Born To Run: I bought a record when I was 14. I've often had to explain to people why it's part of what keeps me alive...

Bruce Springsteen

Born To Run

CBS (1975)

The skinny kid from New Jersey was on his last chance. Bruce Springsteen had a lot of hopes and reputations riding on his third album – including his own.

For the four or five years previously, Springsteen had been a growing phenomenon on the US east coast, largely based on epic three-hour performances and songs that were increasingly both anthemic, but with an everyman touch. The live audiences were rabid, the critics moved to frothing superlatives – including that ‘quote heard round the world’ when reviewer Jon Landau had a handful of words taken out of context: “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” No pressure there – much. Hyperbole, sure – but Springsteen’s ongoing reputation show he could survive – even thrive – under that weighty claim.

Another convinced of the kid’s talent from the start was John Hammond, the veteran music executive and talent-spotter credited with discovering (among others) Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin, and a bit later a nasal-toned Minnesota folksinger named Bob Dylan. Springsteen was largely pushed into the auditioning for the great man by the aggro style of then-manager Mike Appel, who would go from greatest booster to greatest impediment to the singer’s career within a couple of years: “He thought I was Elvis and he was the Colonel – we weren’t,” as Bruce later put it.

Despite the reputation as full-tilt rock and rock performer, Hammond’s Dylan affections and CBS’s commercial desires were determined to push him into the more laidback singer/songwriter mode like their then-moneyspinners like James Taylor. Hence, Springsteen’s debut Greetings From Asbury Park N.J. (1972), was often tumbling second-division Zimmerman wordplay, and disappointed just about everybody. Not the least the record company, which – at Hammond’s insistence - threw a sizeable promotional budget at the album.

But as a concert attraction, the artist becoming known as The Boss was just getting bigger. A second album, The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle (1973) followed, this time with next-to-no promotional support. Again, it was a bit muddled. Some songs still a bit wordy, although a couple headed toward the cinematic mini-operas that would follow, full of those colourfully shady Jersey characters he grew up with. A greater focus on the band that would take its name from the record also showed some of them were maybe not quite up to the demands of recording, and the increasingly widescreen nature of the material. Throw in some muddy production and things looked bleak. But the support of his rabid home markets, and some influential critics and disc jockey – this being an era when such people still had some sway – saw the record crack 100,000 sales, giving Columbia the confidence to give the artist one more shot. This proved to be a good move.

So, the legend kept growing. A rough mix of what was to become the third album’s title track went out to some supportive radio stations in late 1974. And suddenly it’s all there: regiments of ringing guitars, and Bruce’s urgent delivery of one version of the teenage dream – it’s demanding, desperate, and just fucking wonderful. But still too long to be an AM radio hit. The suits tried to edit it a million ways, but it just became a nonsense of noise. CBS were, understandably, beginning to tear their corporate hair out. Again.

The rest of the album was laboriously slow in coming. Springsteen’s own quest for rock and roll perfection one of the main delaying factors. Acting as producer with the singer, Appel – the dollar signs beginning to flash brightly in his eyes – wanted to get the thing out to the great unwashed as quickly as possible. New York’s Record Plant studio was becoming a pretty tense place. With the ‘rock and roll future’ quote still hanging heavy over both of them, Springsteen and Landau cried into each beers one night. Bruce quizzing him on what exactly a producer’s role should be – in order to avoid some of the failings of the first two records. Landau has produced before, notably pre-punk heroes The MC-5’s second album, Back In The USA; The J.Geils Band, and Livingstone Taylor – James’ slightly rockier brother. Landau became the album’s third producer, and necessary middleman between the artistic and commercial aspirations. In his turn Landau brought in 21-year-old whiz-kid engineer, one Jimmy Iovine – later to produce Patti Smith (handing her a handy cast-off Bruce tune called Because The Night), Tom Petty, Dire Straits and U2 among others, and going on to found Interscope Records. These latter two were very much the team that could set about capturing the noises in Bruce’s head.

So, things began moving through early 1975, but while something magic was beginning to gel, it was still a long time coming. A final musical cog was added to the slightly rejigged E Street Band. The Stax-style brass burst of Tenth Avenue Freezeout was proving a stumbling block. The gun session players engaged to do the blowing – David Sanborn, The Brecker Brothers, as well as Bruce’s own right hand, the Big Man Clarence Clemons – were left twiddling their very costly thumbs while the arrangement was being agonised over. A sharply-featured and sharply-dressed Calabrian type took charge – pulling the Breckers and Sanborn aside and singing them their individual parts – inflections and all – from memory. Appel and Landau looked on, a bit stunned. “This is Miami Steve Van Zandt,” Bruce explained, “He’s our new guitar player, better put him on the payroll.”

But still Springsteen procrastinated. Fiddling with the songs, the takes, the production – full length albums of out-takes and second-thoughts of later albums suggest this working method may not have changed much. But eventually, even the supernaturally patient Jon Landau cracked it, and snapped: “You’re not supposed to think it’s perfect! You think Chuck Berry sits around listening to Maybelline wishing he’d changed something? C’mon, it’s time to put the record out.” Finally faced with an argument he could understand, Bruce gave in.

With an almost ridiculously intensive publicity campaign gearing up around it, Born To Run finally appeared in August – and still stands as one of the most complete, most perfect albums, of all time. In only eight songs, it makes a totally cohesive whole. The album, while not a concept as such, is a day in the life of some urban nowhere with young half-lost souls trying to find some way – any way – out. It’s starts in the morning, that first line’s ‘screen-door slam’ and mournful harmonica is the opening to 40 minutes of rock and roll bliss. It’s dreams of escape: ‘Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair/the night’s busting open, these two lanes can take us anywhere…’

And from there it doesn’t let up. From there, it doesn’t let up. The aforementioned Tenth Avenue Freezeout self-mythologising as ‘…The big man joins the band’. Night, the lost love howl of Backstreets. Any one a song other artists could build a career on – some did, witness Patti Smith, and The Pointer Sisters hitting with another leftover, Fire.

And then you get to Side Two – these being the days when such constructions meant something. It opens with Born To Run itself, where the poetry meshes with the wall-of-sound sweep of noise. ‘You and me Sandy we can live this sadness/I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul…’ The naysayers might have it as melodramatic Americana, but it’s a million adolescent dreams distilled into four-and-a-half minutes. She’s The One is all barely restrained passions. Meeting Across The River – originally titled The Heist on some very early pressings for the trainspotters looking for the ultimate Bruce rarity – is as low-key as it gets: Roy Bittan’s tinkling piano, a touch of bass, and Randy Brecker’s smoky trumpet somewhere off in the distance. Bruce is the small-time crim, thinking maybe this time he’s onto the main chance, but somehow you just know it’s not going to happen for him.

And then there’s the final corner. The last piece – calling it merely a song even seems to lessen it – Jungleland, taking the whole cast from late night into the dawn of the next day, with the dreams crumbling and reality bearing down. Clocking in at 9 minutes 33, it is that complete opera out on the turnpike. The Magic Rat gets his shot at the big payoff, but ‘his own dream guns him down’. But worse, he (and everyone else) ‘Reach for their moment…but wind up wounded, not even dead’. And probably doomed to repeat it again and again.

To listen to Born To Run all the way through can be exhausting – and you gasp that Bruce and the now up near 20-piece E Street Band can on occasion crash through the whole thing in concert – but that it is one of the greatest albums ever is unquestionable. But back then, even his own dream threatened to gun him down. The hype campaign that went with its release was extraordinary – Bruce on the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously, among other excesses – caused an almost equally huge backlash against him.

And then the inevitable splintering of his relationship with Mike Appel, and a three-year legal battle where the artist couldn’t even release new music to capitalise on the breakthrough success as he attempted to extricate himself from a management contract a judge later described as ‘a slavery deal’ – Appel clearing up to 50% of the income generated. Elvis and the Colonel indeed. It’s somehow so right and so wrong that contract was apparently signed on the bonnet of a Chevy Nova in a darkened carpark. It’s perhaps unsurprising he came back with the altogether bleaker Darkness On The Edge Of Town, before the commercial megahit into the mass-consciousness of Born In The USA a decade on. All that, and his current status as multi-millionaire working-class hero, and unsurpassed live attraction – somehow still playing those three-hour marathons in his 60s – came from this extraordinary record.

The man himself is a hard marker about it: “I wanted to write words like Bob Dylan, to sing like Roy Orbison, and have it sound like Phil Spector.” Maybe he didn’t achieve all that in one shot, but he’s got closer than anyone else ever has.