enters middle age, it remains a problem child of a song. Is "Born in the U.S.A." a patriotic anthem, bitter protest tune, or both? When it gets played at leftist rallies as well as pretty much every Fourth of July fireworks show in America, is someone still not getting what Springsteen himself called "the most misunderstood song since 'Louie, Louie'"? Why is there still a struggle to claim this song in particular, waged between the ghost of Tom Joad and the specter of George Will?The song famously became the ball in a political ping-pong battle in September 1984 when both sides in a presidential campaign attempted to claim Springsteen as their own. Ronald Reagan had some egg to wipe off his face after suggesting that Republicans were the party of Bossivity, but his Democratic competitor didn't look much better when he claimed that "the real Bruce Springsteen [is] for the Mondale-Ferraro ticket." It went on to be parodied by everyone from 2 Live Crew to Cheech & Chong, and rivals Neil Diamond's "America" as the one song that has to be played to accompany the rockets' red glare each Independence Day. That's quite a life for what started as a vituperative little folk song recorded in Springsteen's kitchen.
The original working title for the tune Springsteen was working on in late 1981 was the more prosaic "Vietnam." It was about a veteran returning home from the war and taking a lonesome, solo taxi ride home to a far-from-hopeful fate in New Jersey. The chorus line, repeated over and over: "You died in Vietnam." (Try singing that over the revised lyrics at your next fireworks display and see how it goes.) At the time, Springsteen was feeling newly politicized, particularly in regard to veterans' affairs. Shortly after Reagan's election in 1980, he met Bobby Muller, a paraplegic who started an organization called Vietnam Veterans of America, and he'd also been influenced by reading a book called Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein. But the song "Vietnam" was such a relentless bummer, it would have made all his fans suicidal enough to take themselves out in a wreck on the highway.
Then, inspiration struck when Springsteen happened to look over at a screenplay that writer-director Paul Schrader had sent him, in hopes that the Boss would consider a movie career. The title: Born in the U.S.A. Springsteen started singing that phrase instead of "You died in Vietnam," and the dour melody instantly became much more ambiguous, if not quite inspirational. (Schrader didn't come away completely empty-handed, by the way; Springsteen offered him a song called "Just Around the Corner to the Light of Day," and Schrader's film — starring Michael J. Fox instead of Springsteen — was retitled Light of Day.)
Yet it still wasn't a grabber. "To me it was a dead song," producer Jon Landau told biographer Dave Marsh. "It was one of the lesser songs on the Nebraska tape," he added, referring to the cassette of demos that became Springsteen's all-acoustic Nebraska release in '82. "Clearly the words and music didn't go together."
The fact that "Born in the U.S.A." got nixed from Nebraska was the greatest thing that could have happened to it. There was another set of sessions in 1982, with the E Street Band, when Springsteen was briefly considering making Nebraska a full-on electric album. It was this full-band version cut in '82 that saw release two years later on the Born in the U.S.A. album, and a classic was born. "For everybody there, I know, to this day," Landau said, "it was the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio."
Springsteen's producers and engineers have talked about how, at that time, the singer preferred not to run through the entire song with the band in advance of turning on the reel-to-reel recorders, instead teaching the players individual sections and then hoping for a raucous spontaneity when they'd play the whole thing through on tape for the first time. Springsteen has said that the version you hear on record was the second take laid down on May 3, 1982. Chief engineer Toby Scott, who may have more complete records, says it was the sixth out of eight takes. What's clear is that it was live and utterly uncontained, even though it represented one of Springsteen's first times relying on a synth riff instead of a more organic sound.
"I remember listening to it and going, 'Wow!'" Scott told Sound on Sound. "Right from the start, the snare drum was exploding, and you have to remember this was 1982, when we were in the middle of disco-land there in New York. There were no exploding snare drums in New York — there were no exploding snare drums anywhere — and then, what with Danny's synthesizer playing that grand intro, the song was just cracking away and I turned to Chuck Plotkin and Jon Landau and said, 'I don't know whether it's Bruce, but man, it sounds good to me!'… When the band members came into the control room after the first couple of takes and heard the track, they too were going, 'My God, we've never heard anything like this before!' It was totally, revolutionarily different-sounding to anything else at that time."
By the time Springsteen put out Born in the U.S.A. in June 1984, he'd faced a choice, to back away from the off-putting-to-some starkness of Nebraska and go for the stadium-level brass ring. "In the end it was a variety of things that kinda threw the argument in one direction," he told Marsh, "but my feeling was that I'd created an opportunity for myself, and why cross the desert and not climb the mountain?"
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