Springsteen’s “Nebraska” Hitting UPH Oct. 5

SARATOGA SPRINGS – When it came that last Thursday of September in 1982, it was something of a surprise.

It came wrapped in a photograph captured out the front passenger window along an otherwise tenant-less road that scrutinized the bleak prairies, foreboding fenceposts and ominous clouds on the horizon. The image itself was bordered by a black frame and red block letters that read simply: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. NEBRASKA.

“It felt like a foreign object in my hand,” recalls writer, educator and musician Warren Zanes. “It affected me at the time – but the first was feeling alienated from it.”

On Saturday, Oct. 5, Zanes will celebrate Springsteen’s “Nebraska” with song and stories at Universal Preservation Hall. The event showcases his acclaimed book about the making of the album – as well as the multi-star PBS special and the movie-in-the-works the book has spawned. The Saratoga Springs show is an invitation that promises to immerse attendees in a fully American experience.      

“Nebraska” was Springsteen’s sixth album but his first solo record, dropping after the E Street band releases “Born To Run, “Darkness on The Edge of Town,” and “The River,” and two years before what would become “Born In the U.S.A.”

Music critics used words like hopelessness, brooding, stark, doom and loss to verbally relate the album’s somber strums of a campfire guitar and storytelling accented by the lonely wail of a harmonica floating craggily across a sepia-toned terrain. Forty-two years later, aided by time and a patient willingness to listen, “Nebraska” is today often celebrated for the brilliance it is, and frankly always was. It just took a while for many of us to get there.

“’Born to Run’ – we were all over it. ‘Darkness on The Edge of Town,’ we’re all over it. We were in the coach crossing the prairie and then ‘Nebraska’ comes and the first feeling was: this isn’t what he was supposed to do. It didn’t make sense to my young mind,” Zanes recalls.  

“I went running for ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town,’ but – even as a young fan you find that you’re committed to the artist. So, I went back to it. And I think it was the mood and the lack of redemption that started to speak to me. I also put it in with the punk rock that I liked. It seemed to be about refusing the easy way.”

Nebraska lists 10 songs in all. For listeners, moments wrapped in a sonic surprise came before you’d even have to get up and turn the record over.

Last song, side one, twenty-four minutes and forty-five seconds in comes tumbling the startling Bruce-howl that never failed to shake the bejesus out of you no matter how many times you’d heard it before and would practice preparing for it. 

The Saratoga Springs show – which partners UPH with the Saratoga Book Festival – is an outgrowth of Zanes’ latest book, “Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska,” which garnered merit as a 2023 NPR Best Book Of The Year.

The book gave birth to a recently filmed PBS special with Eric Church, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, Noah Kahan, Lyle Lovett, and the Lumineers.  “You know that was probably the biggest night of my career and they weren’t there because of Warren Zanes, they were there because of ‘Nebraska,’” says Zanes who wrote and directed the TV special.   

It also spawned a movie adaptation of Zanes’ book to be distributed by 20th Century Studios and Disney that will be directed by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Hostiles, Black Mass) and casts Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) as Springsteen.

“Believe me when I say the unthinkable happens for this writer. You write these things and hope a few people read it,” Zanes says. “You don’t think someone’s going to take your book and turn it into a movie. And the best news is that Bruce is excited about it.”  

I Can’t Say That, I Am Sorry, For The Things That, We Had Done

“If he hadn’t already established himself as Bruce Springsteen, if he hadn’t been the guy who had done ‘Born To Run,’ who had done ‘The River,’ no label would have accepted ‘Nebraska.’ But he was already Bruce Springsteen, so Columbia (Records) was not in a position to turn down a Bruce record,” Zanes says.

“Was this what they were looking for? Those who say it was what they were looking for – they are liars. It wasn’t just that he turned in a record that was imperfect, unfinished, muddy. He also said he was not going to tour behind it and he wasn’t doing any press. I make this point in the book: if you can make a list of all the things a label does not want to hear…he had them all. The way Bruce describes it, he wanted that record to go directly to the fans and they needed to make up their minds about, to understand what it was. He didn’t want anyone explaining it to them.”

Zanes’ hands have touched many things: guitarist for The Del Fuegos, biographer of Tom Petty, avid bicycle racer, solo musical artist, college professor, father, dog owner (a shelter dog from Mississippi named Toby), writer, decade-long Executive Director of Steven Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, and former VP of Education and Programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

“I have this portfolio of somewhat diverse interests and how they went from being just interests to parts of a career is fairly haphazard,” he says. “I would describe myself as a late bloomer. My brother asked me to join a rock ‘n’ roll band (The Del Fuegos) when I was 17, so from 17 to 23 there really was nothing else to think about; radical monotony,” Zanes says with a laugh.

“Before rock ‘n’ roll, I went to boarding school. I was at the bottom of my class until Ward Just came along,” he fondly recalls of his teacher who had been a Vietnam War correspondent at the Washington Post and would become a prolific novelist.  

 “He came into the classroom smoking Camel non-filters and with the gift of taking young people seriously. He made you feel that maybe what you were writing mattered in some way. And that was crucial. There was a very significant moment when I was a teenager, probably taking myself too seriously, and I wrote this passage about what made Elvis Presley important. I was a little embarrassed about it, but I had to turn the pages in for an assignment,” Zanes recalls.  “I was alone with him in the classroom, and he’s smoking and says: This Elvis stuff… Really works. It was a moment for me. It was the first time where the stuff I loved outside of the classroom was suddenly welcomed into it. And that seed definitely stuck. There’s this cultural collision where music somehow is making it all make sense in that one moment…it all matters, and that’s what I got from him and that’s what would come back to me later on as I started to work as a professor,” Zanes says. “It was crucial that he gave me that little push.”

A bachelor’s degree, two master’s and a Ph. D. later, Zanes says he still conjures those positive feelings received from a receptive teacher to try and inspire his own classroom.  “When I’m standing in front of my own students do I hope for that? Always. I think every teacher does.”   

I’m Tired Of Coming Out On The Losing End, So Last Night I Met This Guy And I’m Gonna Do A Little Favor For Him

“I was a teenager when I met Bruce, a teenager when I met Tom Petty. Before I met them, I’d been listening to their records as a very committed fan and these guys mattered a lot to me,” says Zanes, who is 59, and in 2015 would see publication of his book ”Petty: The Biography.”  

“Before I became his biographer, he could have picked whoever he wanted. I think what he liked when he picked me was the diversity of my background, that I could come at the subject as a musician, as a writer, as a historian,” Zanes says.  “Make no mistake, Tom Petty sometimes had a man-of-few-words quality, but he was a deep thinker and very sophisticated. I remember standing in his driveway when he asked me, and I was like: by all means. And he immediately set up the parameters: ‘This will not be authorized, I think any biography that says authorized is bull… It’s your book, your contract.’ He just laid it all out. He didn’t want to get in the way of a truth about him as an artist that he might not find palatable.”

Down In The Part Of Town Where When You Hit A Red Light You Don’t Stop  

“When I went to work on the Bruce stuff, talking with Jon Landau (Springsteen’s long-time co-producer and manager), I said, ‘Here’s how Petty laid it out.’  And Jon just looked at me and said: yeah, that works for me. 

“On ‘Nebraska,’ Springsteen was thinking in a cross-cultural way, as I talk about in the book,” says Zanes, whose book on the topic “Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska,” was published in 2023. “He’s looking at movies. He’s reading short stories. He’s looking at photographs and he’s thinking in a way as a writer that is rarer than I think is acknowledged.” 

The event at Universal Preservation Hall will incorporate words and music.

“When it comes to a book about ‘Nebraska,’ the songs are so important that I started putting together book events that included me – not just reading from the book, but talking about the making of the book and going beyond, leading to particular songs and having the music punctuate everything.  And that’s the way I’ll do it in Saratoga,” Zanes says.

“If I’m talking about ‘Mansion on the Hill,’ it leads into someone playing that song. Although I have a partial life as a musician, I didn’t want to play. I want to have other people playing songs. It’s a moveable, shapeable thing and that’s what I’m bringing to Saratoga,” Zanes says. Musicians scheduled to appear include Chris Hartford, Kate Fenner, Scott Moore and locally based Thom Powers.

“Ideally the audience goes away with a feeling of being immersed in the topic of one of popular music’s strangest and most beautiful records.”   

For more information about the Saratoga Book Festival, which runs Oct. 4-7, as well as specific ticket information regarding Warren Zanes’ celebration of Springsteen’s “Nebraska” at UPH, go to: https://saratogabookfestival.org/ or HERE.