Nothin' Feels Better Than Blood on Blood
Today’s formative-album replay: Bruce Springsteen Nebraska. It’s true what they say about this record: It really is Bruce’s best. But why? What is it about this clutch of housebound demos, mostly recorded in a single day in 1982 on a four-track tape deck, that sets them apart from the rest of the Boss’s catalog?
I’ve been challenged lately to explain what the music I love has in common, and my readiest answer is harmony—the vivid, distinctive ways the chords go together, basically. But is that really the whole story? One of the most formative periods for my taste was an obligatory high school folk period, and accordingly there is a lot of music I love deeply in a variety of genres, from country to pop to rock to hymns, that is utterly undistinguished harmonically. Can I explain why the hack ’50s progression of the Del-Vikings’ “Come Go With Me” tears my heart out? Why the two chords of Dylan’s “Drifter’s Escape” or U2’s “Three Sunrises” or Nappy Brown’s “Piddly Patter Patter,” to pull a few favorites off the top of my head, are more than enough to create rich, rangy sound worlds I love to visit?
There’s no accounting for tastes, is one answer. Another is that harmonic interest must not be everything to me. To expect to live on a spice-only diet would be insane, and sometimes I just crave a burger, y’know? Another way to put this may be in terms of visual art or prose: Not every painter is going to ceaselessly find new colors or forms, nor every novelist hit their peak by reaching for innovations in language (by that standard, Finnegan’s Wake would be the greatest book of all time). Sometimes, in fact quite often, it is what an artist can express with the simplest tools at hand that defines their genius, and the simplicity and directness of those tools is inseparable from their greatness. If chords are colors, why can't a song be great in the musical equivalent of black-and-white? That’s certainly what’s behind the genius of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, and indeed most (but not all!) of his best work, and it is part of what I was talking about when I recently tried to account for the extraordinary power of seemingly unprepossessing songs by him and Leonard Cohen, who by his own admission only knew about four or five chords.
Which brings us back to Bruce and Nebraska. In general I find Springsteen more admirable than lovable, with an undeniable knack for elaborate self-mythologizing that verges on shtick and a tendency toward bellowing bombast which can be alternately endearing and tiresome—honestly, at his worst he sounds to me like a country singer who wishes he were in a metal band, or maybe vice versa. At his rocking best, I hear him in the distinguished line of guitar songsmiths a la Chuck Berry or John Fogerty rather than the Dylan/Prine/Waits vein he seems to have often brushed close to; I find most of his would-be Guthrie narratives frankly boring.
It is on Nebraska that he distilled a brew distinctly his own, and all the more impressively by doing so in very well worn folk/rock territory. Almost all the songs make do with three or four chords, tops, mostly picked on an acoustic guitar, lightly seasoned with harmonica. The key is his vocals, I think—with few exceptions they are delicate, rough, exposed, often tentative, with few traces of the Bruce bellow, just as Elvis’s Sun Sessions show little warning of the self-parody he would become—and they in turn match the overall bareness of the sound, which perfectly serves the open landscapes and impoverished lives he limns in the songs. (The midnight-train claustrophobia of “Atlantic City” is a notable and utterly convincing exception.)
It is not primarily material poverty that gnaws at these characters, though: There is a reason that the whole album seems to build to the exquisite, guilty anguish of the penultimate song, “My Father’s House,” a ghostly waltz with a mesmerizing grip that tightens inexorably until it just lets it go with gasping suddenness, like a dying man suddenly closing his eyes on the image of the house “shining ’cross the dark highway where our sins lie unatoned.” I get chills just thinking about it, and that’s a place beyond the reaches of harmony.
I’ve been challenged lately to explain what the music I love has in common, and my readiest answer is harmony—the vivid, distinctive ways the chords go together, basically. But is that really the whole story? One of the most formative periods for my taste was an obligatory high school folk period, and accordingly there is a lot of music I love deeply in a variety of genres, from country to pop to rock to hymns, that is utterly undistinguished harmonically. Can I explain why the hack ’50s progression of the Del-Vikings’ “Come Go With Me” tears my heart out? Why the two chords of Dylan’s “Drifter’s Escape” or U2’s “Three Sunrises” or Nappy Brown’s “Piddly Patter Patter,” to pull a few favorites off the top of my head, are more than enough to create rich, rangy sound worlds I love to visit?
There’s no accounting for tastes, is one answer. Another is that harmonic interest must not be everything to me. To expect to live on a spice-only diet would be insane, and sometimes I just crave a burger, y’know? Another way to put this may be in terms of visual art or prose: Not every painter is going to ceaselessly find new colors or forms, nor every novelist hit their peak by reaching for innovations in language (by that standard, Finnegan’s Wake would be the greatest book of all time). Sometimes, in fact quite often, it is what an artist can express with the simplest tools at hand that defines their genius, and the simplicity and directness of those tools is inseparable from their greatness. If chords are colors, why can't a song be great in the musical equivalent of black-and-white? That’s certainly what’s behind the genius of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, and indeed most (but not all!) of his best work, and it is part of what I was talking about when I recently tried to account for the extraordinary power of seemingly unprepossessing songs by him and Leonard Cohen, who by his own admission only knew about four or five chords.
Which brings us back to Bruce and Nebraska. In general I find Springsteen more admirable than lovable, with an undeniable knack for elaborate self-mythologizing that verges on shtick and a tendency toward bellowing bombast which can be alternately endearing and tiresome—honestly, at his worst he sounds to me like a country singer who wishes he were in a metal band, or maybe vice versa. At his rocking best, I hear him in the distinguished line of guitar songsmiths a la Chuck Berry or John Fogerty rather than the Dylan/Prine/Waits vein he seems to have often brushed close to; I find most of his would-be Guthrie narratives frankly boring.
It is on Nebraska that he distilled a brew distinctly his own, and all the more impressively by doing so in very well worn folk/rock territory. Almost all the songs make do with three or four chords, tops, mostly picked on an acoustic guitar, lightly seasoned with harmonica. The key is his vocals, I think—with few exceptions they are delicate, rough, exposed, often tentative, with few traces of the Bruce bellow, just as Elvis’s Sun Sessions show little warning of the self-parody he would become—and they in turn match the overall bareness of the sound, which perfectly serves the open landscapes and impoverished lives he limns in the songs. (The midnight-train claustrophobia of “Atlantic City” is a notable and utterly convincing exception.)
It is not primarily material poverty that gnaws at these characters, though: There is a reason that the whole album seems to build to the exquisite, guilty anguish of the penultimate song, “My Father’s House,” a ghostly waltz with a mesmerizing grip that tightens inexorably until it just lets it go with gasping suddenness, like a dying man suddenly closing his eyes on the image of the house “shining ’cross the dark highway where our sins lie unatoned.” I get chills just thinking about it, and that’s a place beyond the reaches of harmony.
Comments
Post a Comment