The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen (The Ghost Of Tom Joad - Bruce Springsteen)

Member Name: Lichfield1979

Product:	The Ghost Of Tom Joad - Bruce Springsteen
Date:	04/09/08 (122 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some good stories

Disadvantages: A departure from commercial expectations

The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen

This 1995 album is best understood as the musical equivalent of a book of short stories. The title is named for the hero of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, and Springsteen's stripped down acoustic style owes its biggest debt to American folk pioneer Woody Guthrie. It tends to get overlooked in his oeuvre, sitting uncomfortably alongside the minor records that emerged in between his old heyday and his resurgent period of creativity in the wake of the World Trade Centre bombings. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the power of Springsteen's bold and stark story telling, and perhaps the natural comparison to make is with his own Nebraska record.

I think The Ghost of Tom Joad can be judged favourably as a brave and challenging artistic statement, in which Springsteen inverts his familiar blend of expansive optimism and hopeful cynicism, and delivers a series of introspective character studies, peering back from a world in which lives are frequently defeated and difficult, but in which lives are lived none the less. Few musicians of his commercial stature can point to such thoughtful social explorations as are to be found here, and fewer still have ever evinced a capacity for setting original and literate prose to music, let alone with such touching simplicity to illuminate disparate human spirits. It may not be what we're used to, but Springsteen has earned the culture's collective respect sufficiently to warrant us pausing to consider why this record was an important statement for him to make when he made it. His judgement is probably superior to ours, and we should certainly let him teach us what he has to say before rushing to dismiss that with which we are unfamiliar.

One - The Ghost of Old Tom Joad

A plaintive burst of harmonica. A simple guitar arpeggio. Understated percussion. Haunted keyboards. And this is one of the fullest arrangements on the whole record. The harmonica returns, forceful with the feeling of struggle. Also pedal steel guitar and bass. Springsteen's voice is hushed, as if invoking us to crane our necks better in the campfire light and listen up to the story. Itinerant workers are out amongst the highways and the railroad tracks as border guards patrol the southwest. The promised lands of preachers and prayer books must be taken with hungry force because although "the highway is alive tonight nobody's kidding nobody about where it goes", and first shall not be last and last shall not be first. The ghost of Tom Joad it seems is the saintly spirit of the landscape that affords half a fighting chance wherever somebody needs a place to stand.

Two - Straight Time

The guitars lull with warm light and rippling rhythms softer than breath. There's a violin and a pedal steel guitar and some keyboards as well but all used exceedingly sparingly. Drums and bass are minimalist to say the least. Everything's a soft flutter. Springsteen's understated voice raises itself only occasionally, and there is a matter of fact, resigned lethargy as the narrator reflects on getting out of prison in 1986 and then finding a wife and a job. Keeping honest has been a struggle "I got a cold mind to go tripping across that thin line" but it's eight years now and "you get used to anything sooner or later it becomes your life."

Three - Highway 29

Small talk flirting in a roadhouse on Highway 29 meets two lovers for the first time and he robs the small town bank and their car is blood and tears going south to the Sierra Madre in wintertime. "All I could see was snow and sky and pines". A keyboard adds a few shadows. The guitar has gentle dreams as the bandit wonders if she made him do it but "it was something in me, something had been coming for a long time."

Four - Youngstown

Bruce sings up a bit louder on this one and his band are given more to do. A violin augments the sound of bass, drums, keyboard, pedal steel and acoustic guitars. It's got more of a beat to it but the music is still lush and delicate and alive to the haunting quality of the passage of time. In 1803 James and Daniel Heaton built a blast furnace and used iron ore from the creek to build cannonballs that were later used by the Union in the Civil War. The narrator's father worked the furnaces too, after fighting in World War Two. So did the narrator himself after Vietnam. In Youngstown it's what every generation does to feed their children under the "beautiful sky of soot and clay." He tells his wife Jenny he's "sinking down", but without soldiers being sent to fight, what would happen to the industrial heartlands that "built the tanks and bombs that won the country's wars"? Somebody in Youngstown must be getting rich off the labour at the furnace, but it's better preparation for a life spent with the devil instead of getting to heaven.

Five - Sinaloa Cowboys

Like track three, this one features just Bruce alone on keyboard and guitar. Miguel crossed the river from Mexico to California with his kid brother Louis and they worked together in the orchards and fields. Their father warned them "everything the north gives it exacts a price in return." Some men from Sinaloa tell Louis and Miguel they can make half as much money in ten hours cooking methamphetamine as they can in a year working as labourers. But the acid burns Louis' skin and the fumes leave him spitting blood in the desert as he dies in the tall grass by the creekside. Miguel drives him to a eucalyptus grove the next morning where he digs up the ten thousand dollars they've saved and kisses his brother and buries him in the grave.

Six - The Line

Vocals, keyboard and guitar again. A recent widower is discharged from the military and takes a job as an immigration official in the canyons of the desert mountains. His partner's family is Cuban, and he explains why people risk their lives and give everything they own to drug smuggling rings who can get them to America. The job seems to him to be a matter of doing what he's told rather than what makes the most sense. In a bar in Tijuana they talk to a girl they sent back the day before and he dances and drinks with her. He agrees to help her get her family across. Her brother is carrying drugs, and she's probably just using him, and she runs off when his partner catches them. His partner never says a word, but he quits his job six months later, and drifts from bar to bar and town to town, trying to find the woman he thought he was in love with.

Seven - Balboa Park

Vocals, keyboard and guitar only. Another tale of a hustler sleeping rough in the borderlands and turning tricks to survive or swallowing bags of cocaine to smuggle past customs. In the end a car knocks him down before the drugs can kill him.

Eight - Dry Lightning

This one has a band but it's a soft understated sound. The lyrics portray domestic scenes living out in the prairie landscape with only memories of somebody long gone for company.

Nine - The New Timer

Just Bruce with his guitar. A man leaves his family to seek work. Halfway across the country, he's taught the ropes on the railroads by an old timer called Frank, who's been living this way since the 1930s. Frank says it's safe so long as you don't cross nobody. They cross the rest of the country, but are finally separated after months spent working different jobs together. He only sees Frank once again, from a speeding train. Later, Frank is found shot dead for little reason. The man dreams of his family, but the time has passed that he'll likely go home. Now he sleeps alone with a machete for protection.

Ten - Across The Border

The harmonica is back, and there's also an accordion and a pedal steel guitar to join the keyboard, bass, drums and guitar. The song has a nice instrumental lilt and there are backing vocals and the lyrics are a little more poetically figurative than has been allowed elsewhere. It's about making a new start tomorrow, across the border, and the entwined landscapes and memories are as beautiful as they are painful.

Eleven - Galveston Bay

The band sit this one out as well. The simple guitar music sounds a bit like the gently lapping water of the bay. Springsteen's voice has a natural sleepy cadence. The narrative is about a Vietnamese man who helps the Americans in the mountains and the deltas of his homeland for fifteen years before taking his family to the Gulf of Mexico and working his way up to buying a shrimp boat. An injured American war veteran and his friends in the KKK try to burn the boat, and the fisherman shoots two of them in self defence, but is acquitted by the courts. The soldier threatens to kill him. He takes a knife and lies in wait but lets him pass. The two men settle back into similar lives, fishing and supporting their families.

Twelve - My Best Was Never Good Enough

The lyrics are homespun folk phrases of popular wisdom which would allow the sunny upside of hope and faith back into the picture after all the sad lives we've heard unfold in the last eleven tales, except "for you my best was never good enough." Cynicism never sounded quite this soft focus, and the suggestion might be that people are hypocrites who don't live by their own positive advice.


It's rare to come across a record such as this which is not only almost entirely dependent on its lyrics to draw you in, but which even then relies wholly on coherent narrative content, rather than a quick turn of phrase. There are only a handful of people who could plausibly attempt what Bruce Springsteen succeeds in doing with The Ghost of Tom Joad, and neither Paul Simon or Neil Young, to take two possible examples, have ever strayed this close to the territory more usually associated with novelists. Even if you're uncertain about the relative lack of musical accompaniment, allow yourself to listen to the words, and you may be won over by the stories that are being conjured up in conversational reverie, with a tenderly immediate intimacy, as the writer explores an innovative artistic form.

Summary: Underrated.