40 years ago this November, as winter assembled its dark materials, I was collecting unemployment, having been fired from my job at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois—because I wasn’t “a joiner,” according to the chair of my department, which consisted of her and me. (I refused to show up during winter break for faculty workshops because I had planned a research trip to D.C.).**
So there I was in the kitchen trying to convince myself to keep “revising the dissertation for publication,” as ABDs are obliged to say, with no job prospects and no applications out because the shits at NCC waited until April to tell me I wouldn’t be interviewed for the tenure-line position, after all, not after my one-year trial. (My replacement was David Blight, bless his heart, who eventually made it all the way to Yale.)
I was depressed as hell, as you might imagine. Why write about the fucking Federal Reserve? Who cared? What were the occupational possibilities or alternatives for a guy with a PhD in History from Northern Illinois University? Librarian/Archivist? Bartender? Free-lance writer, OK, but of what? My stint as the editorial writer for In These Times (replacing Martin Sklar) had lasted all of a month because Jimmy Weinstein, the publisher, had rewritten one of my gems, whereupon I quit. Where to send whatever I ended up writing, free lance? I had no clue.
The one thing I did want to do was play the guitar with my brother, home from Germany and living a mile away on Halsted Street, or just listen to the music he’d share with me. Depression will do that to you, make you more penetrable by every sound, to the point where you hear a serious accusation in a stranger’s whisper, or a genuine celebration in a saccharine song. In that state, music makes you want to cry, or laugh, or sing and dance, you can’t help yourself anymore because you spend most of your time beside your self, listening to the new voices now resident in your head.
I was a new model fan of Springsteen, having seen him in concert at The Horizon in Rosemont (courtesy of Weinstein) and read Dave Marsh’s bio. So one morning I tried to rouse myself by putting on the new LP, “Nebraska,” and listening to what Bruce had to say. But first, I asked, what’s with the album cover, the hood of a car pointed down a dark and lonesome highway under crowded grey skies? Looking pretty bleak from here, Boss Man, nothing like that concert I saw, which was—what?—as “uplifting” an experience as I’d ever had, something like a gospel show under a circus-size tent.
I turned my attention to the miserable task at hand, “revising the dissertation for publication,” not yet hearing Springsteen’s words, just letting the sounds seep in as I started writing. I was working on chapter 3.
The music sounded familiar, somehow, maybe because it was so bare-bones, even raw, sounding not much different than two acoustic guitars and two voices, like my brother and me when we got going after a few beers and a lot of cigarettes. But no, the familiarity came from another, earlier place in my sonic memory, the place where a congregation gathered and solemn hymns got sung and frail men in robes spoke of God.
“Nebraska” is a prayer offered by a cast of characters right out of Winesburg, Ohio, except all the speakers save one—and he’s a state trooper from a small town in Michigan County, Ohio—are from New Jersey, quite possibly Freehold, the Boss’s hometown. There are 10 songs, six of them sung by losers on their way to Hell, three by supplicants stuck in a dreamworld of fathers and sons on their way, they hope, to Heaven. “Johnny 99,” the ballad of a restless punk laid off from the auto plant in Mahwah—he’s got “debts no honest man could pay”—is the only song voiced in the third person, but he sounds like the guy who calls his girl and sings “meet me tonight in Atlantic City,” where he’s planning to get out from under the same load of debt by robbing a casino (or is it a smaller heist?).
There are other uncanny lyrical overlaps between songs and characters. Johnny 99, who killed a convenience store clerk and got cuffed by an off-duty policeman, could be the man named by Mary Lou as the one she’s waiting for in “Reason to Believe,” the last cut on the album. He also might be the guy with criminal plans in “Atlantic City.” And he could very well be the man driving the NJ Turnpike in “State Trooper,” who sings “deliver me from nowhere” just like the gearhead with the “hazy mind” in “Open All Night,” who complains likewise about his jammed-up car radio.
The overlapping references reach to previous albums and songs, too, with mentions of darkness at the edge of town, the baptismal river, and those Badlands, the imaginary landscape where Springsteen goes when he’s in search of a dead man’s voice or a new reason to believe in living. But the characters that seem to mingle in “Nebraska” aren’t interchangeable parts. They appear at different times and places along the Turnpike—or some other dark highway—and the music changes their meanings: ”State Trooper” is a stripped down bass line, “Open All Night” is full-bore Chuck Berry, and the voices you hear on “Mansion on the Hill,” “Used Cars,” and “My Father’s House” are hushed and afraid, making the sounds of children who are looking up to adults or at places in time and space (say, Heaven) they’ll never inhabit.
It’s not an album “about” God, exactly, because there is nothing to be known of what is unspeakable. It is nonetheless a form of worship—a disciplined meditation on the “unknowability of God,” as Springsteen has put it in interviews about other music he’s made, or in other prosaic venues, as if for all these years he’s been channeling William James, the philosopher who insisted that “God may be called the normal object of the mind’s belief.” Or, what is the same thing, closely reading Flannery O’Connor.
Every character in the cast of “Nebraska” is somehow on the road to perdition or redemption, stretched one way or another “across this dark highway where our sins lie un-atoned.” That’s the last line of “My Father’s House,” whose narrator recalls the bright shining “Mansion on the Hill,” but finds no one home: the chained steel gates of Heaven have opened onto emptiness. You hear children’s voices in those two songs, and in “Used Cars.” From his father’s car below, the kid watches the mansion that rises above the mill, or from the backseat he notices the car salesman staring at his father’s gnarled hands on the wheel, or from the front door of his deserted father’s house he looks down the hill to see the Devil himself. “In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” Jesus is said to have said. “If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” (John 14:2) He speaks of his ascension unto Heaven, where he will sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, come to judge the quick and the dead, having died—having sacrificed himself—for our sins.
The children who populate these three songs aren’t so sure that the place up above is still open for business: it seems that Jacob’s Ladder to Heaven has been pulled up, leaving only bootstraps behind. So their voices are weary, bewildered, even despairing, as passive as the “I” in dreams. (I’m paraphrasing W. H. Auden on Poe’s ghostly characters.) But the adults who tell the other stories on the album have grown up to believe in a different kind of salvation, the kind that doesn’t require a departure from this earth, this ugly here and now, and indeed requires first-hand knowledge of its cruelties and violence.
The scenes set by the adults are moments on a horizontal plane—they’re not looking up, at grown-ups or loftier destinations than Atlantic City, and they’ve got nobody to look down on. In this sense, they’re on the road with Walt Whitman, the “ideal tramp” according to William James, the poet summoned by Ralph Waldo Emerson in these prophetic words: “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the Middle Age; then in Calvinism.”
Whitman’s tyrannous eye delighted in the barbarism and materialism of his times, and there were no guard rails on the open roads he travelled. “Here the profound lesson of reception,” he announced, “neither preference or denial.” As James said, Whitman “abolishes the usual human distinctions,” like those between God and Man, men and women, subject and object, slave and freeman, heaven and earth, even good and bad, sometimes to the point of “indiscriminate hurrahing for the universe.”
Here’s how old Walt explained himself in Leaves of Grass:
“And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,/For I who am curious about each am not curious about God . . . /I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least . . . /Why should I wish to see God better than this day?”
The adults in “Nebraska” are on some road or highway, but it’s never as open as the one Whitman travels, and they remain curious about God because they know that judgement day is upon them. And yet they will neither look up, toward Heaven, nor give up on the possibility of redemption. They’re waiting patiently on something, but it’s not the life hereafter, and they have no fear of Hell. For them, it seems, the eternal return isn’t a myth, it’s just a fact of life. “Everybody dies, baby, that’s a fact,” says the guy on the Turnpike headed for Atlantic City—is he Johnny 99, and/or the men with the same jammed-up radio?—and answers himself with a shrug: “Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”
Again, the adult episodes in this moving aural picture are plotted along a horizontal axis, never as points on the vertical axis that connects heaven and earth. God is a presence in their songs, but he’s not a ghostly, celestial being who reigns from on high. He’s more watchman than regulator, more a jury of their peers than a judge passing sentence on them (Old Judge Brown gives Johnny the perp 99 years of prison time, but no one thinks he’s dispensing justice).
The last song, “Reason to Believe,” follows the dream-like dirge, “My Father’s House,” which announces that deus is absconditus—”no one by that name lives here anymore.” There’s a congregation gathering down by the river where the baby will be washed in the water, cleansed of its sins by baptism; there’s a man poking a dead dog with a stick over on Highway 31; and there’s Mary Lou, still waiting for Johnny to come home. The singer asks, “Lord, tell us, what does it mean?” He’s got no answer. There isn’t one, not from anywhere, except this: “At the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe.”
No matter how pentecostal he gets in concert these days, The Boss stays with Whitman in the here and now, on the road that leads from the depths of depression and despair into the spiritual daylight of the present. Even in “The Rising,” the post-9//11 album that sounds like a hymnal celebrating the resurrection of a city put to death by religion, he hedges his bet on the knowability of God and the appeal of His Heaven. Sure, the chorus of the signature song—the one Johnny Cash covered as he lay dying—starts with, “One sunny morning, we’ll rise, I know.” But it and the refrain that completes every verse ends like this: “And I’ll meet you farther on up the road.”
“I got a dead man’s suit, smiling skull ring,/Lucky graveyard boots, got a song to sing,/I got a song to sing, keep me outta the cold,/And I’ll meet you farther on up the road.”
__________
**My girlfriend insists I wasn’t fired from North Central, but rather was “not renewed”—I hadn’t been promised the tenure-line job, after all, I was just an adjunct placeholder for a year. This is true, but the authorities had, in fact, assured me (1) that I had the inside track on the permanent position, and (2) that they would interview me for this position. My replacement was teaching in a Wisconsin high school when he was hired, and he was by all accounts “a joiner.” The year (1981) I took this ill-fated job, I had two on-campus interviews, one at Princeton, the other at North Central. I thought I got the job at Princeton because I was the only candidate the department brought to campus, and the interview, though grueling, went well. At any rate Stan Katz, the chair of the search committee, was extremely confident as he put me on the plane at Teterboro. As it turned out, I didn’t convince the prospective colleagues that I was an economic historian—they pegged me for an intellectual historian (and they were right). I had argued with them, of course, saying that you can’t treat the economy as an externality, a self-regulating mechanism impervious to thought, because to do so is to reproduce and reify the outlook of Manchester School liberalism (now a.k.a. neoliberalism). But no matter. I mention this on-campus episode because the person who conducted my exit interview at North Central, the chair of the Religious Studies department, exclaimed at one point, “Jim, you have to understand why we didn’t interview you for the tenure-line job. You have to understand what league you’re in here! My gosh, we got applications from as far away as Kentucky!”
Great writing. I will go back and listen harder.
wonderful