There’s a moment in the history of popular music that has, for four decades, stood as one of the greatest examples of an artist choosing to leave a recording unfixed, unfinished, imperfect: Bruce Springsteen’s sixth album, “Nebraska.” It’s one of American music’s great left turns. Mr. Springsteen’s prior release, “The River,” was his first No. 1 album. He was poised to go to the superstar level. Instead, he released a recording too rough to be played on commercial rock stations.
Why did he do it? He told me in an interview for my book about the making of the album that he felt it couldn’t be “made better” and still manage to transmit the turbulence he’d captured. So he didn’t fix what he easily could have. Joel Selvin’s 1982 San Francisco Chronicle review of “Nebraska” is telling: The album “is a stark, raw document, rough edges intact, and so intimately personal it is surprising he would even play the tape for other people at all, let alone put it out as an album,” he wrote. Understand, this was a very positive review.
Many artists look back to “Nebraska” to remember what it sounded like when a major songwriter and performer, at the top of his game, had stories to tell in song that suffered when he went in to fix the recordings that transmitted those stories.
As Mr. Springsteen said to me, “Every time we went in to improve it, we lost the characters.” Their frailty, their humanness, their conflicts and troubles: You couldn’t hear them when he cleaned up the recordings, not in the way Mr. Springsteen wanted them to be heard. So he released the album as it was, flawed. It was recorded on a cheap cassette tape, mixed onto a malfunctioning boom box. And that’s what you heard when you bought it. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to hear it again and again.
As a teenager, I felt as if “Nebraska” was telling me a few things, but one of them in particular stuck with me: You can do this, it said. Steely Dan recordings didn’t have the same effect. Same for Toto’s “Rosanna” and the “Chariots of Fire” soundtrack. “Nebraska” was dirty, kind of mumbled in sections, its hushed tones punctuated by a few screams; it told scary stories. But it felt so close to the world I lived in. It was a recording I listened to, and I never felt left out. There are times when we need that kind of art. I’d say now is one of them.
Warren Zanes is the author of “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’” and “Petty: The Biography.” A former member of the Del Fuegos, he teaches at N.Y.U. and continues to write and record music, sometimes with the poet Paul Muldoon’s Rogue Oliphant band, sometimes on his own.
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