Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run
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Written By: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 25.08.1975
“I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” journalist Jon Landau wrote in May 1974 after seeing Springsteen perform at the Harvard Square Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And everyone quietly wondered: Bruce who?
Landau himself could hardly have imagined that within months he would join forces with the man he had identified as rock’s next great star, helping him turn that prophecy into reality.
In the summer of 1975, the prophecy fulfilled itself when The Boss released "Born to Run", his third studio album, on August 25, 1975. But getting there required an enormous amount of effort, frustration and nerves, and at times it seemed that the harder Springsteen pushed forward, the further away his destination became.
Springsteen later recalled having enormous ambitions for the record. He wanted to make the greatest rock album he had ever heard, something huge and impossible for the listener to ignore, music that demanded attention not only to the songs themselves, but to life and what it meant to be alive.
The album took approximately 14 months to record, with an extraordinary amount of that time devoted to the title track alone. Springsteen wanted the record to sound like Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan with Phil Spector producing, an ambitious vision for a musician who had released only two albums and was still relatively unknown outside his strongest markets. Almost all of the album's songs were initially composed on piano.
Springsteen's first two albums, "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J." and "The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle", had earned critical praise, but neither sold particularly well.
By 1974, his popularity remained largely concentrated on the East Coast of the United States, while his record company's confidence in him was beginning to fade. Management at "Columbia Records" had changed, and the label was increasingly placing its bets on another emerging young artist named Billy Joel.
Morale was low throughout Springsteen's camp, including his manager Mike Appel and his backing group, the "E Street Band". After Springsteen rejected a CBS proposal to record in Nashville, Tennessee, with session musicians and a producer selected by the company, the label agreed to finance one more album. The message was clear: if this one failed, Springsteen could be dropped.
Springsteen, it is worth remembering, was still only 25 years old, and the pressure naturally weighed heavily on him. Recording "Born to Run" alone became an exhausting, months-long process. Springsteen's perfectionism turned the sessions into an ordeal. He obsessed over every syllable, note, tone and texture, desperately trying to transfer the sounds he could hear inside his head onto tape.
The song was written during a period when the promise of the American Dream seemed increasingly unattainable for many Americans, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the 1973 oil crisis.
Springsteen spent an enormous amount of time working on the lyrics because he wanted to avoid the familiar clichés of classic rock and roll. Instead, he tried to transform those familiar archetypes into fully developed, vulnerable and emotionally believable characters.
“It was the beginning of the creation of a certain world that all my others would refer back to, resonate off of, for the next 20 or 30 years,” Springsteen later explained.
The songs were largely autobiographical, while also drawing inspiration from the noir-like B movies Springsteen enjoyed at the time. Through those cinematic images, he tried to capture new ideals shaped by his own experiences, creating characters desperate to escape, find love, reinvent themselves and discover whether something better might exist beyond the horizon.
His determination to achieve something approaching Phil Spector's Wall of Sound created another problem. Multiple instruments were assigned across the studio's 16-track mixing console, and with every additional overdub, recording and mixing became increasingly complicated.
As Springsteen continued rewriting and refining the lyrics, he and Mike Appel constructed mix after mix filled with electric and acoustic guitars, piano, organ, horns, synthesizers and glockenspiel, along with strings and backing vocals. At the center of much of that increasingly expansive arrangement was the magnificent Roy Bittan, whose piano would become one of the defining sounds of "Born to Run".
"Born to Run" reportedly went through no fewer than five different versions. According to Springsteen, the finished recording contained 72 separate tracks squeezed down onto the studio's 16-track console, an extraordinary example of just how far he was willing to push the recording technology available to him.
Springsteen was finally satisfied with the completed mix in August 1974, but CBS/Columbia reversed the expected strategy. Rather than immediately releasing "Born to Run" as an advance single, the label wanted to hold it back and allow the eventual album to promote the song.
That same month, pianist David Sancious and drummer Ernest Carter left the "E Street Band" to form their own jazz-fusion group, "Tone". They were replaced by Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums.
Bittan came from a background that included orchestral and theatrical work, while Weinberg had experience with various rock bands and Broadway productions. Bittan was already familiar with Springsteen's music, while Weinberg was not. Both quickly fitted into the band, bringing fresh musical ideas as well as calmer personalities that helped ease some of the tension accumulated through years of recording and performing. On "Born to Run", Bittan effectively became the principal pianist, while Danny Federici's contribution was primarily on organ.
In November, Mike Appel began circulating "Born to Run" to radio stations, effectively ignoring the record company's wishes. A pre-release version was played by Philadelphia DJ Ed Sciaky on WMMR on November 3, 1974, and within weeks it had reached other progressive-rock stations in the Northeast.
Appel's gamble worked. The song began generating significant interest and anticipation for the unfinished album, and "Born to Run" soon became a radio favorite as well as one of the highlights of Springsteen's concerts. Audiences were becoming familiar enough with it that by February 1975 they could already sing along during performances.
By January 1975, the band had been working on the album for more than a year, yet only one song was completely finished. The sessions continued to be plagued by technical problems, false starts and Springsteen's relentless demand for additional takes.
A new song called "Wings for Wheels" was unveiled in February. Springsteen felt that the sessions were losing direction and increasingly turned to writer and producer Jon Landau, who had already become closely associated with him after writing about Springsteen in "The Real Paper".
The two had developed a close friendship, and in February 1975 Landau attended a rehearsal where he suggested moving the saxophone solo in "Wings for Wheels", soon to become "Thunder Road", from the middle of the song toward the end. Springsteen liked the suggestion and eventually brought Landau into the project as co-producer.
In March 1975, work shifted from 914 Sound Studios to the more sophisticated Record Plant in Manhattan. Landau's arrival gave Springsteen a fresh perspective and helped restore focus to a project that had begun to overwhelm him.
Springsteen later explained that Landau helped bring the sessions back toward the fundamental idea of making a rock and roll album when everything around the project seemed to be coming apart.
Mike Appel and Landau did not always agree over production decisions, leaving Springsteen to resolve their differences. Neither man, however, was there to completely reinvent the record. Like the musicians themselves, their role was largely to help Springsteen finish and sharpen ideas he had already conceived.
Israeli recording engineer Louis Lahav, who had worked on Springsteen's first two albums and engineered the marathon sessions for "Born to Run", briefly returned to work on the project. His wife, violinist Suki Lahav, also contributed the haunting violin heard on "Jungleland". Louis Lahav subsequently became unavailable as he prepared to return to Israel, and Jimmy Iovine took over engineering duties during the Record Plant sessions. Recording continued from March through July 1975.
Springsteen spent most of those months consumed by the album. The sessions were exhausting. Although basic backing tracks and vocals could sometimes be captured relatively quickly, he struggled endlessly with overdubs, lyrics and arrangements.
He worked obsessively, sometimes spending hours correcting a single line or days trying to determine the right arrangement for a song. Springsteen later described the recording process as something that gradually overwhelmed and buried him. Weinberg would remember "Born to Run" as one of the most difficult projects of his career, while Federici recalled that the band essentially ate, drank and slept the album. Sessions frequently stretched from approximately three in the afternoon until six the following morning, and Springsteen could spend extraordinary amounts of time perfecting individual guitar parts.
"Thunder Road" was conceived as an invitation to embark on a journey, with its cinematic imagery partly inspired by the title of the 1958 crime drama starring Robert Mitchum. The lyrics introduce Mary and a narrator desperate to convince her that they still have one last chance to turn their dreams into something real.
Springsteen also explicitly invokes Roy Orbison in the song, imagining him singing for the lonely on the radio. Orbison, whose best-known recordings included "Only the Lonely", was a tremendous influence on Springsteen. His dramatic vocal approach can be heard throughout "Born to Run", while Springsteen's guitar playing also carried traces of Duane Eddy's twanging style.
For "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", Springsteen brought in horn players Randy Brecker, Michael Brecker, David Sanborn and Wayne Andre. The partly autobiographical song tells, in exaggerated and almost mythological form, the story of Springsteen and his backing band struggling toward success, until the arrival of the "Big Man", Clarence Clemons, changes everything.
Musically, it is a funky, horn-driven R&B number. Springsteen and Bittan were struggling to devise suitable horn arrangements when former "Steel Mill" bandmate Steven Van Zandt stepped in and essentially worked them out in the studio. Van Zandt joined the "E Street Band" shortly afterward.
At barely three minutes, "Night" is one of the album's shortest songs. It follows a working-class man trapped in the repetitive routine of his job, who races into the night after work in search of cars, women and freedom. For Springsteen's protagonist, real life begins only when the working day ends. The highway becomes his escape route, while nights and weekends provide the fleeting freedom that his everyday existence denies him.
Springsteen recycled and developed lyrical ideas between "She's the One" and "Backstreets". The former deals with a narrator's obsession with a woman who repeatedly deceives him, while "Backstreets" explores the narrator's intense relationship with someone named Terry through imagery that moves between gritty realism and romantic poetry.
Their bond eventually collapses after Terry leaves the narrator for somebody else. Terry's gender is never made explicit, leading some critics and listeners to interpret the relationship as potentially romantic or homosexual, while others view it as an extraordinarily intense platonic friendship between two young men. Either way, the emotional betrayal is what matters, and the song contains autobiographical echoes of Springsteen's own youth.
The jazzy "Meeting Across the River" is both musically and lyrically different from much of what surrounds it. Piano and trumpet create an almost film-noir atmosphere as the narrator and his partner Eddie, two small-time criminals, prepare for an illegal deal across the Hudson River that they hope will finally bring them enough money to change their fortunes.
Filled with desperation and quiet hopelessness, the song ends before the story is resolved. We never discover whether the deal succeeds, although the bleak atmosphere hardly inspires confidence. It became one of Springsteen's finest early character studies, allowing him to step inside the mind of someone living permanently on the losing side of life.
Thirty years later, the song inspired the 2005 book "Meeting Across the River: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song", a collection of 21 short stories edited by Jessica Kaye and Richard Brewer.
That shadowy underworld flows directly into "Jungleland", the album's monumental closing track and a poetic street epic set within Springsteen's mythological vision of New Jersey and New York. The song follows a gang member known as the Magic Rat and his unnamed companion, the Barefoot Girl, through a world of street gangs, cops, romance and doomed dreams.
By the end, their relationship has collapsed. The girl disappears and the Rat is killed in the streets. His death becomes another variation on the album's central contradiction: the dream of escape can give life meaning, but chasing it can also destroy the person who believes in it.
Running for more than nine minutes, "Jungleland" is driven by Springsteen's increasingly desperate vocal, Roy Bittan's majestic piano and Suki Lahav's violin, before Clarence Clemons delivers the song's emotional centerpiece, an extraordinary saxophone solo lasting more than two minutes.
Clemons was disappointed when "Jungleland" was omitted from Springsteen's 1995 "Greatest Hits" compilation. The song also had a major influence on Bob Seger's "Night Moves". Seger had written part of his song but struggled to complete it until hearing "Jungleland", which showed him how far he could stretch a song structurally and dynamically. "Night Moves" was released the following year, in 1976.
Years later, Melissa Etheridge described Springsteen's wordless cries at the end of "Jungleland" as the essence of rock and roll singing, emphasizing the way he uses his entire body to project enormous power, emotion and passion.
The iconic album cover was photographed by Eric Meola in his personal studio on June 20, 1975. Springsteen brought Clarence Clemons with him because he specifically wanted the saxophonist involved in the cover concept. Meola shot roughly 900 photographs during the three-hour session.
The image eventually selected shows Springsteen in a black leather jacket, holding his Fender Telecaster while leaning against Clemons. It captured something essential about "Born to Run" even before anyone heard the record: Springsteen might have been the name on the cover, but the dream he was building was never meant to be pursued alone.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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