The Make-or-Break Third Album
The rock singer/songwriter Bruce Springsteen emerged in the early 1970s, “a time when many believed that rock was in need of new lifeblood.” NRR When he was signed to CBS in 1972 by John Hammond, TB he was billed as “the next Bob Dylan.” NRR Such hype could have killed his career, but Springsteen turned out to be “just what audiences needed – a fresh face with a guy-next-door persona who sang about common people with their common hopes and fears.” CS He became “the undisputed poet laureate of the working class.” CS
At this point in his career, however, Springsteen hadn’t yet attained that kind of status. He was a seasoned performer who’d played in a number of bar bands and had “seven years of songwriting behind him.” TB He would start to build a reputation for his energetic and passionate live performances. However, he wouldn’t be anointed as rock’s savior on the covers of Time and Newsweek magazine simultaneously until 1975.
He released two albums in 1973. They were ”noted for the feral, jazz-like musicianship of his E Street Band and his own brand of quirky, urban street poetry” CQ but were commercial failures “made for modest sums at a suburban studio.” AM It set up Born to Run as his “make-or-break third album” AM as his record label was on the verge of dropping him. This was his “last chance to craft a commercially viable record, and this go-for-broke outlook infects everything on the album.” CQ
The Recording
Springsteen started work on his third album in August 1974. As with his first two albums, Springsteen started recording at 914 Sound Studios at Blauvelt in New York State. However, he was dissatisfied with the “technical quality of the studio” CC and a gulf was widening between him and manager Mike Appel. CC Springsteen had found “a soul mate” in journalist Jon Landau, who’d famously written in 1974, “I saw the rock ‘n’ roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” TB Landau suggested moving recording to New York’s Record Plant CC where the album “was cut on a superstar budget.” AM
This was Springsteen’s first collaboration (but definitely not his last) with Landau as his producer. “Jimmy Iovine (then a recording engineer, now the head of Interscope Records) took care of hiding stacks of overdue bills from the record label.” TL Meanwhile Appel would eventually take legal action, upset about being muscles out of the picture, and it would stall Springsteen’s follow-up to Born to Run for three years. CC
The E Street Band
Born to Run featured a “revamped lineup of the dynamic E Street Band.” NRR “His two virtuoso players, keyboardist David Sancious and drummer Vini Lopez, [were] replaced by the professional but less flashy Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg.” AM “Danny Federici and Roy Bittan’s dueling organ and keys lend a celebratory and church-like quality to just about everything.” CQ The band also featured “Miami” Steve Van Zandt on guitar, Garry Tallent on bass, and Clarence Clemons, whose “saxophone slices into the shadows of every song.” CQ
In a review of a live performance after the release of Born to Run, Bud Scoppa said, “What a band. Even without The Boss they’d be one of the best in the business; with him, they’re practically unrivalled.” CS
New Sound
Landau helped Springsteen attain the “full, highly produced” AM “Wall of Sound atmosphere for which the singer yearned.” CQ The effect “required months of studio tinkering to perfect” TL as the album is filled with “layers of guitar, layers of echo on the vocals, lots of keyboards, thunderous drums.” AM It was the first album in which Springsteen “fully realized the sound that would earn him the title of ‘the Boss.’” NRR It “represented a sonic leap from his first two.” AM
Springsteen later described “the sound he wanted for his third record” TL “as ‘Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan produced by Phil Spector,’” TL the producer known for the Wall of Sound. By all accounts, Springsteen succeeded, delivering and album of “epic grandeur and big screen rock’n’ roll that hadn’t been heard since Phil Spector’s teen symphonies of the early Sixties.” CC
Bruce Springsteen, Storyteller
“Born to Run had a big sound, and Springsteen wrote big songs to match it.” AM “Most of what makes the record great is the lyrical theme running through the album, the romantic spinnings of urban outcasts, their girls and their cars.” PK “It dramatizes the romantic longings of urban life, offering snapshots of tenements, streets, and highways, where radios blare through summer windows, bikers pose with their machines, and lovers make out on the beach.” TB “If Lou Reed represents the dark side of New York, full of sexual ambiguity and drugs, Springsteen’s New Jersey offers us the romantic counterpoint, a pseudo-nostalgic world populated by drag races instead of drag queens, fast cars instead of speed.” PK
Springsteen “distilled his music into something cohesive and relatable, a love letter to every loser and working class anti-hero from Jersey and beyond. Whereas his previous lyrics had been rooted in imagery and little else, Born to Run had stories to tell, stories that painted everyday people with broad strokes and high stakes, giving the record a sense of epic narrative that had never been heard in American rock and roll.” CQ
“Springsteen took everyday characters, incidents and locations and transformed them into myth” CC via ‘mini-operas for the alleys.” CM “Songs like ‘Thunder Road,’ ‘Backstreets,’ and the bombastic title track are really just about bored kids hanging out and wanting to escape their town, but with lyrics like, ‘The ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away/ They haunt this dusty beach road and the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets,’ you’d think Springsteen was filming his own Spaghetti Western.” CQ
“The overall theme of the album was similar to that of The E Street Shuffle; Springsteen was describing, and saying farewell to, a romanticized teenage street life. But where he had been affectionate, even humorous before, he was becoming increasingly bitter. If Springsteen had celebrated his dead-end kids on his first album and viewed them nostalgically on his second, on his third he seemed to despise their failure, perhaps because he was beginning to fear he was trapped himself. Nevertheless, he now felt removed, composing an updated West Side Story with spectacular music that owed more to Bernstein than to Berry.” AM
Springsteen said of the writing process, “I wrote it and I rewrote it and I rewrote it. What I kept stripping away was cliché, cliché, cliché. I just kept stripping it down until it started to feel emotionally real.” CM He was asking big questions like “What do you do when your dreams come true? What do you do when they don’t? Is love real?” CM
An Embodiment of the American Dream
Born to Run “declared its own greatness with songs and a sound that lived up to Springsteen’s promise.” AM With “an unapologetically romantic vision and a strong blue-collar work ethic” VB he delivered a “breakthrough album, starring optimistic tramps and engine-revving sax solos, [that] is the greatest living embodiment of the American dream.” EW’12 “Born to Run dares you to leave your youth behind and embrace the reachable horizon resting before you.” PM “No one before or since has tried to pack as much of the American experience into 39 minutes, and no one has come as close to succeeding.” TL
The Songs
Here’s a breakdown of each of the individual songs.
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