Demo-itis. That’s the term producers and musicians use to describe their frustrating attempts to recreate the raw purity of the first realization of a brand-new song: the demo. When demo-itis sets in, they labor endlessly to copy the intensity of a newly minted vocal line, or the tone of an instrumental quirk or some other happy studio accident. Even as multiple takes push the initial spark even further away, they strive to reproduce some indefinable spirit and ambience that got captured in the moment.
Countless songs have been fleshed out, pumped up, embellished and improved along the way from demo recording to official release; that’s a huge part of a pop musician’s craftsmanship. And every major musician’s studio catalog is likely to be dwarfed by the number of rough-draft recordings that fans never hear.
But since 1982 there has always been the great counterexample, the indisputable proof that sometimes, demo-itis is no delusion: Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska.”
The “Nebraska” album Springsteen chose to release in 1982 was the bedroom-recorded, low-fi product of his one-man arrangements: guitars, voice, harmonica and little more. The songs were constructed on limited and iffy equipment: a four-track Tascam 144 Portastudio cassette recorder that was “mixed down through an Echoplex reverb to a water-damaged Panasonic boombox that ran at the wrong speed.”
That’s from Erik Flannigan’s liner notes on the new “Nebraska ’82,” a 37-track boxed set that delves further into the album’s story. It’s the latest deep dive into Springsteen’s seemingly inexhaustible vault of unreleased recordings, after the release of seven full albums on “Tracks II: The Lost Albums” earlier this year.
“Nebraska ’82” proves that Springsteen made the right choice. The fragile, solitary, imperfect tone of the demos captures and suffuses the spirit of the songs. But the expanded album also unveils some striking outtakes and might-have-beens.
Springsteen clearly sees “Nebraska” as a crucial, mission-defining moment in his career. The boxed set arrives alongside an earnest authorized biopic — “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” — that focuses on “Nebraska” as an artistic and psychological turning point. Springsteen has been actively promoting the movie alongside Jeremy Allen White, who plays his 1980s self.
For the songs that became “Nebraska,” Springsteen had expected to work as he had on previous albums. He’d bring the basic demos to his expert, road-tested E Street Band and let them fill out his outlines. The new boxed set reveals what they came up with; the band’s solidly professional and sometimes rowdy new takes, and songs that would re-emerge on later albums, are billed as “Electric Nebraska.”
The Electric Nebraska sessions in the new box include a real find. It’s the primal, cranked-up take of a song Springsteen held back: the openly desolate, minor-key precursor of his all-conquering 1984 blockbuster single, “Born in the U.S.A.”
The 1982 demo version, with hard-strummed, reverb-laden guitar, has already been released on Springsteen’s 1998 compilation, “Tracks,” and Springsteen has revisited that version on tour. But the electric version on “Nebraska 82” has an elemental power: a throat-tearing vocal above a stark, stomping band. (“Downbound Train,” another song remade for “Born in the U.S.A.,” gets revved up too.)
“It was different,” Springsteen said in a phone interview. “The strange thing was, I cut the band down to a trio. I have no idea why, but I just used guitar, bass and drums on a lot of the Electric Nebraska stuff. I went after this very primitive sound, which I really hadn’t pursued. I forgot entirely that I ever did it.”
When he rediscovered the recordings, he said, “I was shocked at how it sounded. I don’t know where I was going with it exactly at that time, but you know, looking back, I remember I was disenchanted with it. But now, hearing it this far down the road, I said, ‘Well, that was pretty good.’ It was probably the most primitive that the E Street Band has ever sounded.”
But those tracks stayed in the vault, and “Nebraska” arrived as an unexpected turn inward before the explosive extroversion of “Born in U.S.A.” would make Springsteen a superstar. Punk had already emboldened low-fi recording experiments. But “Nebraska” would encourage many more mainstream performers to honor their demo-itis.
Springsteen made “Nebraska” after repeated breakthroughs, including the brash, word-drunk, do-or-die and perfectly over-the-top “Born to Run” in 1975; the steadfast up-from-disillusionment “Darkness on the Edge of Town” in 197; and the sure-footed and thoughtful “The River” in 1980. For “Nebraska,” Springsteen’s artistic impulses led him away from the sound he had honed with the E Street Band.
The songs on “Nebraska” continued the kind of terse, character-driven storytelling that Springsteen had used on “The River.” But the stories they sketched were even bleaker; they were all but drained of hope. “Reason to Believe,” which ends the album with a half-smile, recognizes the stubbornness of optimism, only to reveal its futility.
Springsteen has said the songs are grounded in his love of film noir, with its moral impasses and dead-end fatalism. Many of the album’s characters self-destruct — not even spectacularly, but in vain. The narrator of “Nebraska,” who is awaiting execution after a pointless murder spree, can barely explain his actions, and he sums up the album’s lessons in a line: “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”
The way the E Street Band worked up the demos didn’t sound right to Springsteen at the time, even though they might have been more radio friendly. Instead, the album arrived as something more modest, haunted and immersive.
“Nebraska ’82” includes demos of songs Springsteen would omit from “Nebraska” and later rework or salvage lyrics from: “Child Bride,” which would yield verses for “Working on the Highway” and the phrase “meanness in this world” for “Nebraska,” and “Losin’ Kind,” a distant relative of “Highway 29” on “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”
In “A Gun in Every Home,” Springsteen explores a sense of fear and alienation behind the facade of a comfortable suburban life. The set also unearths “On the Prowl,” a driven, Chuck Berry-style rocker played solo, with not-quite-finished lyrics. As Springsteen sings about “searching, searching, searching for a wild, wild child,” the echoey guitar and vocals create a manic, spooky tone.
Fans have long been curious about the discarded Electric Nebraska sessions. They reveal the kind of camaraderie the E Street Band has always added to Springsteen’s songs, transforming them into jaunty teamwork.
On the “Nebraska” songs, their playing is solid, attentive and skillful — and, as Springsteen realized, simply not quite right for these songs about desperate estrangement. “Nebraska” became a soothing folk-rock ballad; “Mansion on the Hill” hinted at a hymn. “Atlantic City” suggested a boys’ night out, while “Johnny 99” emerged as an upbeat romp splashed with honky-tonk piano. The sound was richer, cleaner, more comfortable — but comfort wasn’t what the songs demanded.
Filling out the “Nebraska ’82” box, Springsteen revisited the album onstage this year for a concert film, performing the songs at the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, N.J. The arrangements were similar to the album; two very discreet backup musicians quietly added instruments heard on Springsteen’s four-tracks, like a glockenspiel or a second guitar. There was no audience in the theater, preserving the album’s sense of isolation. The film is black-and-white; the recording is somber, pristine and respectful.
But the “Nebraska” originals still hold something more, something that was preserved on the narrow tape of that humble 1982 cassette. Maybe it’s noise, or imprecise tape speed, or the limitations of a microphone, or the acoustics of Springsteen’s bedroom. Maybe it’s the tentativeness of testing new material. Maybe it’s the way the songs sound like they’re being overheard rather than performed. Whatever it was, Springsteen heard it — and was wise enough to let the world hear it too.
Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.
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