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Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis.

The stories about the characters from Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska are insane.

One went on an unprovoked killing spree with his 14-year-old girlfriend in 10, excuse me, 11 innocent people died.

Another was classified by the FBI as the most violent member of the Philly mob. And those are just the real-life true crime characters from the album. The fictionalized

characters were at least as compelling. One shot up a nightclub. Another barely restrained

himself from murdering a state trooper,

and a third contemplated work as a hired hitman.

Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska characters, both the real and the imagined, drew from a deep

well of 20th century American desperation.

Characters who Springsteen found in conversation with

Flannery O'Connor's The Misfit and Charles Lawton's Harry Powell played so forcefully by Robert

Mitchum in Knight of the Hunter. In the hands of the boss, these inspired character studies

made for great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the

top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Jack,

Johnny, and Jimmy, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to man-eater by Holland Oates.

And why would I play you that specific slice of sheet cat tamed by a jaguar cheese could I afford it?

Because that was the number one song in America on December 17th, 1981.

And that's the day Bruce Springsteen sat down to write the title track for what would become one of his greatest albums, Nebraska.

On this episode, Charles Starkweather, The Chicken Man, Johnny 99, a meeting in Atlantic

City in Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska.

...