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." In the book, Youngstown, Ohio, serves as a microcosm of the crumbling world order, with some history and lots of emotionally shattering narration from the city's suddenly disenfranchised. It's a story told over the course of 50 pages. Springsteen tells it in four verses. "It's amazing how accurately he's captured in those few words the whole spirit of Youngstown, both the pride and the hurt," says Maharidge, who heard Springsteen do "Youngstown" live for the first time last week. "I was bawling." Maharidge and Williamson did not meet Springsteen until late October, about three weeks before "Ghost of Tom Joad" was released. He invited them to Neil Young's annual Bridge Benefit concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater, which would be the first public performances of material from the album. After Springsteen sang two songs (neither "Journey"-inspired), he walked backstage and gave Maharidge and Williamson bear hugs. For Williamson, it was all somewhat cosmic: In high school, "all I listened to was Bruce. . . . My cross-country team used to run and sing in unison to 'Born to Run.' I think about the kind of people he's sung about over the years and then I get into journalism and all three books I've done have had to do with the downtrodden, the homeless, the poor." In fact, Williamson and Maharidge shared a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for "And Their Children After Them," a book that chronicled the descendants of poor sharecroppers in Alabama. Springsteen had offered to buy portions of "Journey to Nowhere," and the authors sold him the intellectual rights for a symbolic $1. "There was never any talk of money," says Maharidge. "My view is you cannot copyright inspiration, so it was never an issue. And what better compliment could a writer have than to have someone like Bruce Springsteen take your work and make it something else, and something totally unique?" According to Williamson, Youngstown in the early '80s was "the poster child for deindustrialization." And in "Journey to Nowhere," Joe Marshall Sr. and his son make an indelible impression. The father had worked at the mill 28 years, his son 10 years; both had lost their jobs and the son had had to move back home. One of the few parts of the old works still standing was the huge Jeanette blast furnace. It was while the Marshalls were walking through the "Jenny" that the senior Marshall turned to the authors and made his bitter comment about Hitler. In Springsteen's song, there's the line "My sweet Jenny/ I'm sinking down," and, says Williamson, "he's talking not about a woman but the furnace. . . . When they shut down a blast furnace, it's unlikely it will ever start up again." But there's a new growth industry in Youngstown: Prisons. There used to be four mills there; soon there will be four prisons. Maharidge calls it "a cruel joke -- steelworkers guarding former steelworkers." ------------------------------ From: Jungleland@aol.com Subject: Youngstown article for archive... Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, December 4, 1995 by Bob Dyer YOUNGSTOWN: Wander along the east bank of the Mahoning River, and you will see the remains of a lost civilization. Strange, silent hulks of steel litter the land, some still defiantly thrusting their corroded arms toward the sky. They are not-so-treausred artifacts of an age when Youngstown was the hard-pumping heart of steel production for a country that was gobbling up steel like a Great White eating fish. This lost culture has just been unearthed by an archaeologist named Bruce Springsteen. The rock singer's new album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, contains a poignant song called Youngstown, in which Springsteen describes the pain of working in a steel mill--and the even greater pain of losing such work. How well did The Boss describe the world? Judging by the reaction of people who have lived in it, he hit the railroad spike right on the head. Although you wouldn't ordinarily expect an aging veteran of a blast furnace to be a Springsteen aficionado, there is an immediate connection that is allmost eerie. Watch an old steelworker read through the lyrics and you are almost assured of seeing him nod his head and smile. Springsteen has brought voice to a largely unspoken dilemma involved in the Midwest's difficult move away from heavy industry: Working in a blast furnace is "a job that'd suit the devil." But that job "fed my children," and the only thing more hellish than having that job was not having it. As a latter-day Tom Joad, the main character in the classic Dust Bowl novel The Grapes of Wrath, Springsteen sings of decent folks who are increasingly tempted to become less decent by relentfless financial pressure. Younstown is the story of every industrial city in the Midwest. Substitute rubber for steel and you've got a song about Akron. The Boss' forte is communicating those generalities by focusing on specifics. And this song focuses specifically on the old Jeannette blast furnace at the Brier Hill Works, part of the now-defunct Younstown Sheet & Tube Co. Abandoned since it was abruptly closed in 1977, the Jeannette's rusting smokestacks are still visible for miles. An outsider wouldn't know it by reading the lyrics, but the Jeannette furnace is the "Jenny" to which Springsteen refers in his chorus: My sweet Jenny I'm sinking down Here darlin' in Youngstown Back when 25 blast furnaces were blanketing the Mahoing Valley with ore dust, furnaces were given female names, much like ships and airplanes. The fellow in the song is essentially married to Jenny, his job. Until the late 1970s, there were a lot of guys just like him. Guys who would sweat so much during the workday that they took salt tablets. Guys who would drink a six-pack at night to quench their thirst--and numb their pain. The days were brutal, but the pay was good. While it lasted. When Jenny closed, the Brier Hill Works employed 1,500 people. Her demise came two weeks before what is still referred to in Youngstown as Black Monday, the day Youngstown Sheet & Tube laid off 5,000 people at its Campbell Works, the biggest labor massacre in U.S. history. The new song, which is getting frequent airplay on the city's radio stations, features a melody so sparse that Springsteen seems less singer than storyteller. It's not a pretty story--especially the part about betrayal: Well my daddy come on the Ohio works When he come home from World War II Now the yard's just scrap and rubble He said, "Them big boys did what Hitler couldn't do." Thousand--perhaps millions--of Americans are walking around today with the same feeling. Among them is Chuck Shasho, 61, who last week was standing with a picket sign in front of the Sav-A-Lot grocery store in Campbell, just a few miles from Jenny. Sixty-one years old. In 30-degree weather. Shasho worked as a crane operator in a Republic Steel mill from 1952-1962. Today, when he talks about the demise of the old mills, he nearly spits out the letters EPA. "Most of it was their fault," he says, referring to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which battled with the mills over air pollution. but even Shasho allows that "a little of it was everybody's fault. The union, the management--everybody got greedy." Shasho is among those who nod knowingly when they encounter the song. "Yep," he says, reading a line about taconite coke and limestone. "Yep." But don't get the impression that Springsteen spent months in Youngstown doing research. His images were borrowed directly from a book called Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, written in 1985 by two California journalists. The book triggered Springsteen's creative juices. Lyrics began to flow. So he contacted the writers and asked to buy the rights. They were thrilled--even more so when Bruce later promised to resurrect their long-out-of-print work. (A new version with a Springsteen introduction, is scheduled for February.) One of those journalists is the brother-in-law of Mike McGowan, an editor at Youngstown's newspaper, The Vindicator. Although McGowan likes the song--"It isn't necessarily a very pretty thing, but it's very affecting"--his opinion is not universal in a town that continues to wage a war against bad publicity and a worse economy. Today the east side of Youngstown is the kind of place where too many people are home both day and night...where too much graffiti covers walls and street signs...where too many decent folks are on a first-name basis with the police. McGowan says Youngstown's reaction to the song is divided into three camps. "Some people are taking this as, 'Yea, Youngstown! Finally somebody noticed!' "Some people are taking it as a real vindication of the working man. "And some people feel, 'Oh, no! We thought we had all this behind us!'" Among those in the first camp is Dennis Wolfe, a young security guard at North Star Steel, a small mill immediately north of Jenny in the shadow of the creaky Division Street Bridge. He says he hears the song two or three times a day on local radio stations, and that most folks like it. Wolfe works in steel, too. but his "mini-mill" bears little resemblance to the places that employed his forerunners. North Star provides only 350 jobs and produces nothing but pipes for gas and oil lines. Although portions of Northeast Ohio have experienced a significant rebirth in mass steel production--thanks largely to revamped plants with extensive automation--the trend has not touched Youngstown, where only a few small manufacturers crank out specialty products. The days of massive might personified by Springsteen--"700 tons of metal a day"--are long gone. According to Jim Allgren of the Youngstown Historical Center of Labor and Industry (who calls the song "a fine tribute"). Jenny is the older of only two furnaces still standing. Jenny was born back in 1918. But in blast-furnace years, she is an infant. The area's first furnace--as Springsteen notes--was erected in 1803 when they "found the ore that was linin' Yellow Creek," the city now called Struthers. Since then, the world has been transformed more than once. And today the only thing billowing from those rusted smokestacks is bitterness. But at least the bitterness is made somewhat sweeter by Springsteen's touch. ------------------------------