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.

What I think happened was that at some point after that interview, when Bruce Inc. were figuring out what they could release to tie in with the release of Deliver Me From Nowhere, and they were going through all of the demos and studio outtakes, someone very wisely spoke up and said, "Hey, this is what the fans mean by electric Nebraska." Because they were clearly going through what they had to figure out if it was enough to put into a box set and ask us for another $80 in October, after asking us for $300 back in June for a different box set.

I would also like to stress that I am guessing. I have not spoken to any sources on this particular subject, on the record or off, nor have I tried to get anyone to talk to me about it (on-the-record or off). This is the most inside of insider baseball. I don't know what percentage of people at your average Springsteen concert know about the existence of "electric Nebraska" but I'm betting it's in the single digits. (There's a reason I pitched my first story about the record to a British publication.)

I wish I could say that I have spent 40+ years thinking about an electric Nebraska but in my younger years I didn't care as much about album outtakes as I did live shows, so my collecting energy went towards live boots. I also really liked the Nebraska we had. I didn't think that slow / acoustic / folk music was bad. And also, when Glory Days came out in 1987, there were many many many pages of Marsh talking to Landau, Bruce, and Chuck Plotkin where they elaborated on how those sessions were not good. As below:

Be that as it may, the fact was that the material on Bruce's demo cassette wasn't going anywhere. For two weeks, they slugged it out with the same tunes. "I remember the main one we kept whackin' away at was 'Atlantic City,' which was a song that sounded like it was gonna really lend itself to the band," said Landau. "That was one song that seemed like it wasn't gonna be any problem. And that was goin' nowhere. No way was it as good as what he had goin' on that demo tape. Then we tried 'Nebraska' for a while, and Bruce had a whole little arrangement for it that had been rehearsed." Again, no success.

This seems fairly clear!!

They tried other songs, notably "Mansion on the Hill," with an equal lack of results. "The stuff on the demo tape was astounding. It was an incredibly evocative piece of work. And we were losing more than we were picking up," said Plotkin. "I wouldn't even say that the stuff didn't come out beautifully. But the big thing was gone. The stillness was gone, the intimacy was gone. It was being scaled incorrectly."

Once again, how did we receive this information in 1987 and not put the idea of electric Nebraska to bed immediately?

I tried very hard to find the first mention of the term "electric Nebraska." I remember hearing about it during the BITUSA tour era, but it wasn't something I was hunting down. I asked friends, but everyone's memory is imprecise on this subject. There's nothing in Glory Days that uses that term. There are, however, 15 references to "electric Nebraska" in Backstreets, taken from a perusal of issue #8 to issue #91. Many are inside jokes. But some of the more substantive mentions are worth reading.

Backstreets #21 (Summer 1987) had a series called "The Studio Sessions," billed as "a series about the unreleased recordings of Bruce Springsteen," Erik Flannigan wrote:

What is known is that songs such as “Born in the USA,” and “Downbound Train’’ were written and recorded along with the other home demos for Nebraska. All the Nebraska material was tried with the full band, but for reasons only now becoming clear (see Marsh’s Glory Days), the electric Nebraska was scrapped and Bruce released his first solo album.

One can only speculate that the unheard Nebraska demo version of ‘Born in the USA” would sound much like the version performed at last year’s Bridge Concert, and that the unheard electric Nebraska songs would be much like the live arrangements done on the Born in the USA tour, But Bruce and Jon Landau decided to use the home-recorded demos and the band was idle until late 1982.

In Backstreets #22 (Fall 1987) Flannigan continued the series:

We have chosen not to go into the Nebraska sessions in any detail because most info on that material is pure speculation. The much sought after ‘Electric Nebraska’’ tape has never surfaced, despite rumors that it is held by a chosen few collectors. Hopefully someday we may be able to hear why the full band versions were not used.

My favorite mention, however, is from Backstreets #62, Spring of 1999, in the "On Lips" column:

Steve Van Zandt's role in The Sopranos, the critically acclaimed and popular HBO mini-series on Mafia life in New Jersey, isn't the drama's only connection to Bruce Springsteen. The season finale included a reference to Tracks (told by the FBI that they had something they wanted him to hear, Tony Soprano asks, “the Springsteen box set? I've already got it") and featured "State Trooper” at the end of the episode. Now if Tony could work on the Electric Nebraska tapes.

Would love to hear from the rest of y'all as to your recollections about when you first heard about an electric Nebraska. Deeper dives on the box set to follow later this week and next.