Bruce Springsteen - Ghost Of Tom Joad (Music CD)
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Product Details
Description
THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD isn't a rock and roll record. Named for the protagonist of
John Steinbeck's Depression-era novel THE GRAPES OF WRATH (Springsteen cites
John Ford's film version in the booklet) and performed largely on an acoustic
guitar with the occasional support of an Appalachian mountain fiddle and pedal
steel guitar, it's part folk album, part protest record, part short-story
collection.
It'll inevitably be compared to NEBRASKA, the similarly stark song-cycle
Springsteen foisted on an unsuspecting world in 1982. Yet TOM JOAD is more of an
arranged album, with careful guitar arpeggios supported by an eerie bed of
sustained synthesizer chords (played by E Street Band veteran Danny Federici and
Springsteen) and a few full-band folk arrangements. It's also more of an
explicit statement. Whereas the characters in NEBRASKA were lost souls wreaking
havoc on the highways and backroads of the badlands, those on TOM JOAD are a mix
of working-class Americans and immigrants running across (or into) the country
in search of a pot of gold that isn't there. The characters are modern, but the
stories are as old as the Great Depression that Steinbeck
chronicled--Springsteen's message being that after all these years we're still
knee-deep in it.
There are some familiar Springsteen vignettes--the conflicted friendship of two
border guards in "The Line", the family line of steelworkers in
"Youngstown"--but the characters themselves are new, and the clearness of their
anger is almost radical. Pondering the corporate bosses who built a steel plant
in Youngstown, used up the local resources, then walked away, the narrator's
father says, "Them big boys did what Hitler couldn't do". Springsteen does offer
the working class a chance at redemption. "Galveston Bay" brings togethera
Vietnamese fisherman, a disgruntled Vietnam vet and the Ku Klux Klan; by the
time it's over, two Klansmen are dead and the American vet has learned, if not
to overcome his prejudice, to at least live and work side by side with his
Vietnamese compatriot. It may be a not-so-veiled lesson for the flag-waving
patriots who misinterpreted Springsteen's anthem "Born In The U.S.A".
Track Listing
1. Ghost Of Tom Joad
2. Straight Time
3. Highway 29
4. Youngstown
5. Sinola Cowboys
6. Line
7. Balbo Park
8. Dry Lightning
9. New Timer
10. Across The Border
11. Galveston Bay
12. Best Was Never Enough
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