Like all of his music, Bruce Springsteen’s album, Nebraska, captures the optimism, the disillusion, the restlessness and the anguish of life in America. The decidedly sparse album—just his voice, guitar and a harmonica—tells about a dark and desperate life in between both sides of the law. The album begins with “Nebraska” a first-person narrative based on the true story of the 19-year-old spree killer Charles Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, who are portrayed so well by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in the 1973 film Badlands. The Nebraska we encountered was quite different. Although self-professed gunfighters, we are not spree killers; nevertheless, we drove through the badlands of the Cornhusker state, the Sand Hills, feeling maybe a bit like we were running from the law. We stopped at the Nebraska National Forest, a plot of trees hand-planted in the early 1900s. We walked through the sandy hills dotted with pines, listening to a metropolis of vibrant insect life. Our walk was interrupted by dark clouds and a gully-washing storm that produced quarter-sized hail and rain that scoured all of the insect carcasses off Tommy Three Reds. And we drove away like bandits.
No comments:
Post a Comment