Q&A: Author Warren Zanes Brings Bruce Springsteen’s Darkest Moment to Light in the Book That Inspired the Movie

The shrieks of the 20,000 fans at Richfield Coliseum eclipsed the opening lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” on July 29, 1981, the first of a two-night stint. Six months later, Springsteen sat quietly in a small bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey. Depression, uncertainty and trauma consumed his mind. He sang a new collection of somber, introspective songs into a four-track cassette recorder. The murder ballads and childhood reflections were only meant to be demos, but he couldn’t replicate the intensity of those homespun recordings.

Nebraska became one of the first lo-fi releases on a major record label. Followed by no tour or press, the strange side quest between The River and the even more successful Born in the U.S.A. remains shrouded in mystery.

“Every element in the story positions him to go slightly bigger. Go bigger. Don’t wait too long,” says Warren Zanes, the author of Deliver Me From Nowhere, a definitive history of Nebraska. “Bruce goes smaller.”

Zanes, formerly the vice president of education and public programs at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a past professor at Case Western Reserve University, shares insights on the cult-classic album and his book, the namesake and inspiration for a new biopic directed by Scott Cooper and starring Jeremy Allen White.

Cleveland Magazine: Why is Nebraska such an important moment in Springsteen’s career?

Warren Zanes: In 1981 and 1982, he’s coming off The River, his first No. 1 album, his first album to have a top 10 single. He’s just completed months of touring that didn’t just lift him in the United States but established him in Europe. Every element in the story positions him to go slightly bigger. Go bigger. Don’t wait too long. 

Bruce goes smaller. He takes the risk of confusing his fans. He takes the risk of losing his record company's faith in his own sense of reason. He takes the risk of working without his band, and when he finally gets everybody on board, “OK, we're going to support you, and you're going to release these demos you made in your bedroom.” He then says, “I'm not going to tour in support of the record, and I'm not going to do interviews to help you promote it” — something he had never done.

He was poised to take his stardom and turn it into super stardom. Instead, he took that risk of throwing everybody off the scent. It’s this linchpin moment in his story as an artist, and the beginning of his personal odyssey. 

CM: The album was recorded in just a few days. What does this sliver in time reveal? 

WZ: I was among the confused fans in 1982, and over the course of decades, I came to respect Nebraska as much as I respected any piece of recorded music in the history of American popular music, but I still didn't understand why he did it.

My door into that project and into understanding why he might do it really came from his memoir. In the memoir, he talks about Nebraska just for a couple pages. It's really short, and I'm thinking it's this linchpin moment in his story as an artist. It comes and goes so fast. But right after is the story of that road trip West, when he has a kind of breakdown, a major depressive episode, and he starts getting real consistent professional help at the urging of his manager, John Landau. In that memoir, he says that moment was the beginning of his personal Odyssey. He gives us that road trip and his arrival at the first home he ever bought as this kind of middle moment. He's become an artist, and at that moment, he needs to become a man. And I’m reading it and 

I'm reading it, and I'm going, Well, Nebraska went by pretty fast, but I think Nebraska, this thing that comes after this breakdown is connected. That was pure speculation on my part, but I believed in it as an idea. His semi-disappearance between ’82-’84 told me something happened between Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A, and the songs reinforced it. 

Bruce let me put the theory forward that there was a connection between Nebraska and this (mental) breakdown and give him the chance to reflect on that. He didn’t confirm the theory, but he did tell me enough to validate my belief that there was a connection.

CM: What was it like to interview him?

WZ: My favorite moment in the book, because I think it’s the most revealing, yet it’s subtle, is when I tell him the story of The Odyssey, not because he doesn’t know it, but because I’m saying I think your story is like Odysseus’s story. I get part way and I pause, and he says, Go on. This is an artist who’s listening to my ideas to play with them, to entertain them, to elaborate on them. This is not typical in artist interviews, but Bruce Springsteen is exceptional. He doesn’t present as someone who’s the ultimate authority on all things Bruce Springsteen but as someone who’s still curious about that guy himself. 

CM: Why has this album grown as this vital cult classic?

WZ: It’s come to stand as: There’s something about the imperfect. These are unfinished recordings. He didn’t know he was making a record. There’s a lack of consciousness. You can turn it into a life philosophy of stop overthinking it. When you see a hero actually do it themselves publicly, it’s inspiring. For those who say, I don’t like Bruce Springsteen but I love Nebraska, I think that’s a big part of it. You really came to understand this guy as a man who is ready to follow his gut.

CM: People say, “I don’t like Bruce Springsteen, but I love Nebraska.” It’s so funny to me because in some ways it’s the most Bruce Springsteen album, stripped back naked from the E Street Band. 

WZ: Honestly, when people say, I'm not really into Bruce Springsteen, but I love Nebraska. I don't say this to them, but in my mind, I think, “Sounds like you don't really know Bruce Springsteen.” 

CM: A lot of the themes that show up on Born in the U.S.A are present here. A version of “Born in the U.S.A” even eventually gets cut from this album.

WZ: You know, “Hungry Heart” is his first single.” Yet, it starts, “Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack. I went out for a ride, and I never went back.” That’s not everyday lyric writing in popular music, a song that people can dance to that starts with a man leaving his family forever. Bruce Springsteen, on some level, didn’t start telling us about the world of the shadows with Nebraska. He’d been talking about it all along. In different ways, but when you put a lot of melody, and you put a vocal that has a greater range, so you know when you’re at the chorus, you experience changes. In Nebraska, the vocals are in a smaller range. When that scream comes in “State Trooper,” it really gets our attention, right? It’s much more talky as a singing voice. The songs are really simple. So the things that distract us from that first line of “Hungry Heart,” they’re removed. So we see that guy up there. And when Bruce talked to me about Nebraska, he says the problem when they started to produce those up, when they started to add instruments, arrange them more, was he was losing his characters. This time, he just felt like he couldn’t afford to do that because there were things he still needed to hear from them. 

CM: How does Springsteen look back on Nebraska?

WZ: He said of Nebraska, “It still may be my best.” 

CM: How does your book compare to the movie?

WZ: There’s the record and there's the book, and they're two different things. I had this native feeling that the movie would be yet another new thing, even if there's an umbilical cord connecting them. There are things that are in the movie that are not in the book, like Bruce’s romantic life. (Director Scott Cooper) really zeroes in on the relationship between Bruce and his dad. It’s a dark story. It’s a hopeful story. It’s about getting help when you need it so that you can take care of your voice as an artist and as a person. 

CM: This is kind of an “anti-biopic,” as you said, because it bucks the typical format of an overarching career summary, like Johnny Cash’s Walk the Line or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Why does this approach work?

WZ: If you think about how people envision their rock stars, there’s often a spotlight involved. They're up there, center stage. The lights are on them, and we know from Springsteen's songwriting that it's the shadows that interest him. He wants to know what's happening beyond the footlights, beyond the spotlights, and the Nebraska story is that. So my gut, initially, when somebody approached me about (making this movie) was, I don't think it's going to happen, but if anything would be turned into a movie, it would probably be this, because it's really about Springsteen in the shadows of his life and in the shadows of his career. 

CM: You also wrote a book about Tom Petty, Petty: The Biography. Would Petty’s story be worth a biopic? 

WZ: Yes, absolutely. It would be very different. Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty were friends. They shared many things among them; Jimmy Iovine, who you know was an engineer on Bruce stuff and a producer on some Petty stuff, was lifelong friends to both those guys. I think Tom's story would be more of a band story. Obviously, Nebraska is and isn't, but I think Tom Petty's life and career would make an amazing movie. I think you can make a great ’70s movie that has not been made, focusing on Tom Petty's life.

CM: Given your time in Cleveland, why do you think the city has such a deep connection with Springsteen?

WZ: Bands come to life when they talk about those first tours because they’re at their most fully alive. They’re in a van, maybe an RV, but they don’t know what’s coming. And Cleveland is a big part of early tours for Bruce and the band. It creates this bond between the community and the artist that's felt both ways. Believe me, Bruce and the E Street Band, they know the Cleveland part of the story. The radio support. The venue support. That bond is forever.

CM: You were a member of Del Fuegos before turning to writing and academia. Why was Cleveland a pivotal moment for you?

WZ: I look back fondly on my time in Cleveland and at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Cleveland was where I really kind of tied my academic persona together with my music-based persona. Cleveland allowed me to explore that split identity and to find that it didn’t need to be split. 

I came into an education and programming department that was suffering a little. The programming needed to be built back up with some integrity. It was definitely a team that did it. Terry Stewart is no longer there, but you got Rob Weil, Lisa Vinciquerra, who are lifers. John Gerke is there. Jason Hanley, who came into my department and now runs it, was a big part of it. 

It was finding ways to get the voices, the actual participants in the story of rock ‘n’ roll to come in and talk more. The program that mattered the most for me in that role might not have been the best attended, but it was a program called “From Songwriters to Soundmen,” and the idea was to do interviews with everybody but the star. It could be road managers. It could be publishers, could be publicists. It could be sidemen. This is to say, if we limit ourselves to the front person, we are not going to learn that much about the culture that we are here to celebrate, right? 

Sometimes there would be 15 people there, and Terry would come up to me and say, “This is great!” He couldn’t help himself but to look beyond the numbers. There’s that sense that you can be doing the right thing, and it won't be measured in traditional ways. That gave me a lot of freedom, and it led to the kind of writing that I ultimately wanted to do.  

CM: So Cleveland was kind of like your Nebraska.

WZ: I was really proud of the work I was doing there and but I was in a marriage that wasn't doing well, and I will never forget, a couple of the people unnamed who worked with me did something that was as close to an intervention as could be done, but they were like, where's your partner? These programs are really great. We're proud of them. You should be proud of them, but your partner should be proud of them. And I was probably too young to really take it in. I think I've just made excuses for it, but when I hear the word Cleveland, I also taste divorce in the back of my mouth. You know, our experiences as human beings are like this. There's a lot of joy out there in Cleveland on the personal side that included kids. Also on the personal side, it involved a divorce coming and so if I was to say there was a Nebraska, I was probably right at the edge of it as I was leaving Cleveland. 

CM: Nebraska has that undercurrent of hope, though. I think of a song like “Reason to Believe.”

WZ: That album is like a grieving process. When he talks about that record really being based in the time that he and his parents lived with his grandparents, there was a lot to grieve. There was a lot he didn't get as a very young person that he should have gotten, and there is a way to grieve what you don't get when you need it, without being a victim, without blaming, but you got to look at it in a hard way. Now, the songs of Nebraska are not a one-for-one correspondence with his personal story. They're fictional characters, but the troubles those fictional characters are experiencing carry within them some of the troubles that he was confronting as his childhood and in his adult experience. He needed to do some grieving to be able to carry on to become the man he wanted to be, to ultimately become a father and a husband, ultimately all these things. In that album, he did some brave work of grieving. The sad part of it was that he was alone for so much of it, and that came out in the book. And I can't remember exactly how I said it, but I said, “You're not supposed to do that alone,” and he said, “I didn't know that.” Wow. It’s just a little heartbreaking. He's handed us a lot of songs that we've studied ourselves with. We've come to understand ourselves better with them. And yet, there was this moment in his life where he could have used some of that himself.

So it's both a symbol of a hard time in life, and the sadness that has to it, but it's also a positive symbol because the way he wrote it out musically, he got to the shore, the light came back out. With Nebraska, I hear both the trouble of the human experience and the resilience and the capacity to come through. Hope doesn't always derive from the content. It's that act of handing off songs in the form of records, saying, like, here's my story. It doesn't have to be a happy ending to be hopeful as an act, right?

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