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Bruce Springsteen
The Ghost of Tom Joad, Columbia CD or LP CK 67484
Springsteen as balladeer
Normally an album by Bruce Springsteen, former king of arena rock,
would not be Jelly material. But The Ghost of Tom Joad
is a quiet, restrained folk effort, with nary a glockenspiel in
sight. The twelve songs are all simple works, generally just a
vocal with acoustic guitar accompaniment. Occasionally, the background
is filled by a synthesizer wash and a harmonica, or perhaps a
violin adds emphasis, but the overwhelming feeling is of stark
simplicity. All the songs are ballads in the truest sense-tales
of immigrants, scoundrels, and assorted losers, mostly told in
the third person. There's the Vietnamese refugee Le Bin Son scraping
out a living on a fishing boat in Galveston Bay, Miguel and Louis
moving from the migrant orchards to the lure of quick money working
in a methamphetamine factory, and the ex-con Charlie giving up
his job at the rendering plant, sawing off a shotgun and dreaming
of the big score. Springsteen's geographic center has shifted
over the years from the rust belt to the sun belt, where there
are a new set of stories to tell.
The obvious comparison is with Nebraska, Springsteen's
often neglected 1982 solo album, incongruously bisecting a commercial
career trajectory heading from The River to Born in
the USA. Careful listening reveals a world of difference between
the two, each with its own strength and weakness. Nebraska
was a set of demo tapes that Springsteen failed to successfully
adapt to the studio. With a few overdubs, the four-track masters
were released as the album. Tom Joad on the other hand is a fully
realized studio work, the sound clean and sparse. Springsteen's
voice on Nebraska is strained, often cracking as the raw
tales spill out. The overall effect is either touching or histrionic,
depending on your interpretation. Perhaps because it was intended
as the starting point for a studio session, there's quite a bit
of variety on Nebraska, with a typical mix of uptempo and
slower tunes. The vocals on Tom Joad are much more controlled,
more detached and ultimately more disturbing, and the mood more
single-minded.
The sparseness of the album reveals it biggest weakness-a monotonic
approach with barely existent melodies. The Ghost of Tom Joad
is not background music. The melodies are so thin they dissolve
away leaving only the stark songs beneath. But after you learn
the stories, each listening becomes a re-telling of an oral history
that is folk music at its best. Two rays of hope reflect from
Tom Joad's mirrored surface. "Dry Lightning"
is a pretty cowboy love song, and "Across the Border"
tells the hopeful dreams of a man soon to sneak into the U.S.
The dream is just that, however, and "Balboa Park" tells
of the grim reality that awaits in San Diego's promised land.
It's impossible to write about an album like this without at least
a quick nod to the politics behind it. On his last album, Springsteen
was worried about being a rich man in a poor man's shirt . But
it would seem the Republican revolution has prompted his return
to the chronicling the lives of the neglected, much as Nebraska
replied to the Reagan revolution. Tom Joad, of course, was the
central character in The Grapes of Wrath, but the album
credits John Ford's sanitized agitprop movie rather than Steinbeck's
novel as the primary inspiration. The title track movingly puts
to music Henry Fonda's famous soliloquy about "anywhere there's
a cop beating a man" - with its eerie echoes of modern Los
Angeles.
Springsteen has been quoted as saying he wants to follow Neil
Young's example and record different types of albums with different
bands in the coming years. The Ghost of Tom Joad is a keeper,
and let's hope his future explorations prove as fruitful. --Bill Kuhn
Glenn Brooks says... Columbia has seen fit to release The Ghost
of Tom Joad on LP as well as CD. I listened to both, and found
the LP conveys a somewhat better sense of the space surrounding
Springsteen and the instruments, and does a much better job at
capturing low level sounds, such as Springsteen's unvoiced exhalations
at the end of a phrase. But the vinyl itself is not high quality,
so you have to put up with a bit of surface noise.
production notes & song titles
Bruce Springsteen, vocals, guitar, harmonica, keyboards; accompanied
by other musicians on five tracks.
Produced by Bruce Springsteen and Chuck Plotkin, recorded and
mixed by Toby Scott, mastered by Dave Collins. 1995 release. (50:18)
The Ghost of Tom Joad | Straight Time | Highway 25 | Youngstown
| Sinaloa Cowboys | The Line | Balboa Park | Dry Lightning | The
New Timer | Across the Border | Galveston Bay | My Best Was Never
Good Enough
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