The Ghost Of Tom Joad

Performer: Bruce Springsteen
Artist: Patti Scialfa; Garry Tallent; Danny Federici
Engineer: Mike Batlin; Toby Scott
Distributor: Sony Music Distribution (

Notes: Personnel: Bruce Springsteen (vocals, guitar, harmonica, keyboards); Marty Rifkin (pedal steel guitar); Soosie Tyrell (violin, background vocals); Danny Federici (accordion, keyboards); Chuck Plotkin (keyboards); Garry Tallent, Jim Hanson, Jennifer Condos (bass); Gary Mallaber (drums, percussion); Lisa Lowell, Patti Scialfa (background vocals). Producers: Bruce Springsteen, Chuck Plotkin. THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD won the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Personnel: Bruce Springsteen (vocals, guitar, harmonica, keyboards); Marty Rifkin (steel guitar); Soozie Tyrell (violin, background vocals); Danny Federici (accordion, keyboards); Chuck Plotkin (keyboards); Gary Mallaber (drums, percussion); Patti Scialfa, Lisa Lowell (background vocals). Audio Mixer: Toby Scott. Recording information: New Jersey; Thrill Hill. Photographers: Pamela Springsteen; Michael Williamson. In 1982, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and much of America torn between a newly fierce patriotism and the dispassionate conservatism of the dawning "Greed Is Good" era, a number of roots-oriented rock musicians began examining the State of the Union in song, and one of the most powerful albums to come out of this movement was Bruce Springsteen's stark, home-recorded masterpiece Nebraska. In 1995, Bill Clinton was president, America was congratulating itself for a new era of high-tech peace and prosperity, and Springsteen returned to the themes and approach of Nebraska with The Ghost of Tom Joad, an album that suggested little had changed in the past 13 years -- except Americans had gotten better at ignoring the increasingly sharp divide between the rich and the poor, and that illegal aliens who had come to America looking for the fabled Land of Milk and Honey were being forced to shoulder a heavy and dangerous burden in America's underground economy. With several of its songs drawn directly from news stories, The Ghost of Tom Joad is more explicitly political than Nebraska (more so than anything in Springsteen's catalog, for that matter), and while the arrangements are more full-bodied than those on Nebraska (five cuts feature a full band), the production and the overall tone is, if anything, even starker and more low-key, with the lyrics all the more powerful for their spare backdrops. While there's an undertow of bitterness in this album's tales of an America that has turned its back on the working class and the foreign-born, there's also a tremendous compassion in songs like "The Line," "Sinaloa Cowboys," "Balboa Park," and the title cut, which lend their subjects a dignity fate failed to give them. Individually, these songs, either angry or plaintive, are clean and expertly drawn tales of life along this nation's margins, and their cumulative effect is nothing short of heartbreaking; anyone who pegged Springsteen as a zealously patriotic conservative in the wake of the widely misunderstood Born in the U.S.A. needs to hear this disc. The Ghost of Tom Joad failed to find the same audience (or the same wealth of media attention) that embraced Nebraska, but on it's own terms it's a striking and powerful album, and certainly one of Springsteen's most deeply personal works. ~ Mark Deming 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 together a 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."

Rolling Stone (5/13/99, p.64) - Included in Rolling Stone's "Essential Recordings of the 90's." Q (2/96, p.66) - Included in Q's 50 Best Albums of 1995. Q (3/00, p.124) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...a sister album to the earlier, similarly sparse Nebraska set, with evocative character study the order of the day." Melody Maker (11/18/95, p.37) - Bloody Essential - "...a series of fleeting glimpses into the harsh, desperate lives of America's modern-day migrants....12 fables...[that] illuminate how the outside forces of chance and fate shape personal destiny..." Musician (2/96, p.89) - "...Springsteen stakes a claim to being one of us. His songs have articulated the hopes and fears of this country's working class with such eloquence that, 20 years after he became the Boss, fans still look to him for empathic insights into populist concerns..." Village Voice (2/20/96) - Ranked #8 in Village Voice's 1995 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll. Mojo (Publisher) (p.57) - Ranked #76 in Mojo's "100 Modern Classics" -- "Bruce channelled the haunted hungry ghosts of Steinbeck, John Ford and Guthrie..." NME (Magazine) (11/18/95, p.46) - 9 (out of 10) - "...Springsteen has not just purloined Steinbeck's character as a totem for the downtrodden, he has discovered the Nobel prize-winner's deep, hard-won compassion....With THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD, Springsteen has...re-established himself as a moving voice in a tradition of social documentary..."

Bruce Springsteen came out of New Jersey in the early 1970s sounding like a cross between Bob Dylan and early Tom Waits, backed by the rambunctious E Street Band. After toughening up his sound, Springsteen created his 1975 masterpiece, BORN TO RUN, which garnered critical acclaim for its blend of Spectorian grandeur and street poetry. Nine years later, BORN IN THE U.S.A. made him a worldwide superstar with its beefed-up stadium-rock sound. Along the way, he's produced such low-key acoustic-based milestones as NEBRASKA and THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD, never losing the blue-collar ethos that is central to his vision. His 2002 album, THE RISING, is considered one of the finest artistic responses to the 9/11tragedy produced in the event's immediate aftermath.

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