The Ghost of Tom Joad - Springsteen, Bruce (CD 1995)

It s important to say from the outset that this album isn t going to be to everyone s taste. With it s negligible instrumentation, stark acoustics and bleak vision of the desolate, desperate lives of the migrants, working underclasses and vagrants who inhabit boarder town America, it s certainly doesn t make for easy listening. Even ardent fans of the Boss may find this too severe a contrast from his upbeat, fast paced, home grown rock and roll which placed Springsteen and his E Street Band in the annuls of rock history. This aint Born in the USA, nor is it Born to Run, this is an entirely different beast. Think, a well produced, slightly more subdued and reflective version of Nebraska and you ll be on the right track. And if you ve never heard Nebraska (shame on you!) think of the slow, heartrending pace and tone of Streets of Philadelphia and set it in a dessert, and you re getting there.

I say all that because although I ve given this album the coveted 5 star rating, I m aware that this is a highly personal matter. I don t believe that it deserves the rating on musical merit alone, but the music works because there s something more here, an indefinable quality which either gets you in the pit of your stomach the first time you hear it, or it doesn t. And if it doesn t, you may well dislike it, because the music isn t designed to work without that deep, guttural feeling. Here the music serves the songs, and if you don t like the songs, you ll probably miss the music too. But for those people with whom these 12, simple, thoughtful songs carry something weighty and meaningful, this album represents a rare treasure, one which I ll try my best to illuminate.

For me the fact that Springsteen possesses such an unquestionable place in the world of rock & roll history that gives this album such latent force. The minimal, stripped back approach, isn t due to a lack of musical ambition or ability, quite the reverse, this is a conscious decision to return to basics, to lay aside the big sound and let the songs speak for themselves. The characters are so minimal, their stories so personal and almost inconsequential, that anything but the bare musical essentials would simply smother them, and these fragile tales would be lost under a wall of sound. It s as though there are two songwriters within the man, one the consummate performer, the crowd awe-ing Boss of rock and roll, and the other a reflective and troubled narrator, singing about the nameless casualties of the American Dream, taking up their cause armed only with a guitar and a bellyful of passion.

We first saw this side fully emerge on Nebraska back in 1985, but you can find earlier evidence in the excellent Tracks which contains some of his very first unsigned recordings. And here again we see the master storyteller back at work, stripped of the trappings of performance and crowd pleasing he s writing from the dark side of the heart once again and creating poetic visions in which dreams, nightmares and reality blend into the orange dust of the borderlands.

This album contains rare chronicles of forgotten lives lived on the margins of society, told with a bitter-sweet mixture of harsh reality and reflective compassion. He has the ability to humanize his characters, making the intimate details of insignificant lives come alive with rustic colour and painful authenticity.

Springsteen writes lyrics like an author, rather than a musician, concerned primarily with the accurate rendering of the stories he s telling, making the music fit the words, sometimes letting the two components run over each other, like streams which flow across each others path, but never fully join. He never patronizes his audience with simple platitudes or time-worn clich s, he keeps his characters faithful to their setting, and the music faithful to the characters. These are songs, not tunes, and the absence of a strong musical presence, driving the narrative may put many people off at first, but it s this very quality which makes this album a modern classic. A tribute to a golden age of songwriting, from the man who has, with equal ease, produced one of the most enthralling big band sounds of the last few decades. In the poetic lineage of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, Springsteen sings these low-key ballads with a raw, almost tender and vulnerable voice. Sometimes in the first person, other times as a narrator, but always as though he himself was there, embedding the songs with a depth of feeling, an unuttered aching, and at times a sort of reverence, as if retelling ancient spiritual stories in hushed tones to captivated listeners.

With a brilliant mixture of desolation and hope, barrenness and humour, Springsteen creates characters and landscapes which glow quietly with an earthy realness, seldom seen in modern songwriting. These are stories formed and shaped in the bleak yet beautiful literary tradition of Steinbeck (the title track was inspired by the screen adaptation of Steinbeck s Grapes of wrath ), Hemmingway and Salinger and with all the rich immagary and savage beauty of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy whose characters inhabit the same unforgiving landscapes.

As for the music itself, it s Springsteen s own voice which carries the songs and often the melody. The actual instruments are almost simply backing, from slow strumming acoustic guitars to a quietly brushed snare drum, an unpolished harmonica and the distant whining and waning of violins, evocative of the deep south.

It doesn t sound like much, and it s not, without the raw essence of the words, but with them the music forms a subtle yet vital backdrop. The desert my not look very appealing in itself, but it frames the cowboy perfectly, and without it the cowboy wouldn t exist. And so it is with the backing on this album. Those of you looking for the full throttle thrust of an electric guitar and a 16 piece band will either be extremely disappointed, or pleasantly surprised by what you find here.

From the poetic elegy of The ghost of Tom Joad to the gritty truth of Balboa Park(on who's central character I based my nickname) and the bitter betrayal of the American working class in Youngstown (reminiscent of the steel mill town in Michael Cimino s Deer Hunter ) Springsteen paints a jaded picture of the down trodden underside of America's workforce. The daily struggles of the man trying to tow the straight line and feed his family by making a pittance on an honest wage, to the border guard battling against the limitations of the law and the urges of his heart. By resisting the temptation to romanticize his characters, to flood their landscapes with sentimental images and bestow upon them heroic nobility and bravery, Springsteen maintains their earthy humanity and grounds his stories in the unwritten pages of America's nothings. The non-hero s who died fighting the system, instead of some monstrous external oppressor from across the seas.

But neither does he doesn t make them martyrs. He simply lets them die, and fade away with the wind, making the heartbreak all the more tangible by the sheer inconsequentiality of their existence.

Writing from an English perspective, with a deep rooted fascination and love for America, I must confess that I have an innate, predisposed suspicion towards the American Dream . As, I imagine, do many Americans. The shiny, Disney-esque gleam of idealised American life simply doesn t appeal to me, partly because it appears both superficial and unobtainable (as an outsider looking in). And as a result I find the heart of America in the bottom of the pile, not the top. Having grown up in a desolate, troubled inner city area, I know how much of the life blood of a country flows through it s margins, not through the man made centers of power and media-entrenched image makers. And so, I look to the borders, the edges, the underprivileged and the disempowered to gain a fuller picture. And despite the apparent bleakness of Springsteen s images, I find a refreshing authenticity, a colourful genuineness which speaks of something true and solid, something hopeful. It s the honesty of this album which appeals to me most profoundly, and in some, strange way, increases my fascination with and love for America.

Like Martyn Joseph singing about Wales, or Seamus Heaney writing about Ireland it s the harsh, unflinching accuracy of their observation, mingled with a deep, unfaltering love for their native homeland which sets them apart and brings the country to life. Springsteen does this here, in an album which will move and trouble you as often as you play it. These songs need to be listened to, I mean really listened to. Close the door, relax and do nothing else, this is not background music, this demands and deserves your full attention.

Like an old friend, every time you revisit this album you ll find something you ve never seen before, and you affection for it will grow in equal measure to your awe.

Listen, and be changed, by the dreams of those who make these songs live.

Tomorrow my love and I,
Will sleep 'neath auburn skies
Somewhere across the border

We'll leave behind my dear
The pain and sadness we found here
And we'll drink from Bravo's muddy waters

Where the sky grows grey and wide
We'll meet on the other side,
There across the border.

For you I'll build a house
High upon a grassy hill
Somewhere across the border.

Where pain and memory,
Pain and memory have been stilled
There across the border.'