Andy Hibel 0:03
Welcome to the HigherEdJobs podcast. I'm Andy Hibel, the chief operating officer and one of the co-founders of HigherEdJobs.

Kelly Cherwin 0:09
And I'm Kelly Cherwin, the director of Editorial strategy. Today, we're joined by Warren Zanes. Dr. Warren Zanes is a New York Times bestselling author and Grammy nominated documentary producer whose writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, the Oxford American and more. A former professor at Case Western Reserve University, the School of Visual Arts and Rochester Institute of Technology. Zanes is the editor of Collections and Jimmy Rodgers and Tom Petty and has written books including Dusty in Memphis Revolutions and Sound 50 Years of Warner Records, Records and Petty. The biography, which Rolling Stone named one of the top ten music books of 2015. He has been involved in documentary projects, including 20 Feet From Stardom, the PBS series Groundbreaking George Harrison. Living in the Material World and the Gift. The Journey of Johnny Cash. He is currently at work on a series of books with Garth Brooks. A former member of Warner Brothers Recording Act, The Del Fuego, Zanes solo recordings for Dualtone records include Memory Girls, People That I'm Wrong For. I want to move out in the Daylight, the biggest bankrupt city in the world, and the collected Warren Zanes. Warren, thank you so much for joining us today.

Warren Zanes 1:22
Thank you so much for having me.

Andy Hibel 1:25
Warren I read your May 19, 2023 New York Times article What We Can Learn from Bruce Springsteen's Left Turn and saw that you've taught for years at NYU. I instantly wondered, what would you tell an academic colleague about what they could learn from a left turn in their work or career?

Warren Zanes 1:43
I think that's a great question, and if I can set it up a little bit. I would first say, you know, I think we need to look at where Bruce Springsteen was relative to the institutions he was working with when he made that left turn. So if you looked for an academic parallel in 1981, Bruce Springsteen was not an adjunct professor. It was not a clinical professor. It wasn't even a department chair. He was, you know, you could say Dean or, you know, a dean with quite a bit of power. So when he made the decision to put Nebraska out, which was very unconventional, he had a certain amount of power behind him. The equivalent in the academic world might be a dean of a business school deciding to write a book of poetry about his or her childhood trauma. It would still be a very unconventional move. But done from a place of power within the structure that the person is operating in. So I don't want to pretend that anybody could go and make a hard left turn in an academic setting and not pay for that. Like, it depends on, you know, where you're situated. But I think the instructive thing is that it's a risk move. You know, so, you know, for people who don't know Nebraska, Nebraska was an unfinished set of home recordings. Springsteen made them in his bedroom. He never intended to put them out as an album. They were just meant to be rough sketches that had been rerecorded in the studio. But he felt some kind of power in them, and he brought these recordings to Columbia Records to put out as his sixth official release. And there was nothing like that happening with people at the top of the charts at that time. And I would say since so in an academic setting, what can someone learn? It's to take the risk. And you know, what it might involve is like going into a vulnerable part of yourself and understanding that the consequences might not put you in a better place. They might put you in a worse place. In Bruce's instance, you know. Alienating fans. Confusing promo men who are taking records out to radios. There were lots of consequences. And it just happened to work out. You know, I think in in university life, there are a lot of people who won't take risks because the consequences could find them without a job. That's the short answer.

Andy Hibel 4:43
That's wonderful. I guess it's also in the book, too, came just as a follow up question on that. At that point, he puts Nebraska out. Nebraska goes and actually does fairly well, possibly to his surprise, even.

Warren Zanes 4:58
It goes to number three on the charts. On the strength of what he's built up to that point.

Andy Hibel 5:04
And at the time that he's writing Nebraska and putting it out, there's this other project he's working on that kind of gets put aside for now the, if you will, the dean comes through it. Talk a little bit about if he was a dean at that point with that next album, what does he become after that, I guess, is the question. What does that lead to on the other side of taking that chance and taking that left turn on his career? And what would the parallel be on the academic side if you if you want to continue the analogy?

Warren Zanes 5:38
Yeah, well, if there's something above president of the university, it it would be that he went to superstardom. And this is what I, I didn't even know when I was writing the book, the degree to which Nebraska I'm born in the USA. The recording you're referencing emerged at the same time. So it's not that he made Nebraska and then made Born in the USA, it's that they he could have gone to one or the other. He had five top ten singles Bully done and he put them what would become five top ten singles and he put them on the shelf to focus on this record that he knew was going to be confusing to many, not just the record label, but to the fans. And, you know, he took that risk and many things happened because of it. But I think one thing within the artistic community, a lot of musicians looked over and said, if he can do that, there's no reason why I can't. It made people want to take a few chances. And, you know, usually a release comes and people work it for about a year, a year and a half. Nebraska's had this long life by the time I'm writing about it. It's 40 years old and I'm still trying to figure it out. Now, that to me is something that's rare in the popular arts.

Andy Hibel 7:18
And the book delivery from nowhere that you wrote about this experience. I wouldn't say there's a final point. I think you you stopped the work where you felt comfortable. But I think the work is still continuing. But so much of it's infused with the discussion of art and the importance of art. And more importantly, you go in depth about the power of imperfections within the art. Could you elaborate how art can benefit from imperfections and why those imperfections can be so powerful?

Warren Zanes 7:50
Yeah, I mean, I think this is it's timely to be talking about Nebraska, an imperfect record in a time where the technology allows people making records to make vocals perfectly in tune. Everyone is doing it. I'm not talking about Auto-Tune. I'm talking about in the digital era, you can begin to see music as wave form. So engineers often used to close their eyes and listen to music, and now it's eyes open looking at a screen and you can see something that quite possibly you can't even hear and everyone fixes it. Who wouldn't? I would. So what do we lose? We lose those little burrs, you know, those little human moments where a voice goes off pitch and potentially is more emotionally resonant because it's more human. You know, we are flawed creatures. It's just technology. And I don't want to oversimplify with A.I. because I think it's more complicated than a lot of conversations have it. But there's another technology that allows, say, images to hit this level of perfection. And and you look at them and you say, But that's not human. And sometimes it's the human element that's most, you know, has the most emotional power. But I also would say, you know, when we make something, whether it's a record or it's a painting or it's a novel, we're making it for the present audience. But in the best case, it's also going to an upcoming audience. And if we give them something that has the flaws, it shows the signs of its making. We're kind of offering a lesson about creation if it's to perfect, it's out of reach of the human being. And for me, you know, I got I was lucky. Punk rock came along and it was deeply flawed. And it was like for the previous generation, it was seeing the Beatles in 1964 and it was like, I can do that. Punk rock was a big, loud. I can do that. So when you leave the flaws in the work, I think it opens the gate a little bit wider. For those people who have that, I can do that experience. And Springsteen empowered a lot of people by doing that.

Andy Hibel 10:34
I couldn't agree with you more personally by also think we take that a step further to the society we live in today. So much of our society, whether it being Generation X, looking at the millennials, looking at Generation Z, so much of life has played out through media that pulls all of the imperfections out of life. Yeah, life is messy. Life has a lot of different nooks and crannies that it creates and people, but we all put the best version of ourselves out. There are LinkedIn profile. If you're in your mid-fifties like me, if your photo is ten years old, that's not uncommon. Who wants to update their photo from their mid-forties to their mid-fifties?

Warren Zanes 11:17
Like, Yeah, I would, but I would. I would also just jumping in sick say it's not a new problem. If you think about I'm grabbing for a simple one, but Norman Rockwell's America, you know, pumped out through covers on the Saturday Evening Post when you saw images of family and community, they were pretty much without flaws. And then you close your doors and everybody's yelling at one another. And and so what happens is you repress that. And so that's the danger, you know, the return of the repressed. You know, another example, I took a class with Jacqueline Rose at the school for criticism and theory, and they're talking about the idealization of motherhood. And we were reading in an essay about the fact that the mother has these moments where they hate the child and there's zero room to say, I hate my child in this moment because of the sentimental izing of motherhood, so that those feelings are become an object of shame and then they're repressed. But that doesn't mean they're going away. You know, they're coming out somewhere else. And it's generally as some kind of violence. So there's a very big picture to look at with this stuff. I'd say it's not new, but we're hitting higher levels of having to deal with the issue. And there's a real problem and forgetting that we are flawed and forgetting the beauty of the flaw.

Andy Hibel 13:06
I never thought I'd reference this in a podcast, but I remember when our kids were young, my wife brought home a book that was at the time narrated by Samuel Jackson called Go the F%#! to Sleep, which was the non sanitized version of putting your children to bed, that it's just like, We love you, you're awesome. But guess what? Just just go to sleep, please. Like it's been a day. You need to sleep and God knows I need the sleep. So please go to sleep. Yeah. So if you know that.

Warren Zanes 13:36
But we don't leave a lot of room for that.

Andy Hibel 13:38
No, we really don't. But it's such a shared human experience. Every parent is going to experience a night, at least a night, maybe regularly a night where they. They just want the kids to get to sleep so they can just get a little bit of respite to be able to be the best version of themselves that next day.

Warren Zanes 13:55
And if that's shared with others who are going through that, what they do is they have a sigh of relief and there's a kind of increased sense of community not to idealize that, but there's an identification, a sigh of relief. So when when we see Bruce Springsteen put out something that's more approachable, more innately human because of those imperfections,

I think he draws us closer and makes us want to make thing.

Andy Hibel 14:33
Not surprisingly from you, warm. That's extremely well put.

Warren Zanes 14:37
Thank you.

Andy Hibel 14:38
Let's let's dig a little bit deeper into the book. And I felt like I debated whether or not I should. And I'm going to visually show Warren something over our zoom here, which is my version of reading the book. And unfortunately, I will reread it personally because I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I read it for the professional purposes of this podcast. And as I do for those things, I take notes in the margin, like, Hey, I want to really touch on this and this has never happened before on page 133 and let's see if I can do a good up close version of that.

Your book set my brain into overdrive like I've never destroyed a page, and I literally wrote all over this page.

Warren Zanes 15:24
Almost no higher compliment.

Andy Hibel 15:26
So when I'm looking at that and I kind of want to just set it up and let you tell the story. My notes reflected many more questions than answers to the story of Springsteen's childhood and what he labeled as transgenerational trauma in his family. How did that conversation play out since you spoke with him with a portrait of his Aunt Virginia? Literally sitting in a chair next to the two of you. Please, please tell the story.

Warren Zanes 15:56
There are moments that I, you know, I put in my locket and save and that that interview and that moment in that interview is one I save. It's like it's precious stuff, because not every interview involves the kind of vulnerability that he brought to that one. I think that Nebraska means a lot to him. And, you know, that's probably a gross understatement. But we were talking about, you know, what was going on for him psychologically at this time. You know, in his memoir, Born to Run, he makes Nebraska, puts out Nebraska, and then takes this road trip from New Jersey to Los Angeles, where he's purchased his first home. And he has a kind of breakdown along the way. And that road trip in his memoir is a far longer account than the account of the making of Nebraska. And in my mind, I thought there was a connection. So in this interview with him that really, if there was any number one point to talk about it was that connection. Like, I believe something happened for him in making Nebraska that took him to that place where things were going to break down before they got built up. And so we were talking about it, and he started reflecting on living with his grandparents and in his grandparents home, as he described it to me, there was this portrait of his aunt Virginia, who had been killed that I think it was age six, riding her bicycle on McLean Street, Freehold, where he was living. And there he is living at his grandparents house for the first, you know, five or so years of his life. And in the living room is this picture of his Aunt Virginia, who died very close to the age he was. And it was like a house that was just frozen in grief, meaning it was an unprocessed grief. And the grandparents response to it was to let Bruce do whatever he wanted. They were going to withhold all discipline and, you know, I say in the book, like his was a terrible freedom. And Bruce really made this point, drove it home like that. Sounds like a great thing to a kid. You can stay up as late as you want, watch TV whenever you want. You know, the adults aren't going to have authority over you. Sounds pretty good. It's exactly what a child doesn't need or ultimately want. And we were talking about this in talking about that portrait and its effect. It was right over the television. You know, there's is is dead on. Who is this object of just overwhelming grief in that home? And he says, I've got that portrait. Let me go get it. And it was I was not expecting it. And he goes and gets the portrait and puts it on the seat between us. So there's this triangle, me, Bruce Springsteen, the portrait that was in his grandparents home that kind of haunted him around the time that he was making Nebraska. You know, like you said, it was his grandparents life that came back to him in that period in his life. And you mentioned the idea of transgenerational. I use the term trans generational haunting, which I took from the book, the show on the kernel. And we were talking about how the trauma of one generation can affect, you know, two generations up the chain. So there's the grandparents trauma that somehow he was carrying. He'd had an experience that, you know, he wasn't there. There was just this portrait in the living room. And yet there he was, approaching midlife. And it's reverberating in. And the amazing thing, you know, I still when I say I wrote that book with my kids in mind, I want them to know, like, if something happened in childhood and it starts to shake inside them in midlife. Deal with it, find help to deal with it. Don't ignore it. Don't pretend it will go away. Deal with it. And look what this guy did. He didn't just deal with it. He made this record. He told these stories from the place of that shaking trauma inside of him. He told stories about other people that were in some way his story and left this document behind. Now, what's stunning to me is that when people really go in to past trauma and they really visit it, I think a lot stop creating in order to go through it. I imagine that's what I would do. But I think Bruce Springsteen is an unusual species. Like, he's made our way through everything he's gone through. And not every one can do that. And so we get this document, and it's his first record that has no redemption, that has no hope. But the hope and the redemption of time and the fact that he did it, it always meant something to me on that level. So there's enormous power in it. And, you know, I feel like we're getting smarter and smarter and knowing more about childhood trauma and how it affects us and when it makes its appearances. And here's this record. It's a testament. A case study.

Andy Hibel 22:32
A a gift to people who share the same challenges of reconciling their own childhood trauma as it rattles around in them in midlife or whenever.

Warren Zanes 22:43
I'm telling you, like you can as an author, you get a sense for how the book is being received by notes You get. 75% of them are about mental health crises. Wow. Like, this is a this is a story of a recording made by one of our greatest popular musicians. And 75% of the emails I'm getting are talking about this book helped me to understand what I went through or what I'm going through. And I'm like, That's that is a really I've had moments in my life. You know, it's funny, as an academic, we don't talk a lot about self-help. We're not supposed to bring that on the college campus. But I've had points in my life divorce, death of a parent where I stopped reading fiction and I stopped reading critical theory. And I'm reading self-help. And so to me, it's an earmark of success that this book elicited that response, because I think we should keep exploring hybrid forms. This is not a self-help book, but it had some function that related it to that and that that's a win for me.

Andy Hibel 24:04
That's amazing. Talk about intangible benefits that you get through going through a process of writing a book like this. What a wonderful gift to receive in return.

Warren Zanes 24:16
It's funny, like I was I was talking to someone, you know, a fellow Ph.D. who's navigated academia in the way that I have and didn't take a straight path. And we were talking about bell hooks and bell hooks. You're such an interesting writer, You know, writing a book about love. And you know that people in academia are kind of bristling like, oh, you know, if. But I think academic writing, not all of it, but I think where it can happen should push out into this stuff. I always say my kids would be horrified when I would say this to them. But I said, you know, they're in middle school. And I'm like, No, no, this you're not going to be studying anything that really is going to be that useful. You'll you'll learn how to study that will be helpful in some fashion. You'll you'll learn about reading. And every now and then you'll hit a book that will really matter to you. But the things that are most important in life are not going to be studied in the classroom. For instance, love a romantic feeling. They're going to teach you what a penis is, but they're not going to teach you like about falling in love. You're going to fall in love. You're going to feel like this has never happened to anyone else because this thing is in your rib cage and it's so big and they're not going to teach you about that. And this is the part my kids didn't like. So I'm going to go to your school and offer to teach a class on Falling in Love. And that's a it's a God forbid that happen. But I think as I'm saying this to them, I'm like, I'm actually right. Like, there's a lot that should be talked about in the classroom setting that we can't make room for.

Andy Hibel 26:13
And to underscore with your colleagues, if there's something we've learned through the higher ed jobs journey over the decades, that if you're feeling something about your career right now, I can 100% tell you somebody else is feeling it. Yeah. In fact, many other people are feeling it. Knowing where you are in your career and being worried about your career and making sure it's going the way you want to and going through the the bumps and dips of the road on a day to day basis. Everybody goes through that. But more people who can talk about it, we've talked more about mentorship and sponsorship and allyship over the years. That's all great. But people used to when we first started back in the nineties, come up to the booth at a conference and say, Hey, I have a friend who's looking for a job. Can you tell me how to do that? And more and more and I really, really encourage people to do it. We understand that there's there's an etiquette to it, but talk to us. That's what we're here for. We have lived with our friends who use the website on a day to day basis and understand the plight that everybody goes through. It's a shared experience. There's nothing wrong with your job.

Warren Zanes 27:28
Well, there you've kind of given an answer to your first question here. How can what Bruce Springsteen did with Nebraska be instructive for someone who is an academic? And what you're describing is like allowing a certain vulnerability about being on a college campus as an educator. Talk about it shows some of the vulnerability. Springsteen showed some vulnerability and it ended up being empowering to others.

Mike Walker 28:02
Join us next time for the conclusion of our conversation with Dr. Warren Zanes. If you'd like to get in touch with us. Send us an email to podcast@HigherEdJobs.com or message us on X, @higheredcareers. Thanks for listening. We look forward to talking soon.