Born to Run

The [re]birth of the rock legend

Innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent; innocent because it foreknows all and therefore doesn’t have to fear and be afraid. - William Faulkner¹

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This is the third of three posts about Bruce Springsteen's first three albums. You can read the first parts here:

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle

After two fabulous but at the time relatively unsuccessful albums, Columbia were ready to drop Bruce Springsteen in favour of upcoming Billy Joel. Financing one final album, Springsteen went to 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt, New York to record the record, one that he wanted to be “the greatest rock record that I'd ever heard”.

Springsteen squeezed every last drop out of the recording studio, looking to emulate the big Wall of Sound creations of Phil Spector. This album centred around what would become the standard E Street band. Max Weinberg (and on Born to Run itself, Ernest Carter) instead of Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez was an important change. Lopez was an exciting, groove oriented drummer, Weinberg more steady and solid, but the change worked for the new rock and roll sound Springsteen was after. Roy Bittan played most keyboards following David Sancious’ departure, not a huge difference musically but Bittan easily slotted into the sound. Miami Steve Van Zandt helped write the horn charts and joined the band soon after the record was released.

The album took well over a year to record, through gruelling recording sessions [it took Clarence Clemons 16 hours to record his sax solo on Jungleland to Springsteen’s standards]. And it’s a superb record, slowly pulling away from the lyrically intricate earlier work to a more straightforward, direct but passionate narrative.

The album

The record opens with Thunder Road, built around Roy Bittan’s incredible keyboard passage; a song of escape and redemption. If the agreed image is of Springsteen as the voice of the working guy this reminds us of those people looking to escape their small town, not accept it for what it is.

There’s just as much artifice with The Boss as their is with Tom Waits, but Springsteen’s looks more authentic. He’s still creating characters. He’s still writing narratives. He’s still creating other lives.

Thunder Road builds through those exciting verses, full of wonderful moments

You ain't a beauty, but hey, you're alright
Oh, and that's alright with me…

…until the glorious moment at the end when he yells “We’re pulling out of here to win” and the song becomes a cinematic masterpiece: incredible piano lines that cause us to raise our arms in joy before Clemon’s note perfect saxophone enters.

The track is followed by what I think of as the “missing link” between the wordy earlier songs and the new, leaner direction. A slick 70s funk tale full of rhymes and groove. It’s an oblique description of the birth of the E Street band in funky dactyls²

Well, I was stranded in the jungle
Tryin' to take in all the heat they was giving

The “big man joined the band” line always elicited a cheer for Clarence when in concert, it still does as his image is projected across the back walls. And what a horn section this song has! With Clemons we have Randy and Michael Brecker, as well as Dave Sanbourn and Wayne Andre.

Following this with Night, my least favourite track on the album, shows the straightforward rock approach Springsteen was after. He uses his own voice multi-tracked on the verses and pulls out some of his most recurrent themes and images:

The rat traps filled with soul crusaders
The circuit's lined and jammed with chromed invaders

“Soul crusaders” is a classic Springsteen phrase for the teenager hanging around Asbury Park at night. It’s a sonic blast, but the one track I can pass over, although Clarence blows a mean sax solo in it.

Backstreets follows a similar model to Thunder Road: keyboards setting the scene before the other instruments come in, this time in an explosive crash as Bittan duels with himself on piano and organ. It’s a great story of teenage restlessness, pulling in the kind of “US imagery” I love but that can be easily parodied:

Slow dancing in the dark on the beach at Stockton's Wing
Where desperate lovers park, we sat with the last of the Duke Street Kings

Springsteen’s voice has strengthened since the first albums and has real rock power on this one. His skill as a guitar player is often forgotten but he wails a short, superb solo on this. A showman, the song finishes with a singalong coda: “Hiding on the backstreets” over and over until it bring the song to a sweaty conclusion.

Side two opens with what is undoubtedly his most famous song, Born to Run³. There’s not a lot to write about. It is a “a monster song with a piledriver arrangement” as Billboard magazine wrote and it’s a breathtaking track only weakened by it ubiquitous nature. Springsteen plays it every night because he has that philosophy that each show “is that guy’s one chance to see us”. I’ve seen him four times and each time has been a blast.

Born to Run screams like a Ronettes track accelerated up to 100mph. The track was the first one set down, quite a way before the others. It thunders with Ernest Carter’s drums, and has clever touches like Danny Federeci’s glockenspiel, an instrument that propels it far above the kind of stuff Billy Joel was releasing. Columbia almost got it wrong there. The sax solo is frenetic and you can hardly catch your breath listening to it. The song builds to that great theatrical moment, the “1-2-3-4” before the final verse:

The highway’s jammed with broken heroes
On a last chance power drive
Everybody's out on the run tonight
But there's no place left to hide

It’s a song that’s become a living thing, a joyous piece of rock and roll art.

She’s the One is a bit of a comedown after that, but it’s a slick Bo Diddley type groove, based around a repetitive piano lick before the funky blues groove kicks in. A live favourite, that shuffling beat is infectious, and it becomes a chanting, communal track of first love. The call and response of sax and “Oh! She’s the one” often brings a smile to my face.

When I saw Springsteen live in 2003, he played a rendition of Meeting Across the River, which I was not expecting. It’s a fantastic, jazz-cool short story as our narrator looks to hook up with Eddie, trying to get the things they need for one “big” score, although it’s strictly small time, as “two grand’s practically sitting here in my pocket” - not a sum that’s really going to change his life. The song is made by Randy Brecker’s incredible trumpet lines, creeping mysteriously behind the words.

The album ends with the masterpiece that is Jungleland. Introduced by Suki Lahav’s melodious violin before we get the kind of piano lines that Jim Steinman based all of Meatloaf’s career around, we enter an incredible picture of New Jersey life, a final look at those crazy characters Springsteen liked to invent like “The Magic Rat”. The song becomes a blast over repeated chords, but is clever enough to be full of side alleys, bridges and breaks. Hearing thousands of Boss fans yell “Down in Jungleland” is a moment of spine-tingling delight.

The song features a superb guitar solo from Springsteen as well as Clarence Clemons’ famous and incredible sax solo. Recorded over sixteen hours so Springsteen was happy with every note, it’s a stunning musical moment, full of sonic emotion, and a true “rock saxophone” solo, steeped in rhythm and blues.

The song comes down quietly at the end, block chords on the piano, for what seems like the ending - “In the tunnels uptown, the Rat's own dream guns him down” but there’s one last musical hurrah, after the breathy “Tonight in Jungleland” the piano rolls excitedly and Bruce yells and screams over the strings.

A protracted lawsuit led to the band touring for two years solid before releasing the next album a year after that, but there’s no doubt Born to Run changed Springsteen’s fortunes, and direction, forever. The beard would be gone for a while.

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1. The Town, William Faulkner [1957]

2. I think. A dactyl is the long-short-short poetic foot. This is a slight variation, but you feel that first long stress running through the track.

3. At the time of writing the song has sold around 2,000,000 units and and been played nealry 400,000,000 times on Spotify (as much as I hate streaming, it’s the way…)