There have been Bruce Springsteen tributes before. Quite recently a bluegrass celebration called Pickin' on Springsteen rooted the music yet deeper within the American landscape. In 1997, Capitol Records released One Step Up, Two Steps Back, which featured Ben E. King, Richie Havens and various members of the EStreet band.And in 1996, there was an English collection which prompted The Cowboy Junkies to have a go at State Trooper and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and to camp up Born to Run.
Badlands, released this month, is a tribute with a slight difference. It's not so much a nod to the man himself, but rather a homage to one of his albums: Nebraska. Considered by many to be his finest work, Nebraska was recorded in Colts Neck, New Jersey, in the early 1980s, when Springsteen was riding very high indeed. He had just spent a year touring through the clouds of glory kicked up by the previous album, The River, and was sitting at home wondering what to do next. In a move typical of the rest of his career, he surprised everybody.
For his follow-up to studio-slick The River, Springsteen pondered ways of recording his new songs as they sounded before they got that studio treatment. And so he set up a Teac four-track machine in his bedroom and began singing and playing guitar. That left two remaining tracks and here he added harmonica, maybe more guitar, tambourine perhaps - then mixed it all on to a beatbox. And very soon, the demos were done.
And demos is all they ever were - until they later became the album itself. After attempting to re-record them in a professional studio, Springsteen remained convinced that the best versions of his songs tended to be those he sang in his own house. We can only imagine the reaction of the record company when Springsteen walked in, took the cassette out of his pocket and famously said: "This is it".
He certainly wasn't making it easy for himself. Not only was the Nebraska album, a collection of "rough" demos, the subject matter was hardly the stuff of marketing dreams either. This was raw material indeed - an album of stark songs populated by characters heading directly towards their own destruction. Here were anti-heroes pursued by doom, evil, disaster and despair and that bedroom-demo feel served only to add to its grim, bleak nature. It didn't exactly seem like a great career move - but not only was it a great album, it was also a huge commercial success.
In the book, Songs (Virgin 1998), Springsteen says: "My Nebraska songs were the opposite of the rock music I'd been writing. These new songs were narrative, restrained, linear, and musically minimal. Yet their depiction of characters out on the edge contextualised them as rock 'n' roll. If there's a theme that runs through the record, it's the thin line between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes to black, when the things that connect you to your world - your job, your family, friends, your faith, the love and grace in your heart - fail you. I wanted the music to feel like a waking dream and the record to move like poetry. I wanted the blood on it to feel destined and fateful."
Springsteen had been taken down this particularly dark road by several dark US sources. The first was Flannery O'Connor, who was the Boss's choice of reading at the time - her stories, he said, contained a dark spirituality which made sense to him. He had also been deeply affected by the movies - and in particular by Terence Malick's Badlands - which led him to his bleak conclusion at the end of the title track: "I guess there's just a meanness in this world".
Badlands, set in the 1950s, tells the story of a young couple, Holly and Kit (played by Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen), who travel across the South Dakota Badlands with murder on their minds. It is a dramatised killing spree based loosely on events in 1958. There's no doubt about the impact of the movie on Springsteen. Referring to Badlands (and TrueConfessions), he remarked that there was a stillness on the surface, while underneath there was violence and moral ambiguity. It made for serious movies and for a very serious record.
There are at least two Bruce Springsteens - or at least that's how it appears. There's the New Jersey rocker who fronts one of the best bar-bands in the world. He's the voice of the common man, the blue-collar hero who entertains like nobody's business without ever straying far from the spirit of his Garden State home.
But then there's the darker Springsteen who sings with the power of Guthrie and goes far beyond images of the spirited working man who is happy enough as long as he has his woman and a rock 'n' roll band. This is the Springsteen who goes far beyond the noble victim who accepts his condition is "on account of the economy", to explore instead the part played by malice, despair and chilling nothingness. The people in The River have feelings. In Nebraska, you'll find people with none.
The contributors to Badlands are artists who claim to have been moved or influenced by the Boss - including Chrissie Hynde, Los Lobos, Son Volt, Ben Harper, Aimee Mann and Johnny Cash. They give the songs their own twist but, sensibly, it's a measured affair, with the performers well-chosen. Nebraska remains, after 22 years, something of a sacred text among songwriters and all contributors were required, quite rightly, to know precisely what those original four-track demos were about.
Badlands will never replace the original Nebraska, but it's an honest achievement - paying proper tribute to an artist and his finest work, and sending us all back to the sound of Springsteen at home, singing into a Teac four-track and thinking to himself: "this is it".
Badlands - A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska is on Sub-Pop Records