ABSTRACT
Bruce, photographer Annie Leibovitz, and art director Andrea Klein spent months working on a cover concept for the album. They were trying to find an illustration that conveyed the loving but critical picture of contemporary America Born in the U.S.A. created and yet remain distant from the rampant chauvinism frothing so heavily in the year of an American-based Olympics and the electoral coronation of Ronald Reagan. Jon Landau at one time thought of using a Jasper Johns flag painting because Johns’s paintings had just the right combination of distance and respect to undercut the superficial patriotism of Bruce’s title. Although that thought was never developed, it suggests what they had in mind.
