Excerpt from the 11/95 radio interview with Bob Costas, as transcribed by Susan West: Bob: That was Youngstown from TGOTJ. Wanna talk a little bit about the inspiration for that? Bruce: That was a song that really - I go back to this book called Journey to Nowhere - I had written the whole record and then I read the book, and Youngstown and a song called The New Timer are really drawn from a lot of the information and the stories that were in this particular book. I guess that was something that probably out of all the things on the record maybe that connects the most directly to something if you were a fan of the River or just the story of post-industrial America, what happens when your job disappears. You were able to make a good living for 20 years and all of a sudden that's not there for you and maybe you can find a job that pays half as much or a quarter as much and you're 45 years old, you're 50 years old. What happens when the craft you've learned, the skill you've learned... I think, hey what if I couldn't... my music ability that's all that I have, I'm not a multitalented person, I have a talent in a specific area and I fumble around every place else. So I wanted to re-engage some of those ideas and some of those issues and that's really where that song came out of. ------------------------------ From: "Dietz, Adam" Subject: Washington Post article Date: Tue, 05 Dec 95 09:55:00 PST STEELWORKER'S SONG Bruce Springsteen Gives Voice to a Story of America's New Homeless By Richard Harrington Washington Post Staff Writer In 1985, the book "Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass," written by Dale Maharidge with photos by Michael Williamson, presented a sobering portrait of the Rust Belt's newly dispossessed and their "voyage down the endless highways and lonely rail lines of America." Bruce Springsteen, who knows a thing or two about highways, was one of 15,000 people who bought a copy. And then, he says, "I sort of put it away on the shelf." Ten years later, a bout of insomnia led Springsteen to the bookshelf of his Beverly Hills home, and "Journey to Nowhere" ultimately provided closure on his new album, "The Ghost of Tom Joad," a treatise on America's new migrants and immigrants. "I was downstairs one night and I pulled ["Journey"] out and started to read it," Springsteen recalls. "And I read the whole book straight through. It's very powerful and basically it was a source for me for 'Youngstown' and 'The New Timer.' " Both songs are on the new album. "The New Timer" is a somber meditation on two generations of freight-train-riding hobos. And in "Youngstown," a laid off steelworker contemplates the rubble of the huge mill that once employed him and 3,500 others. A veteran of World War II, he now shares disdain for the captains of American industry with his son, a Vietnam War vet: "Them big boys," he says, "did what Hitler couldn't do." That scenario is directly taken from "Journey to Nowhere," in which laid off Youngstown steelworkers Joe Marshall Sr. and Jr. are poking through the rubble of the Campbell Works, whose six 10-story blast furnaces have been dynamited: "How could they shut us down?" The older man pauses. "What Hitler couldn't do, they did it for him." The book, says Springsteen, "puts faces and real-life circumstances on all the statistics that you read about but that remain abstract to a lot of people. It doesn't really tell you what to think, it just shows you things: This is what we found, this is what is out there. "And that's kind of what I've tried to do with my record. I don't think you can tell people anything, but you can show 'em something." Springsteen, in Washington tonight for the first of two performances at Constitution Hall as part of his first solo acoustic tour, insists "Tom Joad" is not a concept album. Still, its title reflects the influence of John Steinbeck's Depression-era classic "The Grapes of Wrath," as well as the John Ford film and the Woody Guthrie songs it inspired. "I didn't set out to make any particular type of record," Springsteen says. "I'm just talking about what happened. It was stuff that came out of looking around, following what my eyes and my ears were telling me. My main interest is to tell good stories with believable characters that lead somewhere -- stories that have their implications, I suppose." Long out of print, "Journey to Nowhere" will be reissued next month by Hyperion with an epilogue, an introduction by Springsteen and lyrics to the two book-inspired songs, as well as the album's title cut. For Springsteen, who has been talking up "Journey to Nowhere" in his concerts, "it's an opportunity to repay something that meant something to me, to turn my fans on to it, and whoever else is interested. It's a very powerful book, it should be out there, it should be read." "Journey to Nowhere" started in California during the early '80s, when Maharidge and Williamson, then working for the Sacramento Bee, embarked on a series called "Hard Times." "Even then, there were so many homeless people around there, and with no shelters, they often just lived under bridges," recalls Williamson, who is now a staff photographer at The Washington Post. "We took it upon ourselves to make this our beat," and over the next three years, the duo lived and traveled with the homeless and rode the rails with hobos through 27 states. "The idea was not just to show homeless people in shelters and soup lines," Williamson explains, "but to answer as journalists where they came from. And eventually we found we had so much material, it screamed to be a book." Widely acclaimed, the book sold out its print run and inspired Rust Belt coverage from National Public Radio, as well as German and British television documentaries. Having just revisited some of the sites originally covered in the book, Williamson and Maharidge report that things have gotten even worse. This time they found two kinds of people: "the ones we knew from 13 years ago who are still under the same bridges and haven't moved, and the new breed." And where originally they had dealt mainly with blue-collar guys, men who had worked in steel mills and coal mines or the auto industry, "when you visit the shelters and talk to homeless advocates, they're seeing the white collar worker," says Maharidge, now a visiting lecturer in journalism at Stanford University. "I'm sure somebody working for IBM or the Defense Department in 1985 never thought he had anything in common with an out-of work steelworker." Now, says Maharidge, "There's not any kind of worker -- retail, manufacturing, agriculture, blue-collar, white-collar -- that doesn't know what only a certain segment knew when we first did this book." When Bruce Springsteen started to work on his first full album in three years, it was inhabited by blue-collar characters and East Coast topography familiar from past recordings, as well as noirish characters inspired by James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. But "Tom Joad" also addresses the hardships of illegal Mexican immigrants and Vietnamese refugees. "A lot of the tunes are set in the West, and I think that was the result of spending time in California, where there's a lot of border reporting in the newspapers and immigration issues are a lot closer to home," says Springsteen. "There's a lot going on out here. Maybe what America is going to become, and people's abilities to deal with it, is manifesting itself here in some fashion." And, says Springsteen, the choice of subject matter dictated the album's spare, minimalist tone. "Anything more than that would have felt distracting," he notes. "The people [in the songs] are restrained in the way that they express themselves and that restraint is reflected in the tone of the music. The music is not fancy. There's no attention going to be called to it except: Is it evocative, is it true to the character, is it plain-spoken, direct?" "Bruce," notes Maharidge, "is a musical Steinbeck. The people he's writing about don't have a voice, so the songs are important, they talk about what's going on in our society today." [ rest of article covered "Youngstown" ] ------------------------------