Word: joad
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...About Jim Jones, a childhood friend recalled, "There was something not quite right. He was obsessed with religion. He was obsessed with death." But he always had the spellbinder?s gift of bending people to his will, which meshed strangely with his seemingly progressive, inclusive social agenda. Paraphrasing Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Jones proclaimed, "Wherever there are people struggling for justice and righteousness, there am I." One of his early churches, in Indianapolis in 1953, was fully interracial when that wasn?t cool. Moving to California, he established the People?s Temple, which grew from 81 members...
Devoted Springsteen fans will sense immediately where Devils & Dust is headed, largely because the Boss has left his boot prints on this territory before, most famously on 1982's Nebraska and 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad. Those albums chronicled closed lives in open spaces with the kind of ascetic social realism you might find in a particularly earnest newspaper series, but they also had Springsteen's venerable empathy to warm them up and dramatize them. Fact and feeling mingle again on Devils, but not always in the proper proportion. The boxer on The Hitter who passes his estranged...
...Julianne Phillips, Springsteen moved into a $14 million mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif. (the faithful jeered), wed Scialfa in 1991 (the faithful cheered) and sang about relationships, kids and his ennui (the faithful shrugged). Then in '95 he put out an album of folk songs, The Ghost of Tom Joad. It won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album, but it felt more like a Woody Guthrie tribute than a Springsteen record. The songs were stark and compelling, but the old optimism was gone. The characters of Tom Joad lived on the fringes of American life, and they died quickly...
...important fact about Springsteen: he thinks a lot about being Springsteen. After Tom Joad, he did some hard thinking--about himself, his family and the job of being Bruce--and decided to move back to New Jersey, where he now occupies a sprawling estate just a few minutes' drive from where he grew up. "Patti and I, we're both Irish-Italian," he says. "We have a lot of family here, and we wanted the kids"--they have three, ages 12, 10 and 8--"to have that experience of knowing people who do lots of different kinds of jobs...
...only strictly literary problem might seem to arise among those authors whose novels describe the lives of the poor. It would not make sense, or be good business, for example, to portray the Joad family traveling west in a sleek eight-cylinder Packard sedan, Tom Joad's diamond Rolex flashing in the Dust Bowl air. The poor do not make good ads..... Or do they? Might be edgy possibilities here, a kind of Walker Evans chic - a good spread in Vanity Fair, page after page of gaunt black-and-white shots, weathered Depression faces, a certain erotic poverty...