
individuals with “well-developed intellectual and interpersonal skills” that
were needed in many jobs in the service and information sectors as factory
and production industry work fell.31 Factory workers were thus displaced
from the job market of the early to mid 1980’s as they failed to meet the
demands of an economy based upon skilled experience.32 The failure of the
Reagan administration to combat this increasing inequality is arguably why
the characters that populate Born in the USA work mainly state or county
jobs, rejecting federal governmental work. The narrator of ‘Darlington
County’ has a “union connection” with his friend’s uncle, looking for work on
28
Ibid.,p.35.
DaleMaharidge,SomeplacelikeAmerica,p.31.
30
FiachraGibbons,“BruceSpringsteen:WhatwasDonetomyCountrywasUnAmerican,”TheGuardian(17February,2012),accessed24April,2016,
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/feb/17/bruce-springsteen-wrecking-ball
31
JohnEhrman,TheEighties:AmericaintheAgeofReagan,p.65.
32
Ibid.,p.66.
29
46
the county line.33 In comparison, the narrator of ‘Working on the Highway’
also works for the county and meets his companion in the “union hall”.34 The
characters that populate the album are not the workers of the service sectors
that were rapidly growing during Reagan’s presidency. There is certainly
evidence to suggest that the gap between the working class and individuals
with higher levels of income was beginning to drastically increase during the
release of Born in the USA. However, Springsteen refrained from involving
himself in mainstream political discourse. He let his music speak for him, as
he often did in the years before 1984.
As Springsteen saw the divide of two Americas, he responded not by directly
engaging in politics but by through his own job - music. A rejection of Ronald
Reagan’s version of America arguably led Springsteen to craft his own
utopian vision of the country he lived in, an idealised view of economic reality
that Springsteen wrote as antithetical to the post-industrialised and
globalised world that was increasingly dominated by neo-liberalism.
Springsteen notes that during the era of Born in the USA, “republicans at that
time co-opted anything that was American. And my music has been American
music,” and thus, he attempted to create in his music another image of
America. Written in 1984, during the sessions for Born in the USA, ‘This Hard
Land’, is a story of friendship and family, the renewal of hope and the
continuance of community in an agrarian, idealised socio-economic
33
BruceSpringsteen,‘DarlingtonCounty,’BornintheUSA(NewYork:Columbia
Records,1984).
34
BruceSpringsteen,‘WorkingontheHighway,’BornintheUSA(NewYork:
ColumbiaRecords,1984).
47
environment. At first, the narrator questions what has happened to the “seeds
I’ve sown” and why they have never grown, why his economic fortune has not
been realized.35 But, there is hope again as the narrator recognises ‘Home on
the Range’ on a tape deck, music once again is the promise of hope. The
narrator implores his friend, Frank, to meet him at “Liberty Hall,” as they
“sleep out in the fields,” the rivers and they will formulate a plan when they
wake.36 The narrator states to “stay hungry, stay alive if you can and meet me
in a dream of this hard land”.37 Springsteen’s track, with the context of his
idea of “two Americas,” serves as a statement of hope to the people of the
country he makes music in - to stay alive in tough economic times, and if the
people can not do this, to share the dream that the characters of his songs
populate.
35
BruceSpringsteen,‘ThisHardLand,’Tracks(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,1998).
Ibid.
37
Ibid.
36
48
Conclusion: “We Need You”.
“They need you for their lives. That’s your thing”.1
-
Steven Van Zandt to Bruce Springsteen.
As his career progressed, Springsteen’s music has shown to exist within a
community that look towards him for an artistic expression of their often
complicated and problematic lives. An anecdote now entwined in the wider
lore of Bruce Springsteen’s cultural impact is included in many post-9/11
sources on the artist. The story unfolds that in the aftermath of 9/11,
Springsteen pulled out of a parking lot in New Jersey when a nearby resident
stopped him, rolled down his car window and stated to Springsteen, “we need
you now”.2 The story demonstrates the linkage of Springsteen to a community
of people in which his songs realistically demonstrate their socio-economic
standing. Not just a community of people in his home county of Monmouth
County, New Jersey, that suffered a heavy loss after the attacks of 9/11, but
the wider community of the United States.3 As this dissertation has
presented, the humanistic relevance and emotional resonance of Bruce’s
Springsteen’s music connects to a wide audience in a way that simple
academic study cannot.
1
StevenVanZandt,quotedinDavidRemnick,“WeareAlive”,(July30,2012).
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/07/30/we-are-alive
2
MarkHagen,“MeettheNewBoss,”TheGuardian(18January,2009),accessed20
April,2016,http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/jan/18/bruce-springsteeninterview
3
JimCullen,BornintheUSA,p.193.
49
Springsteen’s music, grounded in economic realism, is painfully relevant
today as it was during the decline of industry and Reaganomics. Springsteen,
looking retrospectively at the albums he created during the early 1980’s such
as The River, recalled that “…from Darkness on the Edge of Town to The
Ghost of Tom Joad… It all came out of the Carter recession of the late
seventies”.4 For example, the town of Lorain, Ohio was experiencing job
losses at its steel plants in 2015 just as other towns across the state did 30
years earlier.5 ‘Death to my Hometown’, from Wrecking Ball invokes the
same civic decline as ‘Atlantic City’ did in the early eighties, and ‘Easy Money’
deals with income inequality and the inherent negligence of social structures
such as banking as Born in the USA did in 1984.67
Specifically, the idea of a struggling class of people is much relevant today as
it was to Springsteen during his upbringing and developing career. David K.
Shipler’s book on the “working poor” in America documents the many men
and women, of all ethnicities and backgrounds, who paradoxically work yet
are poor. Shipler notes how the working poor of America do not have the
“luxury of rage” - in that they are bound by work without a way for self-
4
JonStewart,“BruceSpringsteen’sStateoftheUnion,”RollingStone,(March29th,
2012),accessed9April,2016,link:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bruce-springsteens-state-of-the-union20120329
5
KevinMartinez,“USSteeltoClosePlantinLorain,OhioandLayOff756Workers,”
WorldSocialistWebSite(7January,2015),accessed26April,2016,
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/07/stee-j07.html
6
BruceSpringsteen,‘DeathtomyHometown,’WreckingBall(NewYork:Columbia
Records,2012).
7
BruceSpringsteen,‘EasyMoney,’WreckingBall(NewYork:ColumbiaRecords,
2012).
50
expression that will turn into self-empowerment and self-betterment.8 Bruce
Springsteen’s commercial and critical success and the adoration from fans
that he holds dear has allowed him just that: the luxury of rage. As the
following chapters have discussed, over the course of his career, Springsteen
has given a voice to the working people of America, real and imaginative
characters that often blur the line between reality and imagination.
Ultimately, it is a cultural voice that warrants study as much as academic
works on the decline of the working class does, as it promotes the
investigation of real economic circumstances.
In conclusion, George Packer writes that when factories have collapsed,
home-owners have fled and communities have unravelled, it is the voices of
the people that remain within these structures, real and imagined.9 Bruce
Springsteen’s voice of economic realism is contained within them, forming an
important cultural element of academic study that attempts to understand the
decline of the working class. It is a voice that echoes from town to town,
factory wall to factory wall, and into the hearts and minds of those affected by
the loss and the ache of economic catastrophe.
8
DavidK.Shipler,TheWorkingPoor:InvisibleinAmerica(NewYork:RandomHouse,
2005),p.ix.
9
GeorgePacker,TheUnwinding,p.1.
51
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E Street Shuffle. New York: Columbia Records, 1973.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Atlantic City’. Nebraska. New York: Columbia Records,
1982.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Born in the USA’. Born in the USA. New York: Columbia
Records, 1984.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Cadillac Ranch’. The River. New York: Columbia
Records, 1980.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Darlington County’. Born in the USA. New York:
Columbia Records, 1984.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Death to my Hometown’. Wrecking Ball. New York:
Columbia Records, 2012.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Factory’. Darkness on the Edge of Town. New York:
Columbia Records, 1978.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Easy Money’. Wrecking Ball. New York: Columbia
Records, 2012.
Bruce Springsteen. ‘Held up Without a Gun’. The Ties That Band: The River
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Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Johnny 99’. Nebraska. New York: Columbia Records,
1982.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Mansion on the Hill’. Nebraska. New York: Columbia
Records, 1982.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Point Blank’. The River. New York: Columbia Records,
1982.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘The Promised Land’. Darkness on the Edge of Town.
New York: Columbia Records, 1978.
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Springsteen, Bruce. ‘The River’. The River. New York: Columbia Records,
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Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Roulette’. The Ties That Band: The River Collection.
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Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Sherry Darling’. The River. New York: Columbia
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Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Shut Out the Light’. Tracks. New York: Columbia
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Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Something in the Night’. Darkness on the Edge of Town.
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Springsteen, Bruce. ‘State Trooper’. Nebraska. New York: Columbia Records,
1982.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘This Hard Land’. Tracks. New York: Columbia Records,
1998.
Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Used Cars’. Nebraska. New York: Columbia Records,
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Springsteen, Bruce. ‘Working on the Highway’. Born in the USA. New York:
Columbia Records, 1984.
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Allen, Stephen G. “Why Construction Industry Productivity is Declining”. The
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Ames, Peter Carlin. Bruce. London: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Beviglia, Jim. Counting Down Bruce Springsteen: His 100 Finest Songs
(Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). P.
Burger, Jeff. Springsteen on Springsteen. London: Omnibus Press, 2013.
Cimino, Michael (dir.) The Deer Hunter. California: Universal Pictures, 1978.
Collins, Robert M. Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the
Reagan Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin’ Alive. London: New Press, 2010.
Crane, Bob. A Place to Stand: A Guide to Bruce Springsteen’s Sense of Place,
in Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader. Edited by June
Skinner Sawyers. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Cullen, Jim. Born in the U.S.A: Bruce Springsteen and the American
Tradition. Connecticut: Wesleyan University, 1997.
DeMasters, Karen. “On the Map; A Factory that Wove Rugs and Bound a
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