Nebraska, Live at the Basie
In the wee wee hours your mind gets hazy
One of the discs in the Nebraska ‘82 box set is the newly-recorded live footage of Bruce Springsteen performing the entire album at the Basie in Red Bank. There's no audience, and it’s essentially a solo performance; Charlie Giordano is there to trigger some bells and the great Larry Campbell plays a second guitar occasionally and shakes tambourine on one song.
Campbell told Rolling Stone:
“Bruce asked me to listen to the tracks and stay true to the second guitar stuff going on in there. That took a lot of paying attention to what was going on. His engineer did send me some of those guitar parts separated, because they’re not mixed where they’re really discernible.”
(Emphasis mine. Chuck Plotkin really does not get enough credit in my opinion for his role in this whole saga.)
My first thought when I sat down to watch the video is that given it was directed by Thom Zimny, I had high expectations because at this point – as I wrote in my piece about “Tonight In Jungleland” at the Born to Run 50th Anniversary Symposium – as fans we know we can trust Zimny to show us what we need and want to see.
So the film is – unsurprisingly – beautifully shot and the renditions of the songs are powerful. It’s reminiscent of Joad except no one is yelling dumb things and Bruce doesn’t have to tell anyone to shut the fuck up. It’s not shot in one take (which would have been amazing) but instead, as we learn from that Larry Campbell interview, they just progressed from song to song, and if Bruce thought they had gotten it, they moved to the next one.
I didn’t read the Campbell interview until after I watched the video, because I still try to approach processing new material as unspoiled as I can possibly manage. So when I heard a triangle during “Nebraska” my first thought was, “Is Kevin Buell offstage playing percussion again?” If you don’t know that other musicians are involved, you won’t know for sure until the camera moves back so you can see Giordano and Campbell sitting off in the back stage right corner.
They’re there but barely? It wouldn’t have made sense for them to be more prominent in the shots but there is a little dissonance for me as a viewer with them being blurry and shadowy figures in the background like that. And while I wish there had been an opportunity to utilize the full range of Larry Campbell’s talents, I am also not complaining. I have complained enough about Bruce Springsteen’s predilection to utilize whoever is around instead of reaching out to any number of incredibly talented musicians who would – like Campbell – be only too happy to lend their services to any Bruce Springsteen project.
So Larry effing Campbell ends up playing tambourine? Good for him! As per that Rolling Stone interview, he was happy to be there, and he not only had the chops for the guitar work but his years of playing with Dylan and having to meld into the background made Campbell a very smart choice for this particular assignment.
Throughout the entire performance, Bruce’s voice sounds fantastic. For my money, “Used Cars,” “Johnny 99,” and “Open All Night” are the best renditions. “Used Cars” because he definitely shopped for used cars with his father in the immediate vicinity of where he was playing it. I think I favor "Johnny 99" because I'm a big fan of the song but not a big fan of its various permutations live. And he even cracks a smile and chuckles at the end of “Open All Night.”
What I'm struggling with is that I don’t think that this film adds anything to our understanding of the individual songs or the record as a body of work. Maybe that's something that will only become evident with the passage of time, but I think the issue for me is one of context. This performance takes place out of nowhere, and wouldn't have happened without the existence of the box set.
The other point of dissonance for me is that this performance is so far from the album’s point of origin. The songs have evolved and been presented live in a variety of versions, from BITUSA to Joad to their appearances in the post-Reunion era. That would have been a goldmine of material that would have been a stronger illustration of the expansiveness and durability of the Nebraska material than this straight-ahead run through, no matter how well-performed or beautifully filmed.
That, however, would have required a significant amount of work, and given Tracks 2 and the touring schedule, would have given us a Nebraska box set in 2032. They're all strong performances, but I don’t know that I’ll ever think, “Oh, let’s watch the full album performance from the Nebraska box set.”
Finally, despite the fact that Bruce has never played the Nebraska songs live in order, that is not a necessary or required thing and I kind of hate that we’ve normalized full album shows as much as we have. That’s because the considerations for album sequencing are completely different than the ones involved in creating a live setlist. So it’s not as though the absence of such a performance was some kind of gaping hole in Springsteen’s live history that this disc now remedies.
This is where I make the case that if we had gotten a proper Born in the USA box for the 35th or 40th year, throwing something together to take advantage of Deliver Me From Nowhere could have been a smaller effort.
Caryn Rose
