15. The Ghost Of Tom Joad (1995)
After seeing John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of The Grapes Of Wrath on TV in the late ’70s, Springsteen would go on to mine the film for inspiration for years, especially as his work would turn towards grittier, more realist depictions of working class struggles. With 1995’s The Ghost Of Tom Joad, however, he made it overt, adopting the protagonist of John Steinbeck’s novel as a sort of folk icon for social causes and blue-collar woes. A collection of stripped-back, meditative acoustic songs dealing with often dreary accounts of the working life, the album’s obvious antecedent is 1982’s Nebraska, which was the first time Springsteen had simultaneously turned to darker and folkier methods to tell these sorts of stories.
Unlike Nebraska, however, The Ghost Of Tom Joad can drift by without leaving a mark, which is obviously a major failure for an album so fixated on bringing attention to social ills. Something notable relative to the rest of Springsteen’s work is the geographic recalibration. Written during Springsteen’s time living in L.A., The Ghost Of Tom Joad is directly inspired by not only his regular motorcycle trips through the deserts of the American Southwest, but also by how he found himself relating with Southern California’s communities of Mexican immigrants. Many of the stories and characters here may feel of a piece with his larger concerns — and they are — but they also highlight a specific element of America’s class narrative that Springsteen hadn’t delved into in quite the same way before. Unfortunately, he doesn’t mine that new influence to bring new elements into the music.
In many cases the stories are all that will linger from these songs. Every song is built on gentle and serviceable finger-picked guitar, with the occasional embellishment: a harmonica, a violin, a synth drone in the backdrop. Occasionally, this works beautifully, as in the title track and “Youngstown,” both haunting enough to rank with some of the material from Nebraska. This could be traced to the fact that not only do these songs boast the most fleshed-out instrumentation, they also feature memorable vocal melodies. Too often on this album, the story is told in Springsteen’s subtle, reedy whispers, and it all begins to feel a bit repetitive and indiscernible. In terms of Springsteen’s ’90s work, this is certainly more dialed in than Human Touch or Lucky Town, but it’s still underwhelming musically.
This isn’t a knock against Springsteen doing minimalism; we know from Nebraska that he can excel at that. The thing about Nebraska is that you can’t shake it because it’s all raw demos that emphasize the desperation and isolation of the stories therein. The Ghost Of Tom Joad is, by contrast, very clearly produced, it’s just underdone from a writing standpoint. Many of these songs demand a righteous fury, something all the more obvious after taking in a live E Street Band performance of “The Ghost Of Tom Joad.” That’s especially true for the times where Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello has joined them, like on their tour of Australia in March. Likewise, the brooding full-band treatment of “Youngstown” is stunning, particularly when Bruce recites the closing lines: “When I die I don’t want no part of heaven/ I would not do heaven’s work well/ I pray the devil comes and takes me/ To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell.” He extends “hell” into a wail, Nils Lofgren unleashes a searing solo, and you feel the ferocity of the narrator.
There were actually sessions where they attempted to record a full-band version of Nebraska, which have never been released. I’d love to hear those, but I don’t suspect for a moment that they’d surpass the album that was released in 1982. But with The Ghost Of Tom Joad, these full-band renditions are striking, suggesting other forms these songs could have taken, a way in which they could have been as gripping and unsettling as Springsteen surely intended them to be.
