Warren Zanes has worn a host of colorful hats in his day: guitarist in the ’80s garage band the Del Fuegos, writer of popular biographies of Dusty Springfield and Tom Petty, executive at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and now, with the upcoming film Deliver Me From Nowhere, major movie producer.
The film, based on Zanes’s 2023 book of the same name about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, stars Jeremy Allen White of The Bear as Bruce and will be released by 20th Century Studios later this year. It has recently been filming throughout New Jersey; locations have included the Stone Pony and Frank’s Deli & Restaurant in Asbury Park, Montclair’s Bellevue Avenue library branch, and downtown Newark. Shooting is scheduled to resume at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford and in downtown Freehold on January 9 and 10, respectively.
The dark, acoustic Nebraska, recorded by Springsteen as he played alone in a rented house in Colts Neck, is his lowest-selling album. Yet it is now considered by many, including Springsteen himself, to be his best work.
Zanes, a 20-year resident of Montclair, says he wrote Deliver Me From Nowhere to explore why Springsteen made the “radical decision” to release Nebraska when he did. “There was a trajectory,” says Zanes. “He was positioned to be the biggest rock and roll star of his generation. The River put him in a perfect place to go really big, but he chose to put out a record that was unfinished. It was imperfect. It was poorly recorded. It was a very odd choice.”
For the book, published by Crown, Zanes interviewed Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau, bandmate Steven Van Zandt, recording executives and fellow musicians. But the big break came when Bruce agreed to an interview, including a visit to the Colts Neck bedroom where Nebraska was born, complete with the original orange shag carpeting. “I had a lot of the book done, but it was nothing until [Springsteen] breathed life into it,” says Zanes.
Zanes was 17 when his brother Dan asked him to join the Del Fuegos. Photo: Courtesy of Warren Zanes/Danny Clinch
Zanes had his own unusual trajectory. He grew up in New Hampshire, the youngest of three raised by a single mom, and attended Phillips Andover Academy boarding school on scholarship. When he was 17, his brother Dan started the Boston-based Del Fuegos. Warren would sneak out at night and hitchhike to Boston to watch them perform, wearing black clothes and a ski mask to evade campus security, and getting back as the sun was coming up. “I was a real troublemaker and at the bottom of my class,” he says.
A bright spot was his creative writing class, where a nurturing teacher encouraged him to write about his passion. “I wrote a paper about Elvis that he really liked,” he says. “I thought, Maybe writing about music has a validity. Maybe these things can merge.”
The writing, though, would have to wait. After graduation, his brother asked him to join the Del Fuegos. “I said yes before I even knew what I’d be playing,” Zanes said. “I had three months to learn to play the guitar.” Six months after he joined, the band signed with Warner Bros.
His five years with the Del Fuegos was an “amazing experience that was really the crucial education for me,” he says. More than the PhD he later earned, he says, “playing in the band was the degree I needed to be able to write books about guys like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen.”
In fact, he crossed paths with both musicians, whom he calls “two of my biggest heroes,” on the road: Petty at a gig in Los Angeles, and Bruce at a club in North Carolina. In Deliver Me From Nowhere, Zanes writes that Springsteen had just released Born in the U.S.A. and was “on the cover of every magazine,” but joined the Del Fuegos onstage for a few numbers and “let some joy flood the room.” For Zanes and his bandmates, though, what gave Bruce godlike status was not his latest blockbuster album. When Bruce walked in, he writes, “We had one thought: That’s the guy who made Nebraska.”
But there was a dark side that accompanied the highs. “I was really young, and we were living pretty hard. We masked our fear and sense of inadequacy with booze and drugs,” says Zanes, who has been clean and sober for 32 years. “But a great thing about being human is that you can have experiences that you’re not ready for and process them down the road.”
After five years and three albums, Zanes left the Del Fuegos. “I wanted more of a piece of the creative pie, and my brother wasn’t willing to give it to me. I was a guitar player and that’s it. However much I was a somewhat lost young man, I just had some sense I could do more. And he was limiting me. And it was a real rift between us. It was hard to quit, and there was a lot of hurt. It’s tough being brothers in a band.”
For the next several years, Zanes “fell in love with school,” and, after a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, earned two masters degrees and a PhD in visual and cultural arts. His dissertation, which focused on critical theory about race, class, gender and sexuality, “really tuned up my mind,” he says. “I learned a way of thinking about society and culture that challenged some of the norms that structure us.”
Soon after he completed his dissertation, Zanes’s writing career took off. In 2003 he published Dusty in Memphis, about Dusty Springfield’s 1969 album, the first volume in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series about classic albums. Tom Petty was so taken with it that he hired Zanes to write his 2015 biography. Other writing gigs included collaborating with Garth Brooks on his book series about his career, and writing about music for Rolling Stone and The Los Angeles Times. He was a consulting producer on 20 Feet from Stardom, which won the 2014 Academy Award for best documentary.
Zanes’s deep connections in the music industry helped him make the Deliver Me From Nowhere book and movie a reality. Thom Zimny, the longtime producer of Springsteen documentaries, who had interviewed Zanes for his film The Searcher, an HBO documentary about Elvis, greased the wheels with Landau, who greased the wheels with Bruce. After Zanes met with the legendary manager, he recalls Landau telling him, “I don’t tell Bruce what to do—nobody does—but I’m gonna tell him that I had a good time with you, and that I think he might also.”
Zane’s discussion of the book on the influential podcast WTF With Marc Maron was key in moving it to the big screen. After the interview aired, Zanes got an email from Eric Robinson of the production company the Gotham Group that read, “This [book] should be a movie.” Robinson flew from Los Angeles to Montclair to meet Zanes at Turtle + the Wolf restaurant. Robinson’s first choice for director was Scott Cooper, a friend of Springsteen’s. Zanes then flew to LA to meet with Cooper, who started the conversation by saying, “You know, Nebraska is my favorite album.”
In the film, Maron, a Jersey native, plays Chuck Plotkin, the producer and audio engineer who prepared Springsteen’s Nebraska demo tapes for release on vinyl.
As for why Bruce made Nebraska, Zanes says he believes that the need to process his childhood trauma was probably the driving force. In 1982, Springsteen was in his early thirties, had just broken up with his girlfriend and had no home of his own. “You deal with the past or the past deals with you,” says Zanes. It’s no coincidence, he says, that soon after making Nebraska, Springsteen “takes this cross-country trip to his new home in LA, and along the way has this breakdown, and he’s kind of gone for a couple of years. He gets help, rebuilds, and then there’s Born in the U.S.A.”
The fact that Bruce faced his issues head-on and is open about his mental-health struggles makes him a powerful male role model, Zanes says. “Nebraska is about male vulnerability. We need that now more than ever. We’re seeing a lot of bravado; people use the term ‘toxic masculinity.’ The story of Nebraska is a story about Bruce Springsteen facing his vulnerabilities, exposing them, rather than trying to mask them with bravado. And it becomes his strength.”’
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