With you forever I’ll stay

Do yourself a favor and check out Elizabeth’s superb essay on the 40th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska.

Nebraska was released a few months after I graduated from college in Ann Arbor, just down the road from the city of Detroit, where the unemployment rate hit 30% that spring.

The top ten news stories in Michigan in 1982, per the AP:

1. The election of James Blanchard as Governor, the first Democrat elected to the office in 20 years;
2. Unemployment in Michigan with 732,000 Michiganders out of work and a record unemployment rate of 17.2%;
3. Mass homicides, including the February 16 murder of seven members of the George Post family on their hog farm near Farwell, the murder of a five members of the Paulson family near Allendale on March 13, and the murder of Bette Giuliani and her four adopted daughters in St. Clair County on April 7;
4. Four rounds of cuts in the state budget totaling $778 million and resulting from the state’s economic tailspin;
5. New contracts between the United Auto Workers and the major automobile manufacturers;
6. A continued slump in sales of American automobiles;
7. Richard Headlee‘s nomination as the Republican candidate for Governor, defeating Gov. Milliken’s chosen successor, James H. Brickley with Headlee losing to Blanchard in the general election as Milliken remained on the sidelines;
8. Cold weather and heavy snow through the winter of 1982;
9. Fraud charges brought by the Canadian government against Amway and four of its executives for allegedly using dummy invoices showing lower values to reduce customs duties paid for goods shipped to Canada;
10. (tie for 10th) The February birth of a baby to a 12-year-old rape victim in Kalamazoo who was denied an abortion after an unsuccessful court battle; and
11. (tie for 10th) Super Bowl XVI between the Cincinnati Bengals and San Francisco 49ers held at the Pontiac Silverdome, the first Super Bowl held in the snow belt.

Don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.

Yesterday I was browsing the vinyl records section in the Boulder Barnes & Noble (I haven’t had a turntable since the Clinton administration but you know) and I saw the cover of Springsteen’s new album, which consists of covers of a dozen songs.

The mental pictures I have of Springsteen are from the covers of his 1970s albums — sensitive Dylanesque bard (The Wild the Innocent etc.), joyous Rock God (Born to Run), depressed rat-faced Jersey survivor (Darkness on the Edge of Town) — so this cover shocked me, as it was of an unambiguously old man.

How does that happen?