Against the American Grain

By JAY COCKS

Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel risk big and score big

The pure products of America go crazy," William Carlos Williams said. The new albums by a couple of rock's most formidable figures, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, use that kind of down-home craziness as a centerpiece, setting it out for examination like a death's head on a coffee table. Springsteen's haunted and haunting Nebraska, Joel's hallucinatory The Nylon Curtain are not just tours across some nightmare landscape. They are not mere descriptions of madness. They are about the process of contemporary craziness, and they are devastating.

Both new records are also enjoying some significant commercial success. Nebraska is No. 3 of the Top Ten albums this week, and The Nylon Curtain is not far behind at No. 9. The point is not that the albums are in competition with each other, although both are on the same label, Columbia, and Bruce has frequently, and unfairly, been used as a stick to deliver a few critical raps on Billy's noggin. Much more interesting is the fact that, in parlous economic times, when the record business is suffering heavy sales deprivation and audiences are supposed to want only bantamweight escapism, two serious, ambitious, even dour, albums have scored big by hanging tough.

Nebraska, an acoustic bypass through the American heartland, sounds a little like a Library of Congress field recording made out behind some shutdown auto plant. Springsteen recorded these songs at home, on a four-track Teac tape deck, and meant them to be demos for material he could do with the E Street Band. But the songs seemed to stand best on their own, unadorned, and that is the way they appear in the album, with just a minimum of technical refinement. Beginning with the title track, a bone chiller about Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, the ten songs in Nebraska are set in the smalltown, working-class milieu that Springsteen has made his own. There, all lives are dead ends, but the turnpikes go on forever. Springsteen certainly has mined this territory before, but he makes the repetition work for him: he can get the same sort of mythic resonance from this setting that John Ford took out of Monument Valley.

In Nebraska, Springsteen's obsession with the family, especially with the father, is more prominent than ever before. In these songs, the head of the house shoulders the burden of the broken dreams, and the family, racked economically from the outside and crumbling on the inside from psychic wounds too deep ever to heal, comes to stand for America. But the record is not without its characteristic humor. Springsteen's writing has seldom been as fleet ("Early north Jersey industrial skyline I'm a all/ set cobra jet creepin' through the nighttime"), and he is the only writer around who can get a good, funny love song out of a date where the lovers eat fried chicken from Bob's Big Boy and wipe their fingers on a Texaco road map.

The Nylon Curtain, on the other hand chucks simplicity out the window, along with much of the high artifice of Billy Joel's estimable pop skills. His melodies may still offer abundant evidence of the composer's admiration for Paul McCartney, but Joel, this time around, is after something like a Top Ten equivalent of The Deer Hunter. These songs are full of steel mills and missed chances and the memories of a war that will never retreat to a safe distance. "Remember Charlie/ Remember Baker," Joel sings in Goodnight Saigon. "They left their childhood/ On every acre." Behind the nylon curtain is childhood's end, a state of purgatorial cold storage where the album's protagonist, after punishing romances and puzzling flights of escape to nowhere, finds himself sitting in the balcony at a show he cannot understand, asking, "Where's the orchestra?/ Wasn't this supposed to be a musical?" Bleak songs for barren times, perhaps. But Joel and Springsteen keep their balance as they take their high-wire walks across the black pit. These are two pure products of America who have not gone crazy, probably, like William Carlos Williams himself because they can set that madness to a different kind of music. --By Jay Cocks

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