Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen – Born In The U.S.A.

(Columbia, 1984)

“A cool rockin’ daddy in the U.S.A.”

Muscles, sweat and a fist raised to the sky. There's no denying it: in the popular imagination, the figure of Bruce Springsteen will always be tied to that of the blue-collar rocker of "Born In The U.S.A." The quintessential stadium-anthem icon, the synthesis of 1980s rock grandeur, a hit endlessly overused whenever a stars-and-stripes flag is waved. From the triumphant march of Roy Bittan's synth to the metallic echoes of Max Weinberg's drums, everything seems to conspire towards a sense of martial celebration. But the stentorian force of Springsteen's voice immediately betrays the fact that the substance is, in reality, something else entirely: "angry patriotism", as Bruce himself would describe it almost thirty years later, speaking of an album destined to share more than one point of contact with "Born In The U.S.A.", "Wrecking Ball". But to understand what this is all about, we need to take a step back.

"In a dead man's town"

On the TV screen, Ronald Reagan's square-jawed features are addressing America. It's night in New Jersey. The echo of the news broadcast mingles with his thoughts, as his fingers run along the strings of the acoustic guitar.

After the tour for "The River", Bruce Springsteen feels the need for a new horizon. No longer just the existential dimension of the "runaway american dream" that has always run through the stories of his characters, but the more markedly political scope of an awareness that has matured over the years.

In the silence of his New Jersey home, Springsteen picks up a simple four-track recorder and starts putting down new songs about criminals, cops and gamblers. Above all, they speak of the connection between the human heart and the society surrounding it: "there's a thin line between eternity and that moment when time stops and everything turns black, when the things that connect you to your world - your job, your family, your friends, your faith, your love - abandon you".

All he needs are guitar and harmonica, just like on the old Woody Guthrie records he's listening to more and more. At first they're just demos to work on with the E Street Band for the new record. But the arrangements he tries out with the band fail to capture the songs' essence. Or maybe it's he himself who feels the need to put himself on the line in person, to find his own way without his usual friends by his side. Either way, it's precisely those demos that end up making up one of the most intense chapters in Springsteen's discography, "Nebraska".

The ten tracks on the album, as usual, are only a small fraction of the material written during the making of "Nebraska". One song, in particular, centres on a theme Springsteen can't get out of his head: the wound the Vietnam War left deep within America. As he himself explains, it's a song about the "spiritual crisis of a working-class man. There's nothing left tying him to society. Isolated from the government, isolated from his family. To the point where nothing seems to make sense any more". At first he simply titled it "Vietnam", just like the song by his idol Jimmy Cliff. Later, however, director Paul Schrader, screenwriter of "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull", gave him the script for a new film, asking him to write a song for the soundtrack. The title is "Born In The U.S.A." And Bruce immediately realises he has found the words he was looking for.

“Like a dog that’s been beat too much”

For anyone who grew up in America straddling the Sixties and Seventies, Vietnam is like a shadow that seems impossible to exorcise. In the early Eighties, barely five years after the end of the war, Vietnam veterans had been forgotten by everyone and left to fend for themselves, like a weight to be removed from the nation's conscience. Springsteen was struck by their stories, especially after reading Ron Kovic's autobiography "Born on the Fourth of July", which Oliver Stone would later turn into the celebrated film starring Tom Cruise.

During the tour for "The River", he dedicated a concert to the "Vietnam Veterans Of America" association, and it was on that very occasion that he explained what he saw as the real heart of the matter: "It's like when you're walking down a dark street at night, and out of the corner of your eye you see somebody getting hurt or beaten in a dark alley, but you keep walking because you think it's got nothing to do with you and you just want to get home. Vietnam turned our whole country into that dark street. And unless we're able to walk down those dark alleys and look into the eyes of the men and women who are there, and confront what happened, we're never going to be able to find our way home again".

This is what matters most to Springsteen: telling the story of a bond of solidarity that has been broken. A bond of human solidarity that is the very thing capable of holding a people together. Vietnam is the loss of the road home, the emblem of that bond's collapse. Hearts born to run with nowhere left to go, no hope left to fight for: "Nowhere to run, nowhere to go".

From the first sketch of "Vietnam" come two songs: "Born In The U.S.A." and "Shut Out The Light", destined to become the single's b-side. The version of "Born In The U.S.A." that Springsteen recorded in January 1982 (later released on the outtakes anthology "Tracks") is as skeletal and bitter as the most emblematic moments of "Nebraska". But this song was destined for a different fate. Just a few months later, Springsteen re-recorded it with the E Street Band: this would become the version that, in 1984, gave its title to the best-selling album of the American rocker's career.

"Don't you understand now?"

While Madonna ventures through the alleys of Venice in the company of a lion, there's a video showing an America made up of factories in crisis, veterans' tattoos, and white headstones lined up on cemetery grass. A preview of the coming season of rock gigantism, from "We Are The World" to "Live Aid", determined to change the world from a stadium stage. But the image that sticks in the minds of those watching MTV at the end of 1984 is above all that of the singer screaming into the microphone with a black bandana on his forehead and a denim jacket over his leather one, the quintessence of machismo, as if he'd just stepped out of a scene from "Rambo".

"I knew that 'Born In The U.S.A.' was one of those songs that only come along once in a while", Springsteen admits. "It had a force to it that seemed to point to something essential, a bit like 'Born To Run'". The success of "Born In The U.S.A.", however, exceeded even his own expectations: released as the third single from the album, the song reached the Billboard top ten, climbing the charts around the world and helping push the album to the top of the US sales charts in 1985. Almost twenty years later, "Rolling Stone" would include it among the 500 greatest rock songs of all time. And yet, few other songs in Springsteen's career have been as misunderstood as "Born In The U.S.A.". "To grasp the intent of the song you had to invest a certain amount of time and energy absorbing both the music and the words", he observes. "But that's not how most people use pop music. For most people, music is first and foremost an emotional language; whatever you've written into the lyrics almost always comes second to what the listener is feeling".

All the attention ends up focused on the quick, gripping punch of the chorus, overlooking the drama of the story it tells. In fact, "Born In The U.S.A." is built according to the typical Springsteen blueprint: "In my songs, the most spiritual part, the part with the hope in it, is always in the chorus. The blues and the everyday reality are in the details of the verses. It's something I took from gospel music and from hymns".

The most striking episode of this misunderstanding occurred right in the middle of Reagan's re-election campaign, in the autumn of 1984. During a rally in New Jersey, the President tried to ride the success of "Born In The U.S.A.", claiming that America's future "rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: those of Bruce Springsteen". Springsteen's response was not long in coming, and two days later, from the stage of a stop on the "Born In The U.S.A." tour, the New Jersey songwriter introduced his "Johnny 99" like this: "The President mentioned my name the other day, and I kept wondering what his favorite album of mine must be. I don't think it was the 'Nebraska' album. I don't think he's been listening to this one".

The choice was anything but random: the closing plea with which the protagonist of "Johnny 99" addresses the judge about to sentence him for a robbery gone tragically wrong is the perfect distillation of Springsteen's worldview: “Now judge, judge I had debts no honest man could pay/ The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they was takin’ my house away/ Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man/ But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand”. In "Born In The U.S.A.", that same judgment is condensed into a single line, in the powerlessness of that "Son, if it was up to me..." which smothers any hope of finding work for the sons and daughters of the working class returning home from war. So much for the President and his attempt to secure an unlikely endorsement from the rock star of the moment.

“Burning down the road”

1996. The screams have given way to whispers, the stadiums to theaters. Springsteen no longer wears the bandana of the Eighties, but a work shirt evoking the era of the Great Depression. The album he's presenting on stage is called "The Ghost Of Tom Joad", his first acoustic record since "Nebraska". Even "Born In The U.S.A." is no longer the same: it has now taken on the shape of a harsh, cutting blues, the melody reduced to a spoken recitative, the exaltation of the chorus completely drained away. In the end, the music dies out to the rhythm of a guitar struck like a heartbeat.

It isn't easy to live alongside a song so popular that it has taken on the status of an icon. "The success of 'Born In The U.S.A.' unsettled me", Springsteen recalls. "I knew it was impossible to scrape together some money without sacrificing something on the altar of Billboard, but I found myself in a situation where the myth of success was so powerful it threatened to crush the story I believed I was telling". Despite a multi-million-dollar offer, Springsteen refused to let the song be used for a Chrysler commercial: "By 1985 I'd become a byproduct of the meat in America's food chain", he reflects. But there's no escaping the machinery of the music business: the song became so famous that it even forced Paul Schrader, who coined the phrase "Born In The U.S.A.", to change the title of his film to "Light Of Day", drawing on the new song Springsteen wrote for the movie's soundtrack.

Springsteen thus chose the most Dylan-esque path of all: reclaiming "Born In The U.S.A." by rewriting it from scratch. Not just during the "The Ghost Of Tom Joad" tour, but also during the tour for "Devils & Dust", where the sourness of the harmonica and the reverb of a distorted microphone turn the song into a savage nightmare worthy of Tom Waits. Yet this doesn't mean Springsteen disowns the "official" version of the song: "Those performances always stood out because of the contrast with the original, and they drew some of their new power from the audience's prior experience with the album version. On the record, 'Born In The U.S.A.' was presented in its most powerful form. If I'd tried to cut something or change the music, I think I would have ended up with a record that might have been easier to understand, but not as good". That's why, alongside the reborn E Street Band, "Born In The U.S.A." can also reclaim its most forceful, solemn form: its identity, by now, has been won back.

The trajectory of "Born In The U.S.A.", in short, has a great deal to do with the very nature of a song, with the essence of its expressive form: "Does the way you choose to present your music represent its meaning? Does the sound and the shape a song takes on also constitute its content?". Springsteen answers these questions by refusing the illusion of a fixed, unchangeable form, restoring to the content all its communicative force. A force that comes directly from the intimate, visceral relationship with the listener: "I do this job to search for and find my brothers and sisters. That's the essence of what I do". The broken bond can still be mended. Such is the power of a song, and of a fist raised to the sky.

Born down in a dead man's town

I’m a cool rocking daddy in the U.S.A.

(30/05/2012)

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11/02/2026