“Bruce is a repairman,” speaks actor Jeremy Strong, playing music mogul Jon Landau, in the trailer for the forthcoming big-screen biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. “He’s repairing that hole in himself. And once he’s done that, he’s going to repair the entire world.”
Such is the weapons-grade level of Hollywood bullshit fans better be bracing themselves for as The Boss follows in the footsteps of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis and other rock ’n’ roll royalty by getting his first major movie treatment this autumn.
Starring Jeremy Allen White (surly chef guy in The Bear) in the lead role, it’ll dramatise the making of the New Jerseyite’s sonically and emotionally raw album 1982’s Nebraska – an important personal gateway to his blockbusting Born in the USA stadium era, not to mention a seminal record all in its own right.
Contrary to appearances, I’m trying not to judge the film too pre-emptively. Laying big clumsy metaphors on with a trowel, before hitting you over the head with the trowel, is the unsubtle way of scripts written for large general audiences. I suppose it’s not impossible that his manager and producer Landau, a former Rolling Stone journalist and thus a master of hyperbole, actually did utter such toe-curling words in the process of talking up his client at a critical juncture in his career.
If nothing else, the live concert footage teased in the trailer looks fun. But my hopes of Deliver Me from Nowhere painting a suitably nuanced portrait of an artist whose inner depths, solid decision-making and workmanlike discipline were among his greatest assets – hardly movie-sexy stuff – are not exactly high.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
I don’t expect much screen time to be dedicated, for example, to Springsteen’s canny ruthlessness as a self-editor. A quality I’ve found myself reflecting on a lot over the years, as someone firmly of the opinion that the man barely put a foot wrong anywhere in his core discography, from his 1973 debut through until about 1992.
After listening to all 319 minutes 48 seconds of Tracks II: The Lost Albums – a new 83-song mega-dump of largely previously unreleased archival material 1983-2018 (a sequel to his 1998 compilation Tracks, covering 1972-1998) – I’m even more firmly convinced, and indeed grateful, that we only got the best of Bruce on his marquee records. All killer, no filler.
There are some flashes of truly great and revealing stuff among this deluge of deep cuts, some of them heavily bootlegged songs of longstanding Springsteen legend. I’d love to have heard a fully E Street Band-ified version of the bopping “Don’t Back Down”, which exists only as a home demo sketch. “The Klansman”, a compelling song about a boy’s indoctrination into the KKK with a brilliant rudimentary haunting synthesiser refrain, is dark and intriguing. But nobody, save for the nerdiest of Springsteen nerds, need spend long panning for gold here (and you will need to spend a long time, even if you play it only once).
An abundance of work-in-progress numbers about true-blue American things such as county fairs (“County Fair”), highways (“Blue Highway”) and good honest workin’ men (we variously get songs called “Repo Man”, “Delivery Man” and even “Detail Man”, if notably not “Repair Man”) all belonged on the cutting room floor where they ended up. Some tracks feel like breadcrumbs in a trail towards another, better idea. Others are aborted attempts to replicate past glories.
Bruce Springsteen in 1985. Image: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy
When it comes to the equation of what makes The Boss’s best songs so once-in-a-generationally special I, for one, prefer not to see his workings. Just the final sum. I suspect he prefers it that way too, which is why he has wisely kept all this stuff locked in a safe the last several decades. It’s a point worth appreciating because good self-editing is, I think, becoming a lost art in the modern music world.
The streaming service algorithms have a hungry heart; their appetite for new music is voracious. In Bruce Springsteen’s heyday, two sides of a 12” vinyl record, about 40 minutes runtime in total, was an artist’s canvas. Its limitations could act like guardrails against overindulgence.
Focus, precision and tough choices were often key. Even The Boss’s most sprawling work, the 1980 double LP The River, feels punchy at 20 songs (whittled down from a potential pool of 50).
Artists today, on the other hand, are able and indeed encouraged to act in exactly the opposite manner, and keep drip, drip, drip feeding out small packets of new material on streaming platforms, quality control be damned. A process of so-called “continuous engagement”, as Spotify CEO Daniel Ek ickily calls it. I feel like it denies musicians space to develop and grow in private.
To conceal potential mistakes and missteps from view, and share only the best of themselves, when the time is right. To torture that terrible metaphor from Deliver Me From Nowhere a different way: Springsteen couldn’t fix some of his songs, much less the world, any more than the next repairman could. He was just good at hiding them behind the plasterboard.
Tracks II: The Lost Albums is out now; Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is in cinemas in October.
Will you sign Big Issue's petition to ask Keir Starmer to pass a Poverty Zero law? It's time to hold government to account on poverty once and for all.
Strike dates 2023: From train drivers to NHS doctors, here are the dates to know
Support our vendors with a subscription
For each subscription to the magazine, we’ll provide a vendor with a reusable water bottle, making it easier for them to access cold water on hot days.
