Elvis Ate Dynamite

After a handful scheduling conflicts over the past few weekends, my wife and I finally saw the Bruce Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, on Saturday. 

Here’s the short version of my review: I liked it. 

Here’s the much longer version. First, I recognize that it hasn’t made much money at the box office and that the reviews have been mixed. That’s okay for at least a couple of reasons. For one thing, while Springsteen fans genuinely love the guy, we’re not a cult. We don’t think he’s perfect and we get that he’s not for everyone. To us, Bruce’s imperfections make him more relatable. 

More to the point, though, the movie may not resonate with everyone because it’s about a very specific time in his career — the period between the end of his 1980-81 tour in support of The River and the release of the Nebraska album in 1982. If you’ve read the Warren Zanes book the movie’s based on, that was a particularly challenging time in Bruce’s life. 

But for some of us of (ahem) a certain age, that same time period, the early 1980s, was a pretty significant and challenging time in our lives, too. 

The first time I saw Bruce play live was on the River tour. I was a freshman at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign when they came through town in February 1981. So, it’s fair to say that that album and that tour had a huge impact on my understanding of what rock music could be.

Then Nebraska came out in September 1982, early in my junior year. This was a time when many of us, like Springsteen himself, were looking for something new and challenging. A few years later, a friend of mine would observe that by the 1980s, rock music had “matured,” and he didn’t mean that in a good way. But that’s how it felt to a lot of us. We didn’t know exactly what we wanted, but most of what we heard on the radio … wasn’t it.

Springsteen wasn’t alone in searching for something new. Punk rock was still emerging; the Clash and the Ramones were still kicking ass. Hip-hop was on the verge of exploding into everyone’s consciousness. All of it was revolutionary. 

And Nebraska, in a way, was a punk album. It didn’t have a punk sound, but it certainly had a punk feel.

To me, what Bruce did with that album is a lot like what early punk and hip-hop artists did. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it’s like they traveled back in time to find that one essential thing — that spark — that was there at the inception of the most vital and influential types of American music, and they brought it back with them. Early rock ’n roll, pre-commercial country, folk, blues, and R&B. They all had something vital and alive, and by the 1980s, the music business seemed to have crushed it out of them.

So, that was how Nebraska landed. I bought it on cassette (which was something I rarely did back then, but if you seen the film, it’s kind of appropriate), I put it in the cassette deck, donned those oversized, avocado-colored Koss headphones, and hit play. 

It was mesmerizing. I knew I was listening to something I’d never heard before. But it was oddly familiar, just like the first time I heard, say, “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” or “Career Opportunities.” Bruce, that guitar, that harmonica, the echo-y, scratchy sound. It was the realest thing I’d ever heard. It was dark, foreboding, a little scary, but mostly it was alive.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has a lot more that warrants discussion, and I plan to circle back to it over the coming days. It’s not just a film about music. It’s a film about mental illness and finally knowing how to ask for help. I know a thing or two about that. And it’s a film about friendship — about having friends who are always there for you, who don’t judge you, and who stay with you throughout your life. I know a thing or two about that as well. 

Those are important topics in the film; in some ways, the most important topics in the film. But for tonight, I wanted to focus on the music and what Nebraska meant to me when it came out. 

A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think of these lines from “Open All Night,” still my favorite song on Nebraska: “Radio’s jammed up with gospel stations/Lost souls calling long-distance salvation/Hey,  Mr. Deejay, won’t you hear my last prayer/Hey, ho rock ’n roll, deliver me from nowhere …” 

It delivered a lot of us from nowhere.