The Ghost of Tom Joad
Shenk, Joshua Wolf
The Ghost of Tom Joad While Washington tries to deny reality, Bruce Springsteen faces it BY JOSHUA WOLF SHENK WALKING PAST THE WHITE HOUSE on my way to a Bruce Springsteen performance a year...
...But the border he explores is not just a geographical one...
...But consensus has its flaws...
...Seven hundred tons of metal a day, now sir you tell me the world’s changed...
...Much is made now of Washington’s bipartisan spirit, of the possibilities of a centrist Democrat working with chastened Republicans...
...it is about sons and their fathers, men and women...
...These leaders see a world of breathtaking complexity and unanimously preach the same lessons: Welfare is the poor person’s worst enemy...
...But in Springsteen’s determination to tell these stories, there is hope-even optimism...
...They live with a greater sense of apprehension, anxiety, and fear than they would in a more just and open society...
...Throughout his work, and particularly in “Nebraska” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” he acts as a straightforward storyteller...
...But if this ambiguity is one explanation of his artistic genius, it is also one of the reasons Springsteen’s work is socially valuable...
...Artists can express their opinions...
...You can show them things...
...Springsteen’s music is many things to many people, but it surely serves as an antidote to this isolation...
...It is an album of distressing, piercing stories-of criminals and state troopers, of men with grease under their fingers that never washes out, of people living with darkness, disadvantage, and disappointment...
...More importantly, Springsteen’s music is not oriented around the body politic, but around the human spirit...
...My name is Joe Roberts,” one song begins...
...And though music may seem more indirect or less intellectual than poetry or fiction, Springsteen’s reach is as broad-if not more so-as the likes of Charles Dickens and Pablo Neruda...
...Springsteen was then on a tour that drew crowds as large as 200,000...
...The root cause of crime is criminals...
...Springsteen’s music is not about public policy...
...Springsteeds concern is for the men stuck on the wrong side...
...U&e Reagan’s stories of Caddlac welfare queens, evil empires, and demonic bureaucrats, Springsteen doesn’t pigeonhole and scapegoat those who are different...
...Artists have always acted as social consciences...
...The Ghost of Tom Joad” is full of dark stories-people who suffer and die, who make bad choices...
...He never has...
...His epic album “Born to Run” captured the fierce yearning of young lives trapped in dying towns...
...Darkness on the Edge of Town” had an explosive anger...
...Look for me, Mom, I’ll be there...
...Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries...
...And Springsteen wants nothing less than to show what’s real, what’s true...
...He climbs into the minds of the down-andoutnot to simplify, but to complicate...
...I got a brother named Frankie, and F d e ain’t no good...
...And yet, Springsteen’s liberalism is a confounding sort...
...With songs about Mexican immigrants and migrant workers and men riding the railroad tracks, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Springsteen’s latest album, has been called a western complement to “Nebraska...
...And to persist...
...I work for the state...
...But over the next decade, Springsteen’s stories grew considerably more complicated...
...In 1984, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that America’s future “rests in the message of hope, in the songs of a man that so many young Americans admire...
...And, in a time for liberals of fracture and defeat, it may offer the simplest and best and most beautiful response to the armies of the right...
...He’s a ghost...
...I’ve always done an honest job, as honest as I could...
...It’s no surprise that Reagan wanted a piece of him...
...to persist...
...People keep guns in their homes...
...Youngstown,” a man eulogizes the steel yards of that Ohio town...
...We all had something to learn...
...It was, Springsteen said later, “my connection to the human race...
...Springsteen’s stories were of people that many Americans would rather simply ignore...
...Still, there is a larger meaning to these stories...
...They are individual realities...
...His father would constantly scowl, “Put down that god damned guitar...
...Tom is not the man on the white horse who d save us all...
...Though he is the exact opposite of an ideologue, the stories of Springsteen’s music do coalesce into a vision...
...NOW Tom said, ‘Mom wherever there’s a cop beatin’ a guy...
...I’m a sergeant out of Perreneville, barracks number eight...
...Economic injustice,” he said in a 1987 interview, “falls on everybody’s head and steals everyone’s freedom...
...But for a poor kid in a family that struggled financially and emotionally, the guitar was not just a hobby...
...When Springsteen burst forth in 1971 with “Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey,” his lyrics were exuberant, poetic, even mildly hallucinogenic...
...For one, politics, expressed in any literal sense, almost always suffocates the art it is attached to...
...In JOSHUA WOLF SHENK is an associate editor of U.S...
...Introducing “Growin’ Up,” a song from his first album, Springsteen often tells the story of his misfit childhood: The nuns at his school hated him...
...Even in “Streets of Philadelphia” and “Dead Man Walking,” AIDS and capital punishment aren’t social problems...
...When he sets stories to music, lives are created in the listeners’ imagination...
...But if their work isn’t larger than a “message,” it’s probably not art in the first place...
...And it is from that soul-and with an extraordinarily prolific imaginationthat Springsteen has spun so many stories...
...I don’t believe you can tell people any%,”Sp ringsteen told David Corn in a MotherJmes interview...
...At a time when so many have given up on the tough tasks of building a shared community, Springsteen’s music beckons us to see the world with clear eyes and listen with open hearts...
...The album’s patriotism is one of tragic irony, with a title track telling the story of a Vietnam veteran abandoned by hs countq with “nowhere to run . . . nowhere to go...
...Springsteen’s music is about the struggle to engage-ourselves, our families, and the larger community with which we are inextricably bound...
...In the title song, Springsteen solemnly intones that he is “waiting for the ghost of Tom Joad”-the redemptive Christ figure of Steinbeck‘s novel and John Ford’s film...
...The Ghost of Tom Joad While Washington tries to deny reality, Bruce Springsteen faces it BY JOSHUA WOLF SHENK WALKING PAST THE WHITE HOUSE on my way to a Bruce Springsteen performance a year ago, I passed a stream of tuxedoed congressmen headed for the Clintons’ Christmas party...
...Still do...
...And in 1982, Springsteen produced a fierce, soulful work called “Nebraska...
...Say what you will,” William Carlos Williams wrote in the introduction to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage-and the art...
...As I think back on it, I wish some of those tuxedoes would have followed me to Constitution Hall...
...But the song offers the hope that his spirit can be claimed by all of us...
...Springsteen never resolves the conflict,” a reviewer wrote in 1974, “(id he ever does, his music will probably become less interesting...
...News & World Report and a contributing editor of The washington Monthly...
...Gay marriage is a threat to the family...
...Your wife can’t walk down the street at night...
...Growin’ Up” contains the crucial line, ‘‘I came out with my soul untouched...
...These simplistic arguments thnve in an age of gated communities, shopping malls, and customized mediaa world where, for the prinlegtd, eve- that is inconvenient or unsettling is simply shut out...
...Where there’s a fight ’gunst the blood and hatred in the air...
...Suddenly, “political” no longer seemed such a strange fit...
...Of course, to anyone who had listened to “Born in the USA” with any care, Reagan’s invocation was a grave, if hilarious, error...
...Political” was not a word that came to mind...
...Springsteen’s characters are almost invariably tom between “straight time” and the lure of easy money, between the woman at home and the boys on the street...
...Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name...
...His is a biblical idealism: The truth shall set us free...
...it is also about the emotional and economic divisions that separate Americans from one another...
Vol. 29 • January 1997 • No. 1
