Product Description

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 togethera 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".

Track Listing

1. Ghost Of Tom Joad
2. Straight Time
3. Highway 29
4. Youngstown
5. Sinola Cowboys
6. Line
7. Balbo Park
8. Dry Lightning
9. New Timer
10. Across The Border
11. Galveston Bay
12. Best Was Never Enough

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11440 in Music
• Released on: 2000-01-10
• Number of discs: 1

From Amazon.com
Bruce Springsteen followed his muse on this haunting 1995 release. Perhaps that's why it barely made a dent in the marketplace, even while it thrilled the faithful who were willing to take another dark, Nebraska-like journey with him. It's abundantly clear that Springsteen had been soaking himself in the work of John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie during the writing of The Ghost of Tom Joad, but their combined influence is found on more than just the title track. It's all over these windblown songs (including the haunting "Dry Lightning" and "the seminal "Youngstown") and their hard-scrabble protagonists. Not the Boss's biggest record, but certainly one of his best. --Michael Ruby

Customer Reviews

The album for non-fans
Bruce Springsteen is a massive name in America, but less so in the UK where he is much more lauded by the press than by the people. Those that do know him mostly know him for the likes of the painfully misunderstood 'Born In The USA' or 'Dancin' In The Dark,' rather than the sparse soundscapes of say, Nebraska. With all his bombast and overblown performing, it's easy to forget that Springsteen is heavily influenced by Bob Dylan, and it's this influence which comes to the fore on The Ghost Of Tom Joad.

The title track notably covered by the infinitely credible Rage Against The Machine, Ghost Of Tom Joad is the album for non-Springsteen fans to enjoy. Nothing here is within spitting distance of the 1980s reverb of 'Born In The USA' or the E-Street Band. Instead, we have a predominantly solo Springsteen crooning and mumbling over acoustic guitar, augmented by occasional keyboards and lap steel. It's a stark, beautiful, emotional piece of work mixing up love songs with character sketches and political defiance. The best song here is 'Youngstown,' a song about America's wars and the human cost thereof, its dynamic switch a few minutes in the album's most fully-realised moment. 'Dry Lightning' is as affecting as anything Dylan wrote in his early days and the title track is as good as anything he ever did.

So forget what you know about Bruce Springsteen. Forget the videos and the hairy chest and the patriotism - and instead see this album for what it is - a bleak, beautiful collection of timeless songs.

Bruce at his absolute best
In retrospect, "Tom Joad" seems like an aberation in the Springsteen back catalogue between "Tunnel of Love" and 2007 (just prior to the release of "Magic"). Amidst the misguided session band experiments of the '92 albums, the various and assorted compilations and retrospectives, the ambitious but ultimately disappointing "Rising" and the scraped-together off-cuts and cast-offs that make up "Devils and Dust", "Tom Joad" stands out as Springsteen's only great recording since "Tunnel of Love". And it is truly great, by any standard and in any time.

Lyrically, I believe this is his greatest achievement, despite the stark abandonment of the trademark faith and hope that had permeated his previous efforts. The sweep of his lyrical concerns here are exceptional, encompassing immigrants, railroad bums, career criminals, unemployed steelworkers and border guards. Most songs here deliver a concentrated and often unsettling picture of lives in turmoil or on the edge, often trapped by circumstance, culture or accident - and sometimes plain bad decision making.

Musically, we veer from stately (the title track) through chillingly spare (Highway 29) to almost entirely tuneless (The New Timer). But there is logic and calculation in every choice.

Highlights are many, but my favourite may be "Youngstown".

"Youngstown" is one of Bruce's great lyrics, simply magnificent in its simplicity, majestic in its glorious depiction of the mixed blessings of the Youngstown mills:

"Taconite, coke and limestone
Fed my children and made my pay
Then smokestacks reachin' like the arms of god
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay".

And there is a barely suppressed rage below the surface, that you feel could explode into violence at any minute. Later, Springsteen expressed this with awesome power in the live E Street version of the song, powered unforgettably by Lofgren's spine-tingling play out solo as the song hammered brutally into "Murder Incorporated" and then "Badlands", the logical extension and next step from this lyric.

And at the end the protagonist, tossed away by the rich men who care for money and power over life and society, finds eloquence that he might never have guessed he possessed:

"From the Monongaleh valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalacchia
The story's always the same
Seven-hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world's changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name"

This is classic story-song Springsteen, able to sum up an age and a lifetime in a verse.

I hope one day he will deliver another set of songs this good.

Truly great, and of its type, unsurpassable.

Brilliantly depressing.
Never been a huge springsteen fan, but bought a couple of albums with a voucher last year, this one and Born in the Usa.
Born in the USA is a classic no doubt, but "the ghost of Tom Joad" is my favourite.
If you ever want to kick back, close your eyes and be taken on a truly saddening journey then this is the album to choose.
My personal favourite is "the line" for its ability to make me want to cry like no other song can.

I am looking forward to listening to some more albums by the same artist, but do not anticipate finding anything of this calibre.