NPR Music - 'Born In The U.S.A.' at 40

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

With the Fourth of July week here, we look at an album all about the messy, complicated and wonderful culture of America: Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., which recently turned 40 years old.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Well, it's Fourth of July week, that time of year when we celebrate all the things that make America this big, messy, complicated, but wonderful place to be. And to help mark the occasion, we thought we'd look back at an album that's all about this push and pull in our country. Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, which just this past month turned 40 years old. Born in the USA was obviously a massive success for Bruce Springsteen for lots of reasons. but one of them was kind of just the timing of it. It came out during a presidential election year, you know, in that big anthemic course on the title cut. It became, you know, this patriotic rallying cry for a lot of people, including Ronald Reagan. America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts.

It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen. You know, but the truth is, born in the the USA was and continues to be a wildly misunderstood song. It's about so many things, so much more than just simple flag waving. So we're going to do a few things on this episode. First, we're going to share a couple of stories about Born in the USA from NPR. I went back into our archives and found the original review that ran in 1984 about the album. That was really fun to hear. And we've also got a special feature from Morning Edition on what Born in the USA is really about. Then we're going to close out with something that a lot of people have never heard or even know about.

And that's these incredibly rare and hard-to-find remixes from Born in the USA that also came out in 1984. Rider Karen Rose has this whole piece all about them on our site right now. You should definitely check it out. These remixes were done by Arthur Baker, who was known for producing dance and pop and hip hop tracks. So I'm going to talk with Karen Rose about how he came to remix some of these songs from Born in the USA, why they were so polarizing and why they're so hard to find. But first, I want to share that review of Born in the USA that originally aired on NPR's All Things Considered back in June of 1984. This is a conversation about the album with Noah Adams, who was a host at the time, and the music writer Dave Marsh.

Monday, the 4th of June, a day circled in red on perhaps millions of calendars around the country. And by the day's end, those people will have in their possession the new album by Bruce Springsteen called Born in the USA. The album that went on sale today was two years in the making. Bruce Springsteen reportedly wrote 60 songs, selected. 12 to record Rolling Stone Rock Critic, Dave Marsh. I like this record. I like it a lot. I think it's one of the more comfortable records that he's made, just in terms of being able to listen to it. And I think it has two or three things on it that are among the best songs he's ever written, and it's got two or three things on it

that give him a future that isn't simply banging out the same old stuff. Let me ask you about that in a moment. First of all, though, the first cut on the album, Born in the USA, sounds great to me, but it also sounds as if Bruce Springsteen is doing Bruce Springsteen. This song is really about being in Vietnam, and it's a very hard-hitting look at it about being in Vietnam, which has the great lines and the immortal lines in a country that's still trying to deny the reality of that war.

I had a brother at K. San, they're still there. He's all gone. That's the truth about Vietnam, for the first time I've ever heard it in a rock and roll record. Now, you put this record on and you hear pretty much what you expected to hear. What is new about this effort from Bruce Springsteen after two years in the studio? What's new? Well, first of all, I don't think it's what I would expect to hear. Number one, because Bruce has never allowed himself to record a lot of the lighter music that he writes. And so you get things like Glory Days, which is just kind of a funny little song, although it has a point,

or I'm going down, or I'm on fire, both of which express a kind of sexuality and a kind of vulnerability that he's never allowed himself. Granted, a number of the songs sound carved out of the same mold that produced the river. But I think it's inevitable, and I think it's also important that you give people some landmarks so they know where you're coming from as well as where you're going to. I don't quite hold with this British kind of idea that every record ought to be a complete departure from the last one. Glory Days is a song where Bruce is, well, in the beginning of the song, he's in a bar, and he's coming out and he meets a high school baseball star that he's gone to school with coming out. And he hangs around with a woman friend of his, who is a high school cheerleader of beauty, and who's kind of falling apart.

They have a couple of drinks, and all they can talk is about the old days. And then in the last verse, he says, I think I'm going down to the well tonight, and I'm going to drink till I get my... But I pride... Yeah, just sitting back. Hey, little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go and leave you? I got a bad desire.

Tell me now, baby, is it good to you? And can you do to you the things that I do? I can take you hard. Now, there's a really pretty song, a love ballad called I'm on fire. You mentioned that. I think what's important about that song is that for the first time in his whole career,

Bruce is allowing himself to speak in a first-person voice and be vulnerable. And that's something that, you know, his whole macho man thing, which he's been condemned by everybody from now on down about, kind of evaporates on this record, or it doesn't evaporate, but it certainly is compromised.

And that's a good thing. It's an important thing, I think. The last song on the album is My Home Town, and it's a song about a young boy in his father and then the young boy as father and his young son. It's really a sad song. To me, my hometown, which is one thing on this record

that reminds you that he did indeed make a record called Nebraska that was more acoustic oriented and quieter and more related to kind of traditional American music is also the song that brings you right back to what is maybe the hardest rocking track on the album, which is born in the USA. And it's the one track where you're not caught up in the issues of 10 or 15 years ago, Vietnam,

where you're caught up in the issues of right now, of today, this line in the next of the last verse where the foreman says those jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back, and all of a sudden it's not my hometown, it's your hometown. And just having to deal with that, having to deal with just that issue as part of this rock and roll music that people want to take lightly,

is to me that's what makes Bruce the most fascinating person on the scene because he won't hardly let anybody get away with anything. Talking with us from New York, Rolling Stone Rock Critic, Dave Marsh. He's the author of a book on Bruce Springsteen called Born to Run. Springsteen's new album is called Born in the U.S. say. So again, that's music reviewer Dave Marsh talking with former All Things Considered host Noah Adams about Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA. It's a conversation that originally aired when the album was released back in 1984. We've got to take a quick break here, but we will have

more on Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA right after this. Starting back in 2018, NPR did this series called American Anthem, and it highlighted 50 songs that, you know, loom large in American culture. And it was everything from the battle hymn of the Republic to Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive. You know, all very iconic and meaningful and impactful songs. And one of the songs that they featured in that series was born in the USA. Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep in 2019 talked with former NPR music director, Lauren Anki about why this song has been so misunderstood and what it's really about. Here's Steve Innskeep. We have a question about this decades-old hit song. How was it so widely misunderstood?

It's a Bruce Springsteen hit from 1984, and the refrain makes it feel like a celebration of America. Yet there's more to born in the USA than celebration. Listen to the lyrics, and you hear a protest against the treatment of a Vietnam veteran. This is one of our American anthems, songs Americans embrace in ways that reveal who we are. This song emerged in the years after the Vietnam War. Lauren Anki, the director of NPR music, has followed Springsteen's career. He did a big benefit in the summer of 81 for Vietnam veterans in Los Angeles and met with vets. And after that tour ends, there's a number of places where he's trying to write about the Vietnam veteran experience.

So the song grows out of that moment, and it starts out as something just called, Vietnam. A veteran arrives home, tries to get back his old job, but the man behind a desk only shrugs. If it was up to me, he says, the songwriter kept that scene of a veteran out of work and cast off as he wrote a more haunting version. This is where he added the refrain. In this story of one American, Lauren Anki hears the story of many. He says, I'm 10 years burning down the road. No where to run.

Now where to go. Those lines, I think, describes so many Springsteen's male characters who are lost, who can't find a home. The systems around them of jobs and connection are unattainable. But it still wasn't the song we know. Springsteen made one more change, turning up the volume and shouting out the lyrics almost as if for joy.

Rarely has a man with nowhere to go sounded so triumphant. Springsteen later told W.HYY's fresh air he meant it that way. Born in the USA, the pride was in the chorus. In my songs, the spiritual part, the hope part is in the choruses. The blues and your daily realities are in the details of the verses. And one Springsteen fan recalls the effect it had on crowds. In the 80s, Chris Christie, future governor of New Jersey, bought a ticket to a concert at New Jersey's Giant Stadium.

Bruce started every show with a really rousing, anthemic-type version of Born in the USA with a bandana on and the cut-off shirt and the fist pumping, and it felt like a celebration of being born in the USA. When really it's a defiant song about I was born in the USA and I deserve better than what I'm getting. Did some people not get what it was about at the beginning? Oh, I think plenty of people didn't.

get what it was about, including the President of the United States. America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. President Ronald Reagan. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen. By playing on the hope, Reagan seemed to overlook the despair. He may have been influenced by a sometime advisor, the conservative columnist George F. Will, who saw Springsteen in 1984.

Max Weinberg, of whom I'd never heard, was the drummer for the East Street band of which I'd never heard, called me up out of the blue and said who he worked for and would I like to come see the boss sing? And I thought this is a way to impress my children, and I said yes. The columnist noted for his bow ties, went to the show and wrote a column praising the hardworking musicians on stage. If all Americans in labor and management who make steel or cars or shoes or textiles made their product, with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism. Now, Springsteen's politics leaned well left of Reagan's.

And after Reagan praised him, the artist mused on stage that if people misunderstood his music, that was fine. It only made him more popular. My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, and my children's out. Because I learned that that's where the money is. And over the years, Springsteen himself has been willing to tweak the song's meaning. Chris Christie heard him play an acoustic version in the 90s. Much different feeling, much different sound. I can remember at the show I went to see at the state theater in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

A couple of people started to try to sing with him. And he stopped, did mid-song, and said, I can handle this myself. At other time, Springsteen dropped the upbeat chorus, singing only the verses and forcing his audience to hear the dark story of the veteran. When the U.S. invasion of Iraq loomed in 2003, he told his audience the song was a prayer for peace. NPR's Lauren Anki says the complexity of Born in the USA is why it endures. Born in the USA is an anthem for me in that it describes the ambiguities and challenges of the country that I have grown up in. And for me, it's a rock and roll anthem. This singer and the screen and the sound of the guitar and the scale of the song

suggests that rock and roll is big enough and important enough to tell that story. Maybe the meaning of Born in the USA is the distance between the grim verses and the joyous chorus. It's the space between frustrating American facts and fierce pride, the demand to push American reality a bit closer to our ideas. Best Morning Edition host, Steveens, keep talking with former NPR music director, Lauren Anki, about Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA for NPR's Anthem series. Again, that conversation originally aired in 2019.

We've got to take one more quick break here, but when we come back, we'll play a bit of those rare, Born in the USA remixes and talk with writer Karen Rose all about them. And you're listening to all songs considered from NPR. It's All Songs Considered from NPR Music. I'm Robin Hilton, and we are looking back at Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, which recently turned 40 years old. So one of the things that a lot of people don't know is that around the same time the album came out, there was a well-known and revered

producer named Arthur Baker, who remixed three songs from Born in the USA. He did the title cut, a version of Dancing in the Dark, and then a version of the song, Cover Me. In some ways, they've kind of been scrubbed from history. You can still buy the 12-inch vinals, you know, if you can find them at a store somewhere. But really, the only place you can find them are on YouTube from fans uploading them. As I said, writer Karen Rose has a piece on her website right now all about these remixes, but I talked with her about how exactly they came to be. And we started off by looking at where Bruce Springsteen was at this point in his career in 1984. At that time, you know, he was only two records out from the lawsuit that stopped him from being able to record. So he was trying to, you know,

there were several years there. He could not make records. He signed in, you know, an agreement without consulting a lawyer. And the lawsuit permitted his manager to decide who could produce his records. And he did not want anybody but himself, Mike Appel, the manager, producing his records. And Bruce didn't want that. So there were a couple of years there he couldn't do it. And then he had darkness on the edge of town came out. You know, that's a three-year gap between 1975 when Born to Run came out. And then the river came out. And he was writing hits for other people. He was not having hits. In 1980, he released the river. And he had the hit with Hungry Heart. But that was the first big hit he had, top 10 hit he had. And he's trying to figure out, where do I go

from here. What's my next step? How do I reach the brass ring? Like, how do I grab it this time and hang on to it? Right. So that's kind of where we are when the record company said, maybe you'd like to consider doing a remix. We think this would be a good idea. Everybody was doing that then. Cindy Laupert had a big hit with a remix of Girls Just Want to Have Fun. And that is how Arthur Baker got picked. So before this moment, he wasn't the Bruce Springsteen that so many people know and think of now. Born in USA, ends up being huge. Seven singles. All of them, you know, hit the top 10 in the pop charts. So the first three were Dancing in the Dark, Cover Me, Born in the USA. And those are the three songs that get these remixes from Arthur Baker. We're going to play a little bit of them here in a minute. But I'd love it.

If you could just tell us how they came to be, take us back to 1984 and how this unfolded. So, you know, again, the record company wanted to do everything they could to make this record be big, have Bruce be more successful, to reach more of an audience. So the record company played some remixes for him, here's some names. and he really liked Arthur Baker, the work that he had done with Cindy Lauper's girls, just want to have fun. So he said, okay, fine, let's let this guy do it. He actually went to the studio to watch Arthur Baker work, and he'd never had his tapes handed

over to somebody else to take apart and create something adjacent but different. And, you know, he stayed in there for a couple hours and was like, this is really interesting. You know, he told Rolling Stone, like, he's an artist. This was his thing. And the Dancing in the Dark remix came out was the first single. It came out around the time that the single came out and was, you know, being sent to what they called urban stations. Also service to DJs, to dance clubs, to discos. I think I heard it for the first time in a record store.

And I was like, what is this? This sounds like the most amazing thing. And I wasn't sure if it was real. It was a bootleg or something. And I went over and I was like, what is this? And they're like, they're doing a 12-inch remix of dancing in the dark. And I used to sit up at night and listen to the two stations in New York City, WBLS, WKTU, to hope to hear of them because they did play them on rock.

radio, but mostly to just get people upset about it. Yeah, so you're saying that the stations were playing it because they knew hardcore fans, Bruce fans would hate him, and they were trying to, whatever, stoke that fire. It was less that they were trying to stoke the fire, that they were just like, can you believe that this has happened? Oh, my God, does Bruce know about this? There's no way Bruce would have let this happen. Arthur Baker got death threats from, like, some DJ on the station.

And he woke up one morning and he heard them saying, this is an outrage. Bruce can't possibly know about this. And that was the reaction in the sort of core fan base. This was the sort of the tail end of disco. And the quote unquote disco sucks movement. And, you know, again, Bruce was in the studio. Bruce signed off on this. Like there's not evil villains at the record company that there are some evil villains at some record.

companies. But in this case, it wasn't that somebody was making a decision for Bruce. This was Bruce's decision. He was all for it. Do we know that he was happy with how they turned out? You know, I take it as it was released, so he was happy with it or it wouldn't have come out. But he also gave a quote to, again, to Kurt Loder and Rolling Stone. Here's the quote. He was fun to just give him a song and see what his interpretation of it would be. I was always so protective of my music that I was hesitant to do much with it at all. Now I feel my stuff isn't as fragile as I thought. And there was a book that came out of all the lyrics of his songs called Songs. And, you know, he talks about how he'd written cover me for Donna Summer. And he said,

and I disliked the veiled racism of the disco sucks movement. So he saw it for what it was. Well, if some fans didn't like it, they were, I mean, successful, right? They all three of them charted, right? The Dancing on the Dark 12 inch was the biggest selling 12 inch of the year. And you can't attribute that to fans who have to have everything that comes out with Bruce's name. That's 1% of the fan base. Maybe at most. It is sold.

People bought it. People wanted to own it. And, I mean, like, cover me. The thing about Cover Me is it wasn't just that Baker did a remix. It was that the assignment was given to him. This is going to be a single. Bruce doesn't know how to rearrange it, to play it live. Do you have any ideas?

And if you listen to the live versions of Cover Me from that tour, it borrows pieces of the remix. It's not a carbon copy of the record. He definitely tried to do something different with it. And that one also charted. It was like at number 11 on the Billboard, you know, club play. So how did we get to this point where these cuts have largely disappeared? You know, you can't really buy them.

They're not on any of the streaming services. How did we get to this point? I think that this is a place where we're letting the loudest people, make the decision. You know, I feel like if you played them for people, people would have a reaction of, this is cool. People don't even know that they exist. If you weren't there and you weren't paying attention, really close attention, I think the rank and file, average fan has no idea that things were even out there. You know, I spent a lot of time like going through a lot of archives and websites that talked about this.

And, you know, most people are like, wait, Arthur Baker did a Bruce Springsteen remix? But I, you know, I spent a weekend listening, you know, thank God for these dance music fans who take the original 12 inches and digitize them and put them on YouTube so you can listen to all of them again. Sony has no plans to release these. I'm hoping this story will make somebody at the label you consider

because they're an important part of the story of born in the USA, which was Bruce became this international superstar, and this was part of it. This was absolutely part of that story. There can't be an appraisal of the thing that people don't know exists. So hopefully now people will know they exist, and there will be reappraisal. And I hope that newer generations of fans, which there are everywhere,

might give these a boost again. That's writer Karen Rose talking about the little-known remixes producer Arthur Baker did for Bruce Springsteen's, born in the USA. The album recently turned 40 years old. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered.