Born to Run (38 page)

Beyond this, I personally needed to know where my family—my grandparents, my mom, dad and sisters—fell in the arc of American experience and what that meant for me, the fortunate son.

FORTY-TWO

HELLO WALLS

I returned to New Jersey after the
River
tour. While on the road, I’d been tossed from my farmhouse and transplanted to a ranch house in Colts Neck, rented sight unseen. The place sat nicely on a reservoir, just a spit from the rope swing my surfing pals and I would visit with our girlfriends on the days the Atlantic lay flat upon the shore. The tour had made sure I finally
had my creditors paid and what felt to me like a small fortune in the bank. I’d have to find some new things to worry about. I’d driven strictly vintage automobiles my whole life. My two-thousand-dollar ’57 Chevy morphed into my six-thousand-dollar ’Vette, backed by my 1970 Ford pickup as a daily driver. In the winter I’d load my truck bed with tree trunks for rear-wheel traction and run the icy
roads of Monmouth County. Debts paid, career established, all should have been pretty free and easy, but I’m not free and easy. So, I sat around and anguished over whether I should spend ten thousand dollars
on a
new
car. I was thirty-one and I’d never owned a new car in my life. For that matter, outside of studio expenses, I’d never spent ten thousand dollars on myself. I didn’t know anyone who
was making more than they could live on, so the money I’d made left me feeling uncomfortably different and somewhat embarrassed. Still, I bit the bullet, rode down to the dealer and drove away in a 1982 Chevy Z28 Camaro. I felt as conspicuous as if I were driving a solid-gold Rolls-Royce.

A House Is Not a Home

My ranch house was wall-to-wall orange shag carpet. I know, it was Frank Sinatra’s
favorite color, but I could feel a serial killing comin’ on. I decided I needed a permanent home. I found a real estate agent, several real estate agents, and started looking. I scoured the state and looked at everything from the humble to the high and mighty. Every available crib in Central and Western New Jersey was cleared of its inhabitants, invaded and scrutinized. Nothing. They were all either
too big, too small, too old, too new, too cheap, too expensive, too far or too close. At first, I felt like, “Well, I just didn’t see anything I liked.” It took a while and some mental probing, but I came to see that NO HOME BUILT BY MAN! was going to hold/satisfy the Jersey Devil. As was my way, I turned the minutest of decisions into full-blown identity issues: What car? What shirt? What house?
What girl? I had not mastered the simple principle that to live shy of insanity, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cigar
needs
to be just a cigar.

At the end of the day, I was simply a guy who was rarely comfortable in his own skin, whatever skin that might be. The idea of home itself, like much else, filled me with distrust and a bucket load of grief. I’d long convinced myself . . . almost .
 . . that homes were for everybody else. But now, something was fucking with my movie. (That movie would be the one where I play an itinerant musician, unlucky at love but fabulously and unrewardingly talented; a charismatic man whose happy-go-lucky exterior
covers a bruised but noble soul. As I drift from town to town, two things regularly occur. One, a beautiful woman always falls helplessly
in love with me, a love that I cannot reciprocate due to the fact that my “heart” belongs to the highway. And two, I transform the life of everyone I meet to such a degree that they welcome me into their homes, feed me, lay upon my brow laurels, give me their girlfriends and will “always remember” me. I nod my head in humble acknowledgment, then travel on, whistling, suitcase in hand, along the dusty
back roads of America, lonely but free, to seek out my next adventure. I lived that masterpiece for a long time.)

A winter morning sun shines on a roadkill doe, its fur covered in a pink frost, as I drive toward my “Rosebud”—Freehold, New Jersey. I still spent many hours a four-wheeled phantom on the edges of my birth city. Mine was a pathetic and quasi-religious compulsion. On my visits to my
hometown, I would never leave the confines of my car. That would’ve ruined it. My car was my sealed time capsule from whose bucket seats I could experience the little town that had its crushing boot on my neck in whatever mental time, space or moment I chose. Come evening I rolled through its streets, listening for the voices of my father, my mother, me as a child. I’d pass by the old stores and
Victorian homes of Freehold and daydream . . . of purchasing a house, moving back, away from all the noise I’d created, bringing it all full circle, fixing things, receiving the blessings of these streets, finding a love, one that would last, marrying and walking through town, my children in my arms, my woman at my side. It was a pleasant fantasy and I suppose I took comfort in the illusion that
I could go back. But I’d been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable. You can move on, with a heart stronger in the places it’s been broken, create new love. You can hammer pain and trauma into a righteous sword and use it in defense of life, love, human grace and God’s blessings. But
nobody
gets a do-over. Nobody gets to go back and there’s only one road out. Ahead, into
the dark.

FORTY-THREE

NEBRASKA

Houseless and clueless about where to turn next, I decided to lose myself in the marginally more controllable terrain of my musical life. With the spiderweb of my past gumming up my works, I turned to a world I’d walked through as a child, remained on familiar terms with and heard calling to me now.

Nebraska
began as an unknowing meditation on my childhood and its mysteries.
I had no conscious political agenda or social theme. I was after a feeling, a tone that felt like the world I’d known and still carried inside me. The remnants of that world were still only ten minutes and ten miles from where I was living. The ghosts of
Nebraska
were drawn from my many sojourns into the small-town streets I’d grown up on. My family, Dylan, Woody, Hank, the American gothic short
stories of Flannery O’Connor, the noir novels of James M. Cain, the quiet violence of the films of Terrence Malick and the decayed fable of director Charles Laughton’s
The Night of the Hunter
all guided my imagination. That and the flat, dead voice that drifted
through my town on the nights I couldn’t sleep. The voice I heard when I’d wander in a three a.m. trance out onto the front porch of my
home to feel the sticky heat and listen to streets silent but for the occasional grinding gears of tractor-trailers groaning like dinosaurs beneath the dust cloud, pulling up South Street to Route 33 and out of town. Then . . . quiet.

The songs of
Nebraska
were written quickly, all rising from the same ground. Each song took maybe three or four takes to record. I was only making “demos.” “Highway
Patrolman” and “State Trooper” were recorded only once each. “Mansion on the Hill” was first, “My Father’s House” last, with the song “Nebraska” serving as the record’s heart. I tapped into white gospel, early Appalachian music and the blues. The writing was in the details; the twisting of a ring, the twirling of a baton, was where these songs found their character. As in
The Night of the Hunter
, I often wrote from a child’s point of view. “Mansion on the Hill,” “Used Cars” and “My Father’s House” were all stories that came out of my experience with my family.

I wanted black bedtime stories. I thought of the records of John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson, music that sounded so good with the lights out. I wanted the listener to hear my characters think, to feel their thoughts, their choices.
These songs were the opposite of the rock music I’d been writing. They were restrained, still on the surface, with a world of moral ambiguity and unease below. The tension running through the music’s core was the thin line between stability and that moment when the things that connect you to your world, your job, your family, your friends, the love and grace in your heart, fail you. I wanted
the music to feel like a waking dream and to move like poetry. I wanted the blood in these songs to feel destined and fateful.

Frustrated at blowing all my money on studio time, I sent my guitar tech out to get a recorder, a little less lo-fi than the cassette recorder I usually used to lay down my new song ideas. I needed a better and less expensive way to tell if my new material was record-worthy.
He came back with a four-track Japanese Tascam 144 cassette recorder. We set it up in my
bedroom; I’d sing, play, and with the two tracks left, I could add a backing vocal, an extra guitar or a tambourine. On four tracks, that’s all you could do. I mixed it through a guitar Echoplex unit onto a beat box like the kind you’d take to the beach, total cost for the project: about a grand. After that,
I went into the studio, brought in the band, re-recorded and remixed everything. On listening, I realized I’d succeeded in doing nothing but damaging what I’d created. We got it to sound cleaner, more hi-fi, but not nearly as atmospheric, as authentic.

All popular artists get caught between making records and making music. If you’re lucky, sometimes it’s the same thing. When you learn to craft
your music into recordings, there’s always something gained and something lost. The ease of an unself-conscious voice gives way to the formality of presentation. On certain records, that trade-off may destroy the essential nature of what you’ve done. At the end of the day, satisfied I’d explored the music’s possibilities and every blind alley, I pulled out the original cassette I’d been carrying
around in my jeans pocket and said, “This is it.”

FORTY-FOUR

DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

Nebraska
and the first half of
Born in the USA
were recorded at the same time. I thought I was working on one record but
Nebraska
’s intransigence to integration soon awakened me to the situation at hand. We toyed with the idea of a double record, the acoustic
Nebraska
and the electric
Born in the USA
in one package, but the tonality of the music was just too
different, too oppositional.
Nebraska
had been so funkily recorded, it would not go onto an LP. It would distort, feed back and declare revolution on the common materials of recording. We discussed releasing it on cassette only, then Chuck Plotkin managed to find an old mastering lathe at Atlantic Studios and my lo-fi latest surrendered itself to vinyl.
Nebraska
entered respectably on the charts,
got some pretty nice reviews and received little to no airplay. For the first time, I didn’t tour on a release. It felt too soon after
The River
, and
Nebraska
’s quiet stillness would take me a while longer to bring to the stage. Life went on.

I drifted away from my very lovely twenty-year-old girlfriend and packed for a cross-country road trip. I’d recently purchased a small cottage in the Hollywood
Hills and figured I’d winter out west in the California sunshine. This was the trip where the ambivalence, trouble and toxic confusion I’d had volcanically bubbling for thirty-two years would finally reach critical mass.

The Trip

It was a ’69 Ford XL with a white ragtop, sea green and Cadillac long. I’d bought it for a few grand and my friend and road buddy Matt Delia, along with his brothers
Tony and Ed, fitted it out for the ride. In the midseventies, up in Bergen County, Matt, Tony and Ed owned the last Triumph motorcycle dealership in New Jersey. Introduced to me through Max Weinberg, Matt had set me up with a late-sixties Triumph Trophy, something clicked, and Matt, Tony and Ed became the brothers I never had.

Matt was now a Goodyear dealer, and the morning of our departure,
we hung at the shop, putting the finishing touches on the XL, taking farewell photos and doctoring the all-important sound system. It’d be just Matt and me making the crossing. It was fall; our plan was to run south, pick up some warm weather, drop the top and head west.

I’m driving. Matt’s suffered a recent breakup with his girl and has fallen on some blue times. He spends most of our first
day riding shotgun, arms locked around a huge teddy bear. Matt’s built like a block, with thick arms and forearms, and the sight of those ropes wrapped around a five-year-old’s toy bear emanates bad voodoo for our trip. I try to explain to him the teddy is throwing a kink into our Kerouac
On the Road
cool, but Matt’s committed to his blues and his bear, so we drive on.

Matt

My lifelong friend
Matt Delia hails from smack-dab in the middle of a family of fourteen children. A mother prone to the arts and a father in the salvage business have left Matt with the talents and physique of a mechanic and the soul of a poet. For a living, he wrenches day and night on motorcycles and cars and is completely at home both dealing with the gearheads, dirt trackers and random motorcycle gang members
who routinely show up at the shop’s front counter in search of his services and discussing music, politics and culture with the likes of me. Car-hoppin’ image aside, I, like many others confronting vehicular trouble, will reach not for the toolbox but for God’s gift to man, the cell phone. But I like to be on wheels, and in the ancient days about which I will soon regale you children, THERE WERE NO
CELL PHONES! So, Matt is my partner and hands-on pipeline to the world of automotive freedom. It’s all Route 66, two guys in a convertible, magic as long as one of us can fix this fucker when it unromantically breaks down on the outskirts of nowheresville. Back in the day, when wheels got flat, radiators blew steam, fan belts shredded, carburetors clogged, engine blocks spewed oil and the automobile
was a less trustworthy traveling companion, the Delia brothers, sturdy as tree trunks and many times more reliable, provided company and solace on several of the biggest road trips of my life. Matt, the eldest of the three, in his youth, bore a fleeting resemblance to
In Cold Blood
–era Robert Blake, and in our thirty-five years of friendship, we’ve driven the country together more than a few times.
He is my Dean Moriarty.