BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN Nebraska (Columbia)

Richard C. Walls

This, then, is the departure you’ve been hearing about: no E Street Band, just Bruce and his guitar and occasional harmonica, presenting an acoustic chronicle of pressures, frustrations, and humiliations, starting with the title cut, a Dylanesque (as in very early Dylan) variant of the Charles Starkweather story, a ballad of the common man as psychopath. At which point you either moan and leave the room or become intrigued. If you stay with the album, by the time you wind your way thru its catalog of stunted lives, dead ends and, all things considered, awesome faith, you begin to understand the random murderer of the opening cut—not accepting, necessarily, or condoning, certainly not, but you begin to see him less as a demonic enigma ripping thru the badlands and more as just an extreme reaction to a widespread malady manifested in millions of empty lives—by the record’s end you might well wonder why there aren’t more Charles Starkweathers.