ABSTRACT
Finally having a master didn’t mean that Nebraska was ready for release. Springsteen and art director Andrea Klein spent the better part of the summer working up an album cover. Bruce wanted something more evocative than a portrait of himself, something closer to the pictures he’d found in a rare copy of Robert Frank’s 1958 photo essay, The Americans. Frank was known to rock and roll fans as the creator of the Exile on Main Street album cover. His long-out-of-print book explored, in the words of Jack Kerouac’s introduction, “that crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral.” Its portrayals were in a style of photography that directly connected to the Nebraska songs—staring without flinching at painfully mundane scenes and stirring the swarming life beneath.
