If there's one record that people like to discuss, that's it Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen. And so it makes sense that this is still being discussed, in 2025. Springsteen – Free me from nothinga didn't make a splash at the box office and grossed $16.1 million in its opening weekend. It might seem like a stratospheric sum, except that this film about an album recorded on a $400 cassette recorder was made on a budget of $55 million. As if that weren't enough, the reviews are mixed. In the meantime Electric Nebraska gave fans a new perspective on the 1982 acoustic album and what it could have been if only Springsteen had recorded and released it with the accompaniment of the E Street Band.
A bit like what happened Kid A by Radiohead, who made a similar move 18 years later, on Nebraska it was always fun to argue, whether you loved it or hated it. In the funniest scene of the film, Jimmy Iovine is on the phone with manager Jon Landau and yells at him about how absurd the record is (Iovine plays himself, which is brilliant). There's also a moment when Landau says he'll play it to Iovine and Stevie Nicks, too bad the film doesn't show us the rocker's reaction.
There are Oscar-worthy performances, Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen and Jeremy Strong as Landau, but it is a divisive film as befits a divisive album, and even those who loved Free me from nothing has a lot to say. It's a movie about men talking about Bruce Springsteen's problems, and one of these men is Bruce, with a couple of women as an aside. The guy mastering the album has more lines in the script than the entire E Street Band combined. The message is that in order not to go to therapy, men are capable of sitting there making acoustic records about the events of a serial killer.
At the center of the story of Nebraska there's old-fashioned showbiz melodrama: the nasty business executives ranting that the record won't sell a copy while the rebellious rocker replies that an artist must do what he wants. And that's exactly what made him legendary. That's why there's a movie about Nebraska and not on the album that won the Grammy that same year, that is Toto IV (that said, I would happily watch the scene where they say «But do you know what's missing from this piece? Wild dogs howling»).
The film offers only small flashes into what 1982 rock culture was and how much Nebraska it was outside any standard of radio programming. In the film, Springsteen drives while listening Urgent by Foreigner and Winning by Santana, big hits in the US in 1981. And then his album is full of men driving alone in the night, praying for rock'n'roll salvation to come out of the radio. AND Nebraska that's exactly what Not they are listening.
The new great rocker of 1982, at least according to radio programmers, was John Cougar who with American Fool it offered “Springsteen-style” music that resonated with audiences, i.e. the music Springsteen refused to make. Hurts So Good And Jack and Diane they were obvious (and effective) Boss-style hits from the Coug (he was still a year away from taking back the Mellencamp surname) and similar songs were about to come from Bryan Adams and John Cafferty. American Fool it had been out for six months when Nebraska came out, but was still in the midst of its nine consecutive weeks at number one on the charts. For people like Mellencamp and Adams, listen Nebraska it must have been one of the happiest moments of their lives.
But it was Billy Joel more than any other musician who benefited from Nebraska. A week earlier he had released his more “artistic” and less commercial album for the same label and probably received with the same shouts from the same managers, The Nylon Curtain. Ironically, Joel's album was still successful because it filled the void left by Springsteen. If Pressure And Allentown they became hits is because they were the closest thing to that “Springsteen” radio rock that the Boss was no longer making.
On an advertising page published on Rolling Stone at the end of 1982 only Billy Joel's name, a fist clutching a wrench and the complete lyrics of Allentown. He would never have been able to afford such publicity if Springsteen had given his fans even just a sop instead Nebraska. Pressure was uncommercial by Billy's standards, an ode to rock stars' difficulties in contacting their drug dealers, with the singer grinding his teeth as if he were trapped in the last half hour of Those good guys (the beautiful documentary And So It Goes never mentions cocaine, we can see that Billy researched it by asking questions to the big shots who frequented Elaine's). And in any case compared to Nebraska that song was, like, Just the Way You Are.
Rock radio has not passed Nebraskaa shock at the time considering it was still Springsteen's new album. “I think one of two things will happen,” he said to Rolling Stone an expert in radio programming, «it will either start a trend towards softer and more personal music accepted by radio or it will be a complete disaster». My local station WBCN, in the Springsteen stronghold that is Boston, passed Open All Night for about a week and then stop. The song had an electric guitar and a Chuck Berry riff, as well as an unusually lively tone (it's the twin of State Troopersa kind of alternate version of the same character's life), but it didn't have a chorus and it sounded flat on the radio. It stopped at number 22 on the rock charts Billboard Top Tracks, a real flop, e Atlantic City And Johnny 99 they got even worse. In that week, the most played albums on rock radio were Signals by Rush (their controversial synthetic breakthrough), Billy Squier, the Who (with their terrible farewell It's Hard), Don Henley (first solo album), Bad Company, Kenny Loggins, Steve Winwood and Men at Work.
When a musician becomes a superstar, as happened to Springsteen with The Riverit is said that he could have a hit just by farting into the microphone. Nebraska is the definitive proof that this theory does not always hold up. If the radio didn't play it, people bought it. After entering the charts at No. 29, it jumped to No. 4 the following week, a meteoric rise by 1982 standards (it was the fastest-rising album of that year after Tug of War by Paul McCartney). He made it all the way to No. 3 behind Cougar, Fleetwood Mac and Steve Miller, just ahead of Michael McDonald. But no radio.
In the film there is a quick ironic reference to MTV when Springsteen zaps through reruns of Young anger. But it was MTV that pushed Nebraska aiming at Atlantic City and to his video in which (wisely) Springsteen did not appear. MTV passed it as if it were a mega hit, but only because it was happy to have any Bruce-branded product to air. Yet he fit in surprisingly well among the British synth-pop artists of 1982/83, whom rock radio similarly ignored. Feel Atlantic City between a Soft Cell song and a Human League song made much more sense than hearing it between Rush and Journey. What made it Nebraska unsuitable for radio made it perfect for MTV, and it's fitting that it was the new wave kids who became attached to Atlantic Cityespecially considering that Springsteen was inspired by the electronica of Suicide and their own Frankie Teardrop.
But the real reason why Nebraska in the end it was successful and remained that people recognized themselves in the songs. Strangely, Ronald Reagan is never mentioned in the film, not even in a background news program between reruns of Young anger. Virtually everything that has been said and written about Nebraska in the 80s, including what Springsteen said and wrote, has to do with the dark side of Reagan's America. At the end of 1982, unemployment stood at 10.8 percent, the highest since the Depression. Springsteen had already written a protest song on the subject, Out of Workfor Gary U.S. Bonds, which (incredibly) had made the Top 40 that summer, with a third verse addressed directly to Mr. President: “Maybe he's got a job for me, even just as his driver?”
Not that, then as now, the president cared much. As Reagan said in March 1982, “Is it news that some guy somewhere like South Succotash got fired and therefore needs to be interviewed nationally?” Nebraska portrays the losers of South Succotash and makes us see them as real people. As Springsteen said, that record “was about the sense of American isolation, about what happens to people when they're alienated from friends, from community, from government, from work. Because these are the things that keep you healthy, that give life meaning. And if they vanish, and you begin to live in a vacuum where the basic rules of society are no longer worth anything, then life itself is no longer worth anything. And anything can happen.”
Today no one wants to admit that they laughed Nebraska at the time, just as no one admits to booing Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, as seen in the other great rock biopic of the year, A Complete Unknown. But they did it, of course. As a reader wrote at the time in the letters column of Rolling“I liked it much better when it aped the '50s.” It wasn't the Broooce that people wanted, the one already transformed into an affectionate caricature in pop culture, as in the imitations of Robin Williams (“Elmer Fudd sings Springsteen”) or in the parody of Dr. Demento Show in which Bruce Springstone sings the theme song of Flintstones.
That's why this album paved the way for all the “Bruce” bar band clones of the 80s. I mean, Hollywood was shooting Eddie's ganga film inspired by the E Street Band that was widely watched on TV in America during the long wait between Nebraska And Born in the USA (The film even has a style subplot Nebraskain which Eddie rebels against the record companies with an artistic and uncommercial album entitled A Season in Hell).
Now as then, people love the outsider soul of the album: the artist who takes a stand, challenges the rules, stays hungry. As was often said in 1982, Bruce had the eye of the tiger again. This is why the album made history: it is the definitive example of the superstar who destroys everything to start again, as happened with Kid A or Achtung Babylike Bowie in Berlin or the Ditch Trilogy by Neil Young. When in 2007 Kelly Clarkson had to follow up on Since U Been Goneinfuriated his label by releasing My December, which he defined as his Nebraska. It's a sign that that cultural myth had moved beyond the confines of rock. And that's what makes it Nebraska one of the biggest talking points in the history of popular music.
From Rolling Stone US.
