What's the story with Joad and me?

Mario, thanks for posting the Sinaloa Cowboys audio, just fantastic, and it was certanly one of the songs that first grabbed me into the album but to say it was my favourite track on the album is a hard hard call. Jerseyfonia said it best above- "In all the songs on the record, I found some emotion or circumstance that touched me in a very real way." and because of this Sinaloa maybe my favourite today, but maybe Galveston Bay tomorrow and Youngstown the next day, I gave up trying to rank the songs on the album ages ago.

I want to hear Bruce and Tommy shouting "THE EARLY BIRD CATCHES THE FUCKIN' WORM!" together.

I think it'd be interesting but a few of the tracks........I just don't see how.

Been revisiting Joad on the back of this thread, you forget how good this album is.

The margins of society brought into sharp focus.

I've no clue how "Electric Joad" would play out, the Morello version of the title track is magnificent though 's kind of tough to conceive overall.....but who knows.

I don't believe this is a negative post, but just my opinion of said music. To "me" the Joad album is boring. Electric TGOTJ and Youngstown are fabulous! Devil's n Dust boring, Devils and Dust song with the ESB 12' fabulous! Western Stars album real boring. The film Western Stars less boring.

So am I a fan or not?

^ What I love most about this performance is that "Sinaloa Cowboys" is a song so steeped in its solo acoustic history that to hear more instrumentation just sounds peculiar, no matter how solid the performance is.

Is this the exact reason why some fans don't like electric "Joad"? 🤔

But until then...

I've just found out about this show, or the full band "Sinaloa Cowboys" I should say. Here's hoping this show was recorded because I'm very interested in hearing that song played with the E Street Band.

1999-10-28 - OAKLAND ARENA, OAKLAND, CA

Soundcheck: PROVE IT ALL NIGHT / PROVE IT ALL NIGHT / STOLEN CAR / TWO HEARTS / LIVING PROOF / DON'T LOOK BACK / JANEY, DON'T YOU LOSE HEART / LOOSE ENDS / SINALOA COWBOYS

ADAM RAISED A CAIN / PROVE IT ALL NIGHT / TWO HEARTS / THE PROMISED LAND / ATLANTIC CITY / MANSION ON THE HILL / INDEPENDENCE DAY / YOUNGSTOWN / MURDER INCORPORATED / BADLANDS / OUT IN THE STREET / TENTH AVENUE FREEZE-OUT / WORKING ON THE HIGHWAY / THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD / SINALOA COWBOYS / BACKSTREETS / LIGHT OF DAY / HUNGRY HEART (with Southside Johnny) / RAMROD / BORN TO RUN / THUNDER ROAD / IF I SHOULD FALL BEHIND / LAND OF HOPE AND DREAMS / BLINDED BY THE LIGHT

Premiere of the full band "Sinaloa Cowboys", unfortunately only played once on the tour. "Two Hearts" includes "It Takes Two". "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" includes "It's All Right", "Take Me To The River", "Red Headed Woman", and "Rumble Doll". "Light Of Day" includes "Boom Boom" and "I've Been Everywhere". Southside Johnny guests to duet on "Hungry Heart".

@Jerseyfornia The passing of time isn't relevant as far as see it, although I imagine everything took place in one afternoon - night - the next day. The principle is that fate & destiny took over and they both seem to have lost control over their actions completely. Spiral effect.

Immoral? Never crossed my mind that any of the two was immoral. Why do you assume she was married, and he wasn't? This implication is kinda one-sided, wouldn't you agree?

The cigarette... Let me tell you.. She didn't put it out at all. She crossed her legs, inhaled deeply, and waited for his response. It was an act of disobedience, and I always assumed it triggered his interest. Also, I imagine he didn't particularly like his job and his 'no smoking in the store' was more of something he was expected to say because the boss was watching. Personally, he didn't mind her smoking at all, and this attitude was apparent to her from his facial expression, which had to be beaming at that moment.

I can also see the leg crossing as part a defiant posture at having to put the cigarette out.

But maybe if I were a young man the leg crossing would affect me differently. 😋

@Louisa Sorry if you've posted this before, but what's your Joad show of choice? I don't revisit them as often as other tours so I'm almost always sticking to the most recently released.

While I've been listening to MSG '00 and '88 most of this year's releases, this thread got me playing Nice again and I noticed something in "Highway 29" that I've never thought about before.

"I slipped on her shoe, she was a perfect size 7 I said 'there's no smokin' in the store, ma'am'

She crossed her legs and then"

It took until this afternoon for it to dawn on me that the woman was trying to flirt with the protagonist, like, in a full on Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct way. This adds to the song for me, because thinking about it this way makes this character seem a lot more immoral than the song already implies.

T'is often better to be linguistically cunning.......

Perhaps wrongly, reading all of your posts reminds me of those on other forums who repeatedly claim Joad Tour releases serve no value and that we're better off not getting any more of them.

This thread strengthens my belief that those people are really, really wrong.

I started to write about my connection to this album, then I remembered I had posted an essay about it to the old forums back in 2016. I know this thread was meant to address the live shows from the Archive Series, but the thoughts I expressed about listening to the record for the first time are easily translatable to how I hear the live shows.

New Timers, Old Timers And Ghosts

The highway is alive tonight

But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes

When Bruce Springsteen released The Ghost of Tom Joad in 1995, I'd been a good seven years off the road. I didn't tramp around anymore, except on weekends and in my dreams. I was living in a plush apartment in the Los Angeles suburbs and working in a fine restaurant in a fine hotel. The day the album was released, my girlfriend and I were in the middle of a four-day getaway in Palm Springs and we had a short but lively argument that Tuesday evening over how selfish it was or wasn't of me to sneak off to the mall to buy the record. My argument had been that going to the mall for a half hour while she was enjoying a two hour spa treatment wasn't exactly selfishly sneaking away, but that argument was lost to the truth that spending the rest of that sunny half of the day alone in the dimmed hotel room listening to the album was probably a little selfish. I had only intended to hang out in the room long enough to smoke a joint and give the new album one listen but I didn't know then, with the shrink-wrap still on the jewel-case, that the record was made up of songs so dusty and true that they would set my mind off on a hundred half-remembered highways and remind me why sometimes, even all these years after coming off the road, I still slept better on the hard floor or out on the balcony in the cool of the night than I did in my soft, too-big bed. In my memories and in my dreams, there were always the sounds of trains and trucks, the wind and rain and I heard those same sounds in the quiet spaces between the voice and guitar on The Ghost of Tom Joad.

Before I heard a note of music, my memory was stirred by some of the song titles and by the pictures of Bruce in the booklet, looking for all the world exactly like a hundred other men I'd encountered standing or walking along some sunset highway in the empty places between the cities and towns where America was still a wild frontier. By the first chorus of the first song, I knew that it was one of a handful of songs that Springsteen had written just for me; and a million others just like me. It didn't matter that the song was born of research and empathy and not soup kitchens and hard travelin' because, as he so often does when writing about people living in the darkness, Springsteen got most of it right. He got it right enough that I was able to sit down comfortably beside the campfire in the song and conjure the faces of pilgrims, lost boys and hoboes I'd known. Listening to Springsteen's musical séance , as he called up the ghosts of Steinbeck and Guthrie, I remembered a toothless, leather-faced old-timer in a tramp camp hidden among the vines and trees on the banks of the Sacramento River in Redding, California who shared his coffee with me and told me that "this here hobo jungle is the very same one Woody Guthrie slept in when he passed this way and some of us old boys was around here even then." A few years later, when I read Bound for Glory, Guthrie's brief passage about climbing off a freight in Redding and tramping down to the hobo jungle not only confirmed the old hobo's story but brought his ghost to life in my mind. The title track of the album had that same ability to not only call forth the ghost of Tom Joad but the ghost of that old geezer in the woods and many others. I remembered eating soup around a fire or in a mission, sleeping beneath freeway overpasses with the rain sneaking through the cracks in the concrete. I remembered all the preachers who fed our bellies but longed to feed our souls. I thought about a place where cigarettes were currency and ten dollars could get you killed and the way that being out on the road contorts time and it doesn't matter if it was 1936 or 1986; out on the highway sides and along the river banks, the progression of time didn't change much about the way people out there live. If Tom Joad's ghost had emerged from the darkness of the night and sat beside my fire on some night in the mid-eighties, I'd have hardly taken him for a spirit from another time. He'd have seemed to me just another pilgrim blown in off the interstate.

Tonight my bag is packed

Tomorrow I'll walk these tracks

That'll lead me across the border

Listening to the album's immigrant songs took me to long-ago places, as well. Though I've never snuck across the border of a foreign country in search of a place where I could stand and live, I did seek that place within the vastness of my own country and, out on the road, where everything else is stripped away and you are just another human being on a quest for something more or someplace better, I learned the lesson that men are not nearly as divided by race as they are united by class. When I worked alongside Mexican immigrants in a strawberry shed in California and an apple orchard in Washington, it didn't matter where you were from or what language you spoke. What mattered was putting in a hard but honest day and keeping up with the person next to you and after work, in the camp or at the table, not by which shade of human beige you were but by how you treated the people you toiled beside. Their journey was about work and food, shelter and peace and a white kid traveling the road with his life strapped to his back wasn't really much different because, at the end of the day, his journey is also a quest for work and food. A dry place to sleep. A safe place to hide. About living. Surviving. In those songs I traveled once more with kindred spirits through the incredible central valley of California, a land so harsh and unforgiving that you wonder at the ability of men to bring forth from the ground such an abundance of food and wealth. Eyes of blue or brown, skin that's light or dark, at some point in our lives, each of us is a pilgrim on our path. Bruce got that right, too.

I got a cold mind to go tripping across that thin line

I'm sick of doin straight time

In all the songs on the record, I found some emotion or circumstance that touched me in a very real way. I played the album six or seven times through that day, stoned and remembering while my girl sunned herself by the pool. I was content that afternoon to revisit lonesome memories and dark highways of the past rather than bask in the chlorinated luxuries of Palm Springs where, even in the off-season, the sun works overtime. I understood the fear and anxiety of the ex-con in Straight Time and how hard it can be to transcend from one kind of life to another without looking back and, sometimes, turning back. The guy in the song spent the same number of years in prison as I spent wandering the countryside and I know all too well that, even now, it wouldn't take such an awful hard push to put me back out there again. I mentioned earlier how sometimes I sleep on the floor or outside on the porch. I always sleep with the sound of rain playing, even when it's actually raining outside. There's a comfort and a calling in remembering how it was to sleep rough, to close your eyes after hitching five hundred miles and be safe and warm in the eye of a storm, and sometimes, just sometimes, that life seems, if not easier, somehow better suited to me than the one I live now.

When Springsteen sang about love-gone-bad, or love just gone, and dry lightning on the horizon line, I vividly recalled the otherworldly lightning storms in the great southwestern desert and, knowing what a hard land it is, I felt a lot of sympathy for the guy in the song, left alone in the desert with the horses and the storms. It's one thing to scrabble out a life the hard way; it's another thing entirely to do it alone, with a broken heart. Love and loss is universal and I didn't have to be a broken-hearted cowboy to know what it felt like. When I left home and hit the road, I left behind a girl I loved and there were many nights in those first few years of traveling when I hurt over that and wished I were curled up against her soft form and not the trunk of a sheltering tree. Bruce got it right and his use of dry lightning reminds me that longing for a love that isn't coming back is like lightning in a sky without any rain. You want the rain, man, but all you get are flashes of light.

Youngstown made me think of my home, though Ohio had never been mine, because you couldn't come from a New Jersey blue-collar family and not relate to the sorrow of an industry dying. Even the album's "throw-away" song, the whimsical philosophy of My Best Was Never Good Enough struck a secret chord in me because, really, I'd have never set out on the road in the first place if I'd ever once in my life up until then felt that my best had been good enough. For myself or for anybody else. There were emotional touchstones scattered throughout every story on the record for me but the one that completely took me out of that hotel room and back out on the highways of my youth was The New Timer.

He rode the rails

Since the great depression

Fifty years out on the skids

Said you don't cross nobody

You'll be alright out here, kid

I remember sitting transfixed in that cheap leather chair, my feet up on the desk, smoking, hearing that song for the first time and when it ended, I played it again before letting the album play through to the end. In all my time on the road, I only rode a freight train once. It was cold and dangerous, and I made that trip with a grizzled old tramp named Clive who I had met in the high chaparral of Tehachapi, California just a few months after I'd hit the west coast for the first time. For a few weeks, I "road-dogged" with Clive, a man who, ironically, would advise me that it was best to travel alone. In the days we travelled together, Clive handed down a lot of road wisdom and taught me things every tramp should know.

With him I rode a freight car from Tehachapi to Modesto and on that cold, windy, clacketing ride he told me about the freight rail systems in the west and how to get off a moving train without killing yourself. When I told him that I didn't think trains were for me, he winked and told me that was a good thing and told me frightening stories about the Freight Train Riders of America, a nomadic gang of tramps who rode and ruled the rails, robbing, killing and raping as they pleased. When we camped for five days in the central valley, just north of Modesto, he showed me how to make a stove from a large can by punching holes around the base so you could set a coffee tin or a cooking pan on top of it without smothering the flames. After you'd heated your food or boiled your coffee, it served as a heat source, but hid the fire from view. He also showed me how to open a can with just a spoon. He showed me how to catch a catfish with just my hands and how to skin it that way, as well. In the decades since my traveling days, I've become a chef, but you can believe me when I tell you that I have never tasted anything as delicious as that catfish, smeared with mustard and pepper from a fast food restaurant and roasted over flames beneath the open sky.

Listening to that song, I thought of Clive and other older tramps who'd gifted me with their eclectic wisdom. And I thought about the loneliness that often accompanied my travels, the Christmas days I ate at a shelter or sat on a roadside, crying for a moment when Bruce sang about looking through the farmhouse window, watching the family sit down to eat. I'm fairly certain Bruce Springsteen has never stowed away on a freighter and I've only done it once myself, but in telling the story through the eyes of a young wanderer, his loneliness and his attachment to an older tramp who'd helped him along his lonely way, Bruce got it right. Again.

That evening, after hearing the album a half dozen times and smoking more pot than I should have, I sat on the balcony with my girlfriend, who would only be my girlfriend for a few more weeks and told her a few stories about the road She kissed me when I told her that less than three miles from the hotel we were staying at, I'd once slept beneath an overpass on Interstate 10 with a dust storm wailing all around me. The Ghost of Tom Joad isn't an album I play all the way through very often; only a few times each year and usually something has to happen in my life to put me in the frame of mind to sit through it. When I listen to the record, it takes me back to that hotel room in Palm Springs, of course, but beyond that it still always, always, every fucking time, takes me back to every highway I'd ever traveled and every river I'd ever lived upon. That's not always an easy trip to take and, as I said earlier, I've got to be careful thinking too consciously about those times because sometimes going back to it seems alluring. When things are wrong in my life, when I'm on the down-side, it's easy to think about leaving it all behind and packing a bag.

This week, I lost my job, which fills me up with dread, and tonight I found myself smoking and sipping bourbon and listening to The Ghost of Tom Joad on a long, mournful loop. It's a remarkable masterpiece, this quiet album of highway hymns. It's a cycle of songs that not only takes me back to another life, but warns me that yesterday is always biting at the heels of tomorrow and, as Springsteen sings in the album's greatest outtake, "one minute you're right there...and something slips."

I'm seeing ghosts. I'd better go to bed.

The highway is alive tonight...

I think Joad is a light that shows us what we are missing or what we normally wouldn't see. Bruce is really good at shining that light so people will understand those people on the margins that are not there out of a desire, but they were put there, put in a place nobody wants, and are struggling to return to a place of safety. More than any other record, Joad does this. I look back to the Asbury Park record. I am thinking of the Vet returning home in Lost in the Flood and those poor fools loaded on the magic dust up at Greasy Lake. That ending where Davy got really hurt. To this day it is not known to me where he ends up. I would see Crazy Janey as possibly the same girl who needs a Shooter. So many people through the years lost. Backstreets come to mind, as does the entire Nebraska record...

I am reminded of an interview I heard where Bruce talks about why people are artists. He said something like: Something happened and we don't like it, so we make a world where we are in charge and we are gonna do something about it. I am shooting from the hip not having the exact words he used.

Tom Joad shows us we are human, it shows us the work to be done. I mourn for the lost souls, I pray for all of us. That record is that prayer.

"And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?

And what'll you do now, my darling young one?

I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'

I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

And the executioner's face is always well hidden

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

Where black is the color, where none is the number

And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'

But I'll know my song well before I start singin'

And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall"

Have said many times that Joad is my favourite Bruce album, would sit and listen to it for hours, it made a great impression on me.

Group therapy, then.

I love Joad shows almost as much as I love all of you....some of you even more.

I saw a show in L.A. after standing in the drop line two hours. I walked around the front side of the Wiltern and saw Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows and his dreadlocks. I walked over to him and said Hi. At that time I had seen his band around 15 times. After I said hi, a connected, L.A., entertainment guy stepped away from will call and exclaimed they gave him 4 tickets. He said out loud, "anyone need two???" I reached in my pocket and pulled out $400 and was ready to hand it to him. He said no need and then handed me the tickets, I ran back to my roommate and best friend and shared my good fortune....I was 4 months sober on that cold night....I sat near Tom Hanks and Sean Penn in the amazing Wiltern theater. I was where I supposed to be, but then again we always are where we should be..that pain you feel is the resistance to growth. It's just a kiss away...

The Joad shows offer something that he had never given me before I knew I needed it. The intimacy of the show and his voice on those songs...opening with Joad and then hitting me with Adam and Darkness was like a shotgun in my face, This is it I thought. Then those stories, the lost souls making thier way in this new world torn from the life they knew. As an abandoned child I could relate and Bruce worked me through it with each song and story. In the end it's about acceptance.

Now when I play a Joad show I am with an old friend, the one who taught me to breathe.

Sounds like you're already getting your therapy.