Posted on 08/24/2025 7:18:44 PM PDT by DoodleBob
I was 18 when Bruce Springsteen’s third album, “Born to Run,” was released 50 years ago, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
I’d just finished my freshman year in college, and I was lost. My high school girlfriend had broken up with me by letter. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was stuck back in my parents’ apartment in the Bronx.
So when I dropped the record onto my Panasonic turntable and Springsteen sang, “So you’re scared and you’re thinking/That maybe we ain’t that young anymore” on the opening track, “Thunder Road,” I felt as if he were speaking directly to me.
But no song moved me more than the album’s title track, “Born to Run.” How I longed for that sort of love – and how I also felt strangled by the “runaway American dream.” The song was about getting out, but also about searching for a companion. I, too, was a “scared and lonely rider” who craved arriving at a special place. Decades later, I combined the personal and the professional and wrote a book about the making and meaning of the album.
All eyes on the Boss
The album was shaped by the times, particularly the malaise of the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate American landscape. There was an energy crisis, and it wasn’t only oil that was in short supply.
The excitement of the 1960s had passed, and rock ’n’ roll itself was in the doldrums. Elvis had become a Las Vegas lounge act; the Beatles had broken up; Bob Dylan had been a recluse since his motorcycle accident in 1966. The No. 1 hit in 1975 was “Love Will Keep Us Together,” by the Captain and Tennille. Obituaries to rock music appeared regularly.
Springsteen went into the studio feeling the pressure to produce. His first two albums had received good reviews but sold poorly. After seeing a show in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1974, writer Jon Landau proclaimed Springsteen “the future of rock ’n’ roll.” Springsteen wore the label uneasily, though he had more than enough ambition to try and fulfill the prophecy: He later called “Born to Run,” “my shot at the title, a 24-year-old kid aiming at the greatest rock ’n’ roll record ever.”
But in the studio, he struggled. It took him six months to record the title song. He kept rewriting the lyrics and experimenting with different sounds. He was composing epics: “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” “Backstreets,” “Jungleland.” And he was trying to tie it all together thematically as his characters searched for love and connection and endured disappointment and heartbreak.
When Springsteen was finally done with the album, he hated it. He even threw a test pressing into a pool. But Landau, who had come on to co-produce, convinced him to release it.
Poetry for the masses
Despite Springsteen’s apprehension, the response to “Born to Run” was remarkable. Hundreds of thousands of copies flew off the shelves.
Springsteen appeared on the covers of Newsweek and Time, where he was hailed as “Rock’s New Sensation.” Writing in Rolling Stone, critic Greil Marcus called it “a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on him.”
There was backlash from some corners: critics who resented all the hype Springsteen had received and who thought the music bombastic. But most agreed with John Rockwell of The New York Times, who praised the album’s songs as “poetry that attains universality. … You owe it to yourself to buy this record.”
An operatic drama
The album pulsates between hope and despair. Side 1 carries listeners from the elation of “Thunder Road” to the heartbreak of “Backstreets,” and Side 2 repeats the trajectory, from the exhilaration of “Born to Run” to the anguish of “Jungleland.”
I felt I knew the characters in these songs – Mary and Wendy, Terry and Eddie – and I identified with the narrator’s struggles and dreams. They all wrestled with feeling stuck. They longed for something bigger and more exciting. But what was the price to pay for taking the leap – whether for love or the open road?
These lyrical, operatic songs about freedom and fate, triumph and tragedy, still resonate, even though today’s music is more likely to emphasize beats, samples and software than extended guitar and saxophone solos. Springsteen continues to tour, and fans young and old fill arenas and stadiums to hear him because rock ’n’ roll still has something to say, still makes you shout, still makes you feel alive.
“It’s embarrassing to want so much, and to expect so much from music,” Springsteen said in 2005, “except sometimes it happens – the Sun Sessions, Highway 61, Sgt. Peppers, the Band, Robert Johnson, Exile on Main Street, Born to Run – whoops, I meant to leave that one out.”
In fall 1975, I played “Born to Run” over and over in my dorm room. I’d stare at Eric Meola’s cover photograph of a smiling Springsteen in leather jacket and torn T-shirt, his guitar pointing out and upward as he gazes toward his companion.
Who wouldn’t want to join Springsteen and his legendary saxophonist, Clarence Clemons, on their journey?
That October, I went on a first date with a girl. We’ve been married 44 years, and the stirring declaration from “Born to Run” has proven true time and again: “love is wild, love is real.”
Springsteen is a matter of taste..... I saw him in concert in Rotterdam (of all places) in 1985 and it is one of the best live performances I have ever seen. This was before his assumption of the persona of hero of the working man (while living as a billionaire) and posing as the new Woody Guthrie ... i.e. a communist. And charging $500 for a seat at his one-man Broadway show. So spare me any more of The Boss please.
As much as I dislike his political leanings, he wrote some great song with great imagery. He knows how to tell a story with few words.
Very well said
I knew some DJs at a big FM station in SoCal. I was in the studio one day and a DJ played a promo disc of Springsteen (who indeed had plenty of record company hype behind him) for me. Asked for my opinion I replied: “It sucks, this marble mouth ain’t going anywhere”.
I was wrong of course. But I stand by my opinion. Springsteen and his music suck.
“ It’s a great song. The music plays one thing, he sings something else.”
Yep. Racing In The Street is good as well.
In My Hometown , he sings about all the broken things that Trump is trying to fix.
Shame that Springsteen does understand that
Go to YouTube and search Aaron Lewis on Tucker Carlson for his view on Bruce Springsteen it’s amazing. He Destroys old Bruce.
No denying it really is a great song. Springsteen is a clueless idiot.
This faker sells out stadiums in Europe. They love him in Scandinavia. How crazy is this?
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He also sells out stadiums in the US, still, as well as the UK and Western Europe.
“Born to Run” arrived when he was packaged as the ‘new’ Bob Dylan/James Dean. That had short shelf life, so he became the jean wearin’/bandana in the back pocket/rolled up sleeve American boy. Same shit, different package.
Bruce is as American as Levi’s jeans.
You know. Levi’s the company is as anti-American as they come. Gun grabbers extraordinaire.
I hope no one on FR still buys Levi’s products. They went all in on gun-grabbing long before woke infected the US.
From day one I thought his songs were incoherent crap and then he went far left. What an overrated drug addled dope.
Although “To Cry You A Song” was by Jethro Tull, the song’s title seems to describe Springsteen’s style of vocals. “Tenth Avenue Freezeout” was okay, I guess. It’s the only one by BS that I don’t change the station on.
Just like Gavin Newsom after his incompetence burns down a major city.
And Loose Bruce, playing the role of a downtrodden middle-class American, relaxes on his 400 acre tax shelter "farm" in the People's Democratic Republic of New Jersey.
His music sucks, it has always sucked, and it will always suck.
Rebellion against oneself for being stupid and frustrated to the point of exclusion from normal adult life.
When this garbage came out it totally resonated with truckloads of aimless, clueless libs-to-be.
Have had to listen to this garbage for 50 years, along with other cretins like Mellenkamp, Petty, Phil Collins, Bob Seeger and other audio stool.
These songs they have written are roughly as old as "In My Merry Oldsmobile" from Tin Pan Alley, but they just won't DIE.
A sign of the endless river of new pathetic young listeners frustrated with themselves being unable to achieve adulthood.
Born to Run was a good album but the only one I thought he did well
I still say he and his F Street Band can’t hold a candle to Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits. “The Sultans of Swing”.
You’re right. He looks like he’s about to drop Obama into the “pool.”
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