I thought after my rant against Tracks II a while back, I should redress the balance by writing something to celebrate one of the greatest albums ever made hitting fifty. Yes, fifty. That’s fifty years. Bruce Springsteen’s seminal third album was released worldwide on 25 August 1975, and to celebrate the auspicious occasion I have been spinning it a lot this week. Or whatever the correct terminology is when applied to MP3 files. It’s not my favourite album by any means. It’s not even my favourite Bruce album (that honour will always go to Darkness on the Edge of Town). But Born to Run is undeniably brilliant. From start to finish it’s a journey, evoking cinematic landscapes signposted by teen angst, lost love, gang violence, and above all, that sense of frustration and crushing isolation that so often haunts people from small towns. At its core, it’s an album of hope and inspiration, which may help explain why it resonated so widely and with so many.
In hindsight, this album was Springsteen’s sliding doors moment. Having been signed by Columbia Records as a Bob Dylan clone in 1972, his first pair of albums (Greetings from Asbury Park, and The Wild, the Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle) didn’t exactly set the world alight. With the record company expecting a return on their investment, this third effort probably represented his last shot at stardom. And he knew it. Born to Run took 14 months to record, which was practically unheard of in the Seventies when most major label artists were putting out two albums a year. The title track alone reputedly took six months to perfect, with the Boss famously complaining that he heard sounds in his head that he couldn’t replicate in the studio. It was produced by Springsteen himself, aided by current manager Mike Appel and future manager Jon Landau, who tied themselves (and each other) in knots trying to capture something akin to Phil Spector’s legendary ‘Wall of Sound.’ The tensions led to a lot of soul searching, some very awkward conversations, and ultimately several departures with David Sancious and Ernest Carter being replaced in the E Street band by Roy Bittan and Mighty Max Weinberg on piano and drums respectively. Appel himself would soon be on the way out himself, which led to a lengthy legal battle which finally ended with Springsteen buying himself out of his own contract.
So what about the music? Well, you should already know all about that but if you don’t, here we go. Eight tracks totalling just shy of forty minutes kicking off with Thunder Road, one of the most recognisable songs in the Springsteen arsenal. With it’s haunting harmonica and piano, it’s a slightly understated introduction, before the balance is redressed with the punchy one-two combo of Tenth Avenue Freeze Out and Night. The ‘wall of sound’ production is already in evidence, but really comes into its own with the climax of the epic Backstreets which rounds out side one of the vinyl and cassette. I mention this because more than one critic has pointed out how vital the sequencing was, with its ‘four corners’ approach meaning each side of the recording starts on an uplifting, optimistic tone before sinking into lyrical drudgery and fraught pessimism, with lyrics touching on fear, betrayal, revenge, and violence. This concept is never more evident than when ‘side two’ kicks off with the immortal Born to Run, which perfectly encapsulates that sense of missing out that we all felt as teenagers, the unshakable belief that everything was happening somewhere else and all you had to do was get there. This is followed by She’s the One, a song about romantic obsession, and the album closes with Meeting Across the River and the immortal Jungleland, two similarly-themed tracks about the darker side of the American Dream with the latter weighing in at over nine minutes and featuring a timeless extended sax solo from Clarence Clemons.
Though not officially a concept album, it has been said many times that Born to Run has a very cinematic feel, with each track hitting like a mini opera, or a vignette attached to a broader work. Several critics have pointed out that the album is driven by actions, such as running, meeting, hiding and riving. These characters are in perpetual motion, if not literally then figuratively. It is indeed a journey for the listener from start to finish, the road possessing the ability to ‘take you anywhere’ and therefore offering a means of escape. There is a feeling that the highway offers a sense of hope or even belonging, and it becomes a metaphor for everything missing in the narrator’s life. Springsteen himself has said that it was all well and good packing all these characters in their cars and sending them off to chase their dreams, but then he had to figure out what happened to them all. Leaving was the beginning of the story, not the end. Interestingly, over the years another school of thought has emerged suggesting that the road described on Born to Run constitutes an antidote to the politically-charged climate it was released into typified by assassinations and the Vietnam War, which ultimately represented an escape from the American Dream rather than way to attain it.
The numbers leave little to the imagination. Released on 25 August 1975, BTR peaked at number 3 on the Billboard charts, back when it meant something, and by the end of the year had sold upwards of 700,000 copies. In 2022 it was certified seven-times platinum by the RIAA in the US and had sold 10 million copies worldwide. These days you can find it on ‘best album’ lists everywhere and Springsteen’s set lists are invariably studded with representatives, probably more-so than any of his other albums. Upon release, it received almost universal acclaim with Rolling Stone magazine commenting that, “Springsteen enhances romanticized American themes with his majestic sound, ideal style of rock and roll, evocative lyrics, and an impassioned delivery,” and the New York Times calling it a ‘masterpiece’ of punk poetry and one of the great records of recent years. Perhaps more pertinently in the grand scheme of things, it also marked the transition from Springsteen’s folk-inspired origins to global rock superstar, which now seems obvious but at the time didn’t please everybody, especially folkie types already scarred by Bob Dylan’s defection a decade earlier. But as anyone can see, rock n’ roll was always the Boss’s true calling and tramps like us, baby we were born to run.
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