HOW I FOUND BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IN ATLANTIC CITY AND NEVER LEFT
- Bernard Zuel
- May 5
- 6 min read
“And everything dies baby that’s a fact/But maybe everything that dies some day comes back.”
THERE WAS A TIME when the idea of being a Bruce Springsteen fan seemed unlikely on so many levels for me: culturally, aesthetically, emotionally. Him? Oh please, as if! That time was when it felt like Springsteen was the biggest thing on the planet not named Michael Jackson, America’s gift to the world not named Madonna, the living embodiment of the mid ‘80s not named Duran Duran.
I owned his first two albums, though had played them only a couple of times and moved on confident I had “got” them so didn’t need to trouble myself further - duty done. I had skipped much of what happened since except for reading the gushing music press out of America, the kind of “I’ve seen god” business that, like the UK’s more flighty and even more hyperbolic music press, felt like bullshit dressed up as intellect. Though I had to confess that the live version of Rosalita that Donnie Sutherland’s Sounds used to play regularly on a Saturday morning looked amazing. Too much, sure, but amazing.
But now wherever I went, the bombastic gated drums and power drive sound of Born In The USA felt oppressively in my face, sleeveless flannelette shirt and jeans meant authentic (yeah, I would roll my eyes at the grunge uniform a decade later too), every bit of live footage showed another crowd losing its shit to this pumped up rock and roll. Here was the living embodiment of the American decade’s hubris, excess, triumphalism, nativism, and (urgh!) optimism.
This didn’t speak to me, for me, or even get me. It was somebody else’s music.
A few more years, a few more albums that were less bombastic but sonically at least, very of their time, didn’t really change the equation. Not when I’d already decided I knew all I needed to know. Then I came across the single of Atlantic City at a second hand store, barely registering it – it was in a plain CBS sleeve, no image from the album, just the yellow-into-orange label – ready to move on again. But hey it was in a bundle of other singles, I guess it wasn’t going to hurt to take it home. I could get rid of it later, dump it on someone, after I gave it a cursory listen.
It opened with a voice, a little rough and wearied, soon an acoustic guitar and then some echoey, ghost-like voice in the background calling out without words, maybe without hope. The lyrics were telling a story that didn’t really mean anything to me – minor crims, the gambling commission, a rumble imminent, something something – but it held me. And then the camera lens (and a double tracked vocal) narrows its focus to two people, one story, and half a life, probably pointless and almost certainly short. “Put your make-up on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.”
Turning over the single I found Mansion On The Hill. Harmonica, a low hum and the almost-muttered observations of a man not yet shaken off the boy who hid in the fields listening to the better lives being led just beyond. This wasn’t grim, not some povo-porn, but everything in it and everything being felt, was happening right now and right now was a night where you could feel the chill that had settled on your skin. I was hooked.
I would buy the album from which it came, Nebraska, soon after. Dark and desolate and desperate – not just its terrain but its emotional landscape – and soaked in its bleak refusal to play nice, to offer some kind of with-one-bound-he-was-happier ending, to make grand that which was anything but. A minor seller compared with the album that followed it and the ones that preceded it, Nebraska was it seemed to me in my prejudices, the anti-Born In The USA; it made me more than curious, and soon, more than a fan.
In Warren Zanes’ recent exploration of Nebraska – the book Deliver Me From Nowhere that is dense with observation, by its nature very fan-specific, yet always comfortable to read for regular humans – there is an argument made that it was this seemingly out of character, definitely not in the industry playbook, record which made possible the subsequent behemoth that was Born In The USA.
That in its role as a clearinghouse of concepts and unexpressed emotions, in its artistry untethered from commerciality mindset, in its one-man, one guitar, one recorder sonic simplicity, it showed Springsteen a way to be that simultaneously allowed him to be something else again.
A man who wanted and feared significant success could allow himself to embrace it because he could see it was not the only way to be. A man whose psychological breakdown (unobserved by the public at the time; confirmed decades later in a different, therapy-friendly environment) was in part a legacy of not talking but deflecting, could find a path to recovery through characters whose inchoate emotions somehow spoke more eloquently than any of their words.
In one of the extended conversations with Springsteen contained within the book, Zanes uses the mythological story of Odysseus returning to his home after 20 years, essentially anonymously, able to reclaim his position only after being a nobody “stripped of his former glories”, as something more than an analogy.
“I can’t help but look at Nebraska, leading into Born In The USA as part of an artistic trajectory that somehow aligns with this. Nebraska sets at all the side, all the glory and achievement, the studio gloss, the big sounds, the band, the picture of a hero on the front cover, the interviews in which you tell the tales of your travels. The recordings are loose, muddy times, unfinished. And then you return, with Born In The USA, with all the heroic trappings … For me, the entire scope of your career, everything, fits between these two projects.”
To which Springsteen responds “It does. To this day. My parameters were set in that moment.”
And, in many ways, so were the parameters of my relationship to Springsteen, as I realised again last week when, seeing it was the 20th anniversary of his album, Devils & Dust, I dug out my review and played that album for a couple of days, and then found Springsteen had released a close-quarters, airy and tender solo recording of an unreleased song written shortly after Devils & Dust called Faithless, which will be part of a swag of unreleased albums he is putting out later this year.
While others rate the post-9/11 American renewal album, The Rising, from 2002, as a return to form, or at least a return to the power and glory of the big band/big sound records and therefore a candidate for great, for me, D&D is the best he has done this century. It would be up there as one of my favourites and in the same company as Nebraska, The Ghost Of Tom Joad, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and Tunnel Of Love.
Which should probably not be a surprise when you see where I started.
Each of those records lean into insecurity and uncertainty. Three of them embrace to varying degrees sonic starkness and isolation. All of them, though they mostly deal in character songs and narrative creations rather than his own stories, are intimate and intensely personal and revealing. Fathers, sons and the failures that rupture. Outsiders inching towards the centre but not seeing the wall til they hit it. Errors made, compounded, escalated, regretted, repeated.
Right up my alley, the alley where I told myself – where I knew in my bones – I was hiding on the edge of a town I could see but never really be part of. Whose generational divide wasn’t going to be fixed in this lifetime, and who said I wanted it to? Where the right people were and were not leaving any time soon. Where I’d enter and leave, like a ghost that had never been solid enough to register.
“I just wanted to be another ghost. On that particular record,” he told Zanes. “It spoke to some need in me. Some roaring need. That might have been a result of having had the kind of success that I had. But I needed to know that I could go back and be nobody. If I really needed to.”
“At night, my daddy'd take me and we'd ride through the streets of a town so silent and still/Park on a back road along the highway side, look up at that mansion on the hill.”
READ MORE
LISTEN MORE
APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Bruce Springsteen – Nebraska
AGE OF REASON: A PLAYLIST: Listen to Faithless as part of this playlist
Deliver Me From Nowhere is published by Penguin Random House. Thank you John Encarnacao (who I semi-converted to Springsteen) for the book.
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