Considered one of the greatest “lost” albums, the electric version of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska will no longer be lost. The original album was recorded at his New Jersey home — unaccompanied — on a four-track tape recorder.
The electric version exists and Springsteen is set to release it with a new box set, titled Nebraska ’82: Expanded Edition, on October 17, a week before the singer’s biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere, releases.
The Electric Nebraska disc has seven E Street Band takes on the album’s material, besides a guitar-dominated electric version of Born in the USA, a song originally recorded acoustically as part of the Nebraska sessions. For years, the existence of the electric version had been denied.
In the early 1980s, Springsteen worked differently. He had asked Mike Batlan, the roadie who handled his guitars at the time, to get “a little tape machine” and set it up in his spare bedroom. The idea was to cut down on the time he spent writing in the studio, which was an expensive process. He thought it would help to bring in tapes of more fully realised songs for the E Street Band to record.
By January 1982, Batlan set up a Teac TASCAM 144, a Portastudio 4-track, a pair of Shure SM57 microphones and a pair of mic stands in the musician’s rented house, according to Meredith Ochs’s book Bruce Springsteen: An Illustrated Biography.
He recorded the songs that would go on to make Nebraska and he was happy with the outcome. Springsteen also recorded electric versions with the E Street Band but these were rejected in favour of the original demo.
The Portastudio was a relatively new machine while Batlan, not being a recording engineer, only tried to make sure the meters were just about fine. He also didn’t figure out what the knob that controlled the tape speed was for, so everything was recorded too fast. The team tried to adjust it when they mixed the tracks.
They mixed down onto the only piece of equipment Bruce had in the house that he could connect to the Teac — a dirty old Panasonic boombox, mentions the book.
During this time, Springsteen used to go on short boat rides and during one of those trips, the boom box had fallen overboard. It was revived and a week later, the boom box roared back to life.
Springsteen’s team had mixed everything through a Gibson Echoplex that allowed them to add an echoey “slapback” effect to the songs.
In the spring of 1982, the singer convened his band to record Nebraska but ended up recording half of Born in the USA.
With his finished demo — there was only one copy — on a cassette, he thought none of “electric Nebraska” captured the feeling of the original.