CLASSIC TRACK: Bruce Springsteen – Born to Run

1975

It was 1974, and Bruce Springsteen was feeling the twin pressures of critical acclaim and commercial apathy. The artist dubbed “the future of rock ‘n’ roll” in a much-quoted review by critic (and Springsteen’s future manager) Jon Landau was two misfiring albums down, his major-label paymasters growing restless.

“Cult artists don’t last on Columbia Records,” reflected Springsteen in his autobiography. “We miss this one, contract’s up, and in all probability, we’ll be sent back to the minors deep in the South Jersey Pines. I had to make a record that was the embodiment of what I’d been slowly promising I could do. It had to be something epic and extraordinary.”

The genesis of Born To Run was less grandiose, Springsteen sketching the song while sat on the end of his bed in a rented New Jersey cottage, with the ’50s rock ‘n’ roll pioneers spinning from his record player into his subconscious. Later, he would salute Duane Eddy for the wiry guitar riff,

Roy Orbison for the wounded croon, Chuck Berry for the car-and-girl imagery, and

Phil Spector for the “ambition to make a world-shaking mighty noise that sounded like the last record on Earth”.

Despite having those giants in his corner, the song didn’t come easy. Springsteen was still tinkering six months later, penning and binning clichés until he could “feel the story I was aching to tell”: a young couple fleeing the ‘death trap’ and ‘suicide rap’ of a US nowhere-town. Even then, the E Street Band struggled to flesh those bones, the line-up only nailing the magic take as the next act beat on the door of 914 Recording Studios in Blauvelt, New York.

“We had it,” recalled Bruce. “We only did it once. But once is all you need.”

As the fulcrum of 1975’s ‘Born To Run’ album, purposefully sequenced five tracks in, the song was everything Springsteen had shot for: a deathless anthem of escape and redemption, driven by kick-your-teeth-in drums, the feral growl of brass, and that eternally hopeful guitar riff, doubled by a chime that felt as cinematic as the lyric. Reaching No.23 in the US and plastering its author across magazine covers from Time to Newsweek, the song ensured his career would never be the same again — but already Springsteen could feel his pact with the Devil.

“I believed that along with the jackpot would come its terrible twin. I was right...”