“‘Homestead’ is probably one of the best songs I ever wrote,” Joe Grushecky told me during our American Babylon virtual sit-down a couple of years ago.
I have to agree.
“Homestead” is a populist anthem about an unemployed steelworker in the Monongahela Valley, and if that sounds a bit derivative of a certain Springsteen song, you might be surprised to learn which came first.
In 1993, Joe and Bruce had already begun working on the album that would become American Babylon when the inspiration for “Homestead” struck. They’d recorded “Never Be Enough Time” and “Chain Smokin’,” but Joe wasn’t satisfied with his other material and neither was Bruce.
“You know, you gotta write some better songs,” Joe recalls Bruce saying. “You write so much better than this. These aren’t up to any kind of standard.'”
Joe took the feedback to heart and cleared the bar on his next attempt. “As fate would have it, I came home and we played a gig somewhere, and one of my old-time fans came up, and he handed me a book called Homestead.”
Homestead is about a Carnegie steel town by the same name near Pittsburgh, with a mill that made its owners rich and gave thousands of bread-earners a chance to make a decent living for more than a century–a century bookended by a famous labor union stand-off and by the closure of the mill when it became cheaper to make steel elsewhere.
By the early 1980s, the mill was dying, and with his band the Iron City Houserockers, Joe helped start America’s first food bank for the unemployed steelworkers. “Dan Rather did a story on us on CBS News,” Joe recalled. “And through the years, I had become friends with the people who we helped out. So I was familiar with some of the guys, this guy Ron Wyden and Jay Weinberg and Mike Stout. They were the real–almost radical–end of the steel workers, the real pro-union guys when the whole thing was collapsing. I read the book, and I think it mentioned Bruce. I’m sure it mentioned Bruce, because he became involved. It also mentioned us, it’s something we have in common.”
The inspiration came from the book; the lyrics came to Joe on his morning commute. “I live in the South Hills of Pittsburgh, and every day when I’d go to work, I go through a tunnel. I had to cross the river in a tunnel, and I can remember coming out of this tunnel, and this song just came to me about Homestead. So I started writing it down, and in the meantime we were going to go to New York to finish those first two songs [with Bruce].
“So I wrote these lyrics, but I just didn’t have any good music for him. I tried to come up with stuff, and it just wasn’t happening. So we finished recording ‘Chain Smokin’ and ‘Never Be Enough Time,’ and I thought, at least this is going to get me started again. Right at the end of our session, I pulled out the paper I had in my notebook and I said, ‘Hey, you know, if you feel like it… if you get the urge, here’s some lyrics. I think the lyrics are really good, but I don’t have any good music for it.’
“So the following weekend comes, and it’s Sunday night, and my wife comes and hands me the phone and says it’s Bruce. Bruce goes and starts playing ‘Homestead’ on the phone. And I said, ‘Oh man, that’s great!’ He said ‘we got to record this!’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s fabulous! When?’ He says, ‘Tuesday.'”
Now Joe has always been a teacher, and it’s not easy for teachers to take time off during the school year. But when Bruce Springsteen co-writes a song with you and wants to record it, one does what one must. Even if it means being a little sneaky.
“I was real honest with my supervisor,” Joe explained, “and I was telling her, ‘Well, I have a chance to go to Los Angeles to record with Bruce Springsteen, and then I have a chance to go to New York.’ I have a good work ethic. I showed up every day, I did my job, rarely missed. Anyway, so she calls me in the office, this is right before the weekend I go back, and she says this is not coming from me, but the head honcho… he says, ‘If you go to work with Bruce Springsteen again, we’re firing you.’ For some reason, he had it in for Bruce Springsteen. He did not like Bruce Springsteen, and he didn’t want me to work with Bruce Springsteen. For whatever reason, I never found out.
“So now I go into work on Monday. Monday night, I call in sick. Now I’m being a little bit sneaky instead of being honest, because who’s going to pass up the chance to do that? Lee Ann and I flew up to New York, and somebody picked us up and took us to Bruce’s in Jersey.
“The next day we get up, and we’re working on a song in Bruce’s study. I had my mom and dad at home watching my kids, and in the midst of working on this song… I was a bit nervous, to tell you the truth, because Bruce was using Drop D tuning, and I was not familiar with it at that time. I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was playing! I should have just asked him, but I guess…I don’t know, I was almost overwhelmed because Bruce Springsteen is recording one of my songs that we’re writing together!
“So we’re going over the music that he wrote for this, and Patti comes into his study and she has the phone. (This is pre-cell phone days.) And it’s my mom. Patti said, ‘Your mom wants you to call. She just called and left a message.’ So right away, you think the worst–you think that somethings wrong with the kids, blah blah blah, something’s terribly wrong.
“So I called, and she said ‘Joey,’ (she always called me Joey) ‘Joey, you gotta call work right away.’ And I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And my mom said, ‘If you don’t call them in fifteen minutes they’re firing you.’ I said, ‘Get out!’
“So I called, and [the head honcho] got on the phone and he says, ‘Where are you?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, I’m sick.’ He says, ‘So why didn’t you answer the phone?’ I said, ‘Well I was in the bathroom! I’m sick.’ He said, ‘You’re not with Bruce Springsteen are you?’ And Bruce is two feet away. I said, ‘No, I’m not at Bruce Springsteen’s. I’m home in Pittsburgh.’ And then he made me come in with a doctor’s excuse, so I had to go to my buddy who was a doctor and tell him the whole story and get a doctor’s excuse.”
It was worth the hassle. “Homestead” ended up as one of the strongest tracks on American Babylon. It’s such a good song, in fact, that Bruce recorded his own version, which remains unreleased to this day.
Bruce may have decided not to release his own version of “Homestead,” but Joe’s lyrics certainly seemed to have made an impression on him–because shortly after putting the finishing touches on American Babylon with Joe, Bruce recorded a song called “Youngstown” and released it on The Ghost of Tom Joad only a few weeks on the heels of Joe’s album.
Youngstown, Ohio is only a ninety-minute drive from Homestead, Pennsylvania, and the two songs bear some remarkable thematic and lyrical similarities. Compare Joe’s first verse…
I was born in the corn fields of Kentucky
I moved north in ’73
The war was still going strong so I found a job
Rolling steel in a foundry in Homestead
…with Bruce’s:
Here in northeast Ohio, back in eighteen-o-three
James and Danny Heaton found the ore that was lining Yellow Creek
They built a blast furnace here along the shore
And they made the cannon balls that helped the Union win the war
Or this verse of Joe’s:
And the steel glowed in the white hot chambers
The furnace spit fire and smoke
And the sunlight came through the cracks in the roof
And the dust was so thick you could choke
…with Bruce’s “Youngstown” verse:
Well my daddy worked the furnaces, kept ’em hotter than hell
I come home from ‘Nam worked my way to scarfer, a job that’d suit the devil as well
Well taconite coke and limestone fed my children and made my pay
Them smokestacks reaching like the arms of God into a beautiful sky of soot and clay
It’s not hard to see Joe’s influence on Bruce’s songwriting.
Joe’s lyrics were definitively Pittsburgh, however. I’d always been struck by the name Joe chose for his single named character in “Homestead,” and I asked him about it when we spoke, because Grzybowski is not an easy name to sing. I did a little sleuthing and found a newspaper reference to a co-worker of Joe’s by that name, and Joe confirmed the easter egg. “His dad worked in Homestead. I just picked his name out of a hat. I could have picked a lot of other ones. I just liked the way it sounded and it was so Pittsburgh: Grzybowski.”
Joe and Bruce have performed “Homestead” together nineteen times over the years since its debut, including every night of Joe’s legendary October Assault mini-tour following the release of the album in 1995.
It’s been more than a decade since we’ve last seen them perform it together on stage, but it’s difficult to believe we won’t see them do it again. Their team-ups are hard to predict but ongoing, and “Homestead” remains one of their best collaborations.
The 25th Anniversary Edition of American Babylon is available now on vinyl, CD, and digital–get it here. Catch Joe and The Houserockers on stage this summer, including a night at The Wonder Bar in Asbury Park on July 9th!
Homestead
Recorded: November 1993 (Grushecky version), Unknown (Springsteen version)
Released: American Babylon (1995) (Grushecky version)
First performed: October 17, 1995 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: November 3, 2011 (Pittsburgh, PA)
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