Author Warren Zanes Brings Bruce Springsteen’s Darkest Moment to Light in the Book That Inspired the Movie

CM: How does your book compare to the movie?

WZ: There’s the record and there’s the book, and they’re two different things. I had this native feeling that the movie would be yet another new thing, even if there’s an umbilical cord connecting them. There are things that are in the movie that are not in the book, like Bruce’s romantic life. (Director Scott Cooper) really zeroes in on the relationship between Bruce and his dad. It’s a dark story. It’s a hopeful story. It’s about getting help when you need it so that you can take care of your voice as an artist and as a person. 

CM: This is kind of an “anti-biopic,” as you said, because it bucks the typical format of an overarching career summary, like Johnny Cash’s Walk the Line or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Why does this approach work?

WZ: If you think about how people envision their rock stars, there’s often a spotlight involved. They’re up there, center stage. The lights are on them, and we know from Springsteen’s songwriting that it’s the shadows that interest him. He wants to know what’s happening beyond the footlights, beyond the spotlights, and the Nebraska story is that. So my gut, initially, when somebody approached me about (making this movie) was, I don’t think it’s going to happen, but if anything would be turned into a movie, it would probably be this, because it’s really about Springsteen in the shadows of his life and in the shadows of his career. 

CM: You also wrote a book about Tom Petty, Petty: The Biography. Would Petty’s story be worth a biopic? 

WZ: Yes, absolutely. It would be very different. Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty were friends. They shared many things among them; Jimmy Iovine, who you know was an engineer on Bruce stuff and a producer on some Petty stuff, was lifelong friends to both those guys. I think Tom’s story would be more of a band story. Obviously, Nebraska is and isn’t, but I think Tom Petty’s life and career would make an amazing movie. I think you can make a great ’70s movie that has not been made, focusing on Tom Petty’s life.

CM: Given your time in Cleveland, why do you think the city has such a deep connection with Springsteen?

WZ: Bands come to life when they talk about those first tours because they’re at their most fully alive. They’re in a van, maybe an RV, but they don’t know what’s coming. And Cleveland is a big part of early tours for Bruce and the band. It creates this bond between the community and the artist that’s felt both ways. Believe me, Bruce and the E Street Band, they know the Cleveland part of the story. The radio support. The venue support. That bond is forever.

CM: You were a member of Del Fuegos before turning to writing and academia. Why was Cleveland a pivotal moment for you?

WZ: I look back fondly on my time in Cleveland and at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Cleveland was where I really kind of tied my academic persona together with my music-based persona. Cleveland allowed me to explore that split identity and to find that it didn’t need to be split. 

I came into an education and programming department that was suffering a little. The programming needed to be built back up with some integrity. It was definitely a team that did it. Terry Stewart is no longer there, but you got Rob Weil, Lisa Vinciquerra, who are lifers. John Gerke is there. Jason Hanley, who came into my department and now runs it, was a big part of it. 

It was finding ways to get the voices, the actual participants in the story of rock ‘n’ roll to come in and talk more. The program that mattered the most for me in that role might not have been the best attended, but it was a program called “From Songwriters to Soundmen,” and the idea was to do interviews with everybody but the star. It could be road managers. It could be publishers, could be publicists. It could be sidemen. This is to say, if we limit ourselves to the front person, we are not going to learn that much about the culture that we are here to celebrate, right? 

Sometimes there would be 15 people there, and Terry would come up to me and say, “This is great!” He couldn’t help himself but to look beyond the numbers. There’s that sense that you can be doing the right thing, and it won’t be measured in traditional ways. That gave me a lot of freedom, and it led to the kind of writing that I ultimately wanted to do.  

CM: So Cleveland was kind of like your Nebraska.

WZ: I was really proud of the work I was doing there and but I was in a marriage that wasn’t doing well, and I will never forget, a couple of the people unnamed who worked with me did something that was as close to an intervention as could be done, but they were like, where’s your partner? These programs are really great. We’re proud of them. You should be proud of them, but your partner should be proud of them. And I was probably too young to really take it in. I think I’ve just made excuses for it, but when I hear the word Cleveland, I also taste divorce in the back of my mouth. You know, our experiences as human beings are like this. There’s a lot of joy out there in Cleveland on the personal side that included kids. Also on the personal side, it involved a divorce coming and so if I was to say there was a Nebraska, I was probably right at the edge of it as I was leaving Cleveland. 

CM: Nebraska has that undercurrent of hope, though. I think of a song like “Reason to Believe.”

WZ: That album is like a grieving process. When he talks about that record really being based in the time that he and his parents lived with his grandparents, there was a lot to grieve. There was a lot he didn’t get as a very young person that he should have gotten, and there is a way to grieve what you don’t get when you need it, without being a victim, without blaming, but you got to look at it in a hard way. Now, the songs of Nebraska are not a one-for-one correspondence with his personal story. They’re fictional characters, but the troubles those fictional characters are experiencing carry within them some of the troubles that he was confronting as his childhood and in his adult experience. He needed to do some grieving to be able to carry on to become the man he wanted to be, to ultimately become a father and a husband, ultimately all these things. In that album, he did some brave work of grieving. The sad part of it was that he was alone for so much of it, and that came out in the book. And I can’t remember exactly how I said it, but I said, “You’re not supposed to do that alone,” and he said, “I didn’t know that.” Wow. It’s just a little heartbreaking. He’s handed us a lot of songs that we’ve studied ourselves with. We’ve come to understand ourselves better with them. And yet, there was this moment in his life where he could have used some of that himself.

So it’s both a symbol of a hard time in life, and the sadness that has to it, but it’s also a positive symbol because the way he wrote it out musically, he got to the shore, the light came back out. With Nebraska, I hear both the trouble of the human experience and the resilience and the capacity to come through. Hope doesn’t always derive from the content. It’s that act of handing off songs in the form of records, saying, like, here’s my story. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending to be hopeful as an act, right?

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