The Myth of "Electric Nebraska"

With the upcoming (now delayed a week) release of Nebraska '82: EXPANDED EDITION, including a disc with the label we've all been waiting for - ELECTRIC NEBRASKA - I thought it would be worth digging to see if we could find how this all started.

The first mention of the term "electric Nebraska" that I could find was in Backstreets #11, Fall 1984. In an interview Charles Cross did with Max Weinberg, this discussion took place:

Backstreets: Is there really an electric Nebraska?
Max Weinberg: Yeah, we did a lot of those songs with the band.

I want to point out the obvious, which is Max did not say "yes there is a whole album of the same songs in the same order as it was released." He just said "we played on some of those songs." But musicians don't think about their output in the same way that fans do. Max wasn't trying to propagate a myth, he was just answering a question.

I now firmly believe that that misunderstanding of how one defines "electric Nebraska" is at the heart of what I think this particular snipe hunt has been. Yes, there were many songs written in that particular time period which the E Street Band played and recorded in the studio, before the decision was made to abandon pursuing that particular direction. But that's all that there was! They didn't record all the songs, because it wasn't working. Why would they try another song from the tape when the first six didn't work?

So when Andy Greene – or anyone else over the years – asked Bruce "What about an electric Nebraska?" he truthfully answered that it didn't exist. Because it didn't, and despite the very smart branding of disc 2 of the Nebraska '82 Expanded Edition, it still does not exist. What we have on that disc is six Nebraska songs recorded by the E Street Band. "It was senseless to waste studio time getting nowhere, and since the studio time was already booked, it was time to try some different material," according to Dave Marsh in Glory Days.