Born To Run and the death of rock ‘n’ roll

Bruce Springsteen photographed by Eric Meola, New York City, June 1975.

In October 2009 New Jersey’s favorite rock ‘n’ roll sons Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band played five nights at Giants Stadium, the band’s unofficial home turf. They were the last concerts to be held at the famous Meadowlands sports arena, and to commemorate the stadium’s imminent demolition, the ever-prolific Springsteen debuted a new song he’d penned for the occasion entitled “Wrecking Ball”. In what has become a recent trend among aging rock acts, for each show Bruce inserted one of his classic albums in its entirety into the live set. Two such nights were devoted to his breakthrough LP, Born To Run, forever cementing it into his fans’ collective psyche.

It was an appropriate choice both for Springsteen aficionados and rock historians alike. When the Giants Stadium opened in the mid-seventies Springsteen was still in the midst of the Born To Run tour, riding a wave of success he’d been enjoying since its release in August 1975. It was the record which catapulted the then 25 year-old to the height of musical fame thanks to simultaneous Time and Newsweek covers, in which his unwanted “New Dylan” mantle was finally shrugged off, only for the unenviable weight of “rock ‘n’ roll future” to be heaped upon the young man’s shoulders.

While Springsteen was keen to play down that kind of media frenzy, for fans and critics the hype was justified. The singer’s first two albums — Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. (1972) and The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle (1973) — while well-received, had not sold as the record company had hoped. The lengthened and strenuous recording sessions which led to Born To Run came about in part due to its being Springsteen’s final chance at what they used to call hitting the big time. This sense of last gasp urgency is apparent throughout its eight songs of romantic desperation and faltering optimism.

Springsteen himself has described the record as a mutual invitation between himself and his fans, as each embarks on an exciting and mysterious new phase of their lives. In this regard, the album can be seen as the end of rock ‘n’ roll as we had known it. Decades later, Born To Run is now seen as perhaps the quintessential release in Springsteen’s impressive canon, and one which habitually lurks around the upper echelons of the kind of best-of lists which often pass for rock journalism. Yet more than just a classic LP, Born To Run is best understood as the artist’s ambitious modus operandi, and the first work of its kind that manages both to celebrate and dispel the myths upon which rock ‘n’ roll was built, signaling a point of no return for both artist and industry.

Hearing Born To Run today reveals that despite the praise that’s been loaded upon it down the years, the album is surprisingly fresh and taught. Springsteen’s scope may have been cinematic, but his direction is stripped and spare: none of the mini rock-operas that bookend each side sound grandiose or bloated, and the entire LP clocks in at under forty minutes. While unique for both the period and within the greater history of rock, most remarkable is that musically, lyrically and atmospherically, Born To Run sounds like no other Springsteen release before or since.

Gone are the accordion-led tales of boardwalk life along the Jersey shore which characterized Springsteen’s first two albums. On Born To Run, the carnival eccentricity of those two records has been replaced with a more direct, electric energy, although the leaner band sound of Darkness On The Edge Of Town (1978) and The River (1980) had yet to arrive. Much of this has to do with the band itself being in a state of flux at the time, both musically and in terms of personnel. Ernest “Boom” Carter and David L. Sancious both quit the band after spending a grueling six months recording the album’s title track. Their replacements, Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan, may not have shared their predecessors’ idiosyncratic tendencies, but became fundamental in the formation of what would become known as “the E Street sound”.

It’s easy to forget that in 1975 popular music was a relatively young medium, and its development still hurtled at an alarming pace. The Beatles had broken up only five years earlier, Elvis Presley was dragging himself through ill-conceived comeback tours and the Rolling Stones were being written off (in Rolling Stone no less) as “irrelevant”. The American record industry had all but relocated to California, New York was in the throes of disco, punk and avant-garde art-rock, while a growing divergence between “black” and “white” music was beginning to change the industry forever.

Springsteen found himself somewhere in-between. He thrived on pop’s most primal, youthful themes, both musically and lyrically. In resisting any temptation to appear current he became one of the first musicians to collectively analyze pop’s influence and impact, on both himself and his listeners. Though it isn’t always immediate, twenty-years of pop history are packed onto the album’s two sides, as if Bruce is personally tapping into the musical subconscious of every American baby-boomer. Vocally the album at times recalls Elvis and Roy Orbison, while the music shifts from elements of Stax soul (“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”), after-hours jazz (“Meeting Across The River”) and the Phil Spector-inspired “wall of sound” (“Born To Run”).

Springsteen’s lyrics, while poetic enough to garner the usual comparisons to Bob Dylan or Van Morrison, also evoke the grittiness of the period’s socially-conscious Motown records. Born to Run is Springsteen’s last album to feature horns prominently, employing an expanded section to perform a tight chart on “Tenth Avenue” and muted trumpet on “Meeting Across The River”. Though Clarence Clemons would remain a permanent fixture and an essential live presence, never has he seemed so integral to the E Street Band than on “Jungleland”, the epic gang romance that closes the record, punctuated by his quasi-spiritual saxophone solo and Bruce’s visceral wails.

Though the album’s starting point is naturally Springsteen’s native New Jersey, Born To Run is unmistakably urban, and while its final destination remains unknown, the lure of the city pervades the record like a thick summer mist. That city is obviously New York, though there are fewer specific mentions of streets and places than on his previous LP, nor references to trash cans, fire escapes or “tin cans exploding out in the ninety-degree heat.” Similarly, the colourful cast of characters (Crazy Janey, Hazy Davy, Killer Joe, Wild Billy, Spanish Johnny, Puerto Rican Jane, Diamond Jackie) that populated his early albums are here replaced by real people with regular names: Mary, Terry, Wendy, Eddie.

Indeed, as Springsteen evolved into a more economical songwriter, so these elements began to fade from his lyrics. Instead, he started to focus instead on more adult issues facing individual Americans, as young romance and petty street crime gave way to domestic dissatisfaction and abandoned dreams. While there is perhaps more mileage in the universal, for Springsteen it was also a smart means of finding a larger audience (what Village Voice critic Robert Christgau calls “the ordinary Joes and Janies”) beyond the East Coast. (Subsequent bootlegs and previously unreleased material deemed inappropriate for his projects at the time have revealed the depth of Springsteen’s personal musical interests.)

For me and many other non-Americans, Springsteen’s music certainly affected my perception of East Coast reality, while also enhancing the mystique surrounding it. So many acts have since ripped off Springsteen’s device of inserting aspects of Americana into his lyrics that such terms can seem almost clichéd now, but once must have carried an element of the exotic. When he sings “They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets” on “Thunder Road”, I often consider how these words must have been received by a young person growing up in the UK at the time, when the cultural disparity between the US and Britain was far greater than it is now. Today there’s not much about modern America that would astound in quite the same way as it would have thirty years ago. It’s hard to imagine, but in 1975 — before Springsteen was “The Boss” and long before Tony Soprano showed up on British television — New Jersey probably meant very little to people in England, a place where “screen doors”, “dusty beach roads” and Chevrolets were utterly foreign, and remain to this day completely absent.

Years after first hearing “Jungleland” for the first time I found myself making my own “stab at romance” in New York City, where from my first bedroom window I was just about able to make out the “giant Exxon sign” at the bottom of Second Avenue, bringing “this fair city light.” A couple of weeks later I got the chance to see Bruce and the band live. The band had lost none of its energy, unexpectedly inserting “Night” into the set-list, but I was obviously thirty years too late. Seeing Bruce Springsteen – or anyone else – is unlikely to provoke the same kind of reaction today that compelled Jon Landau to hail prophetically the future of rock ‘n’ roll.

Time and technology have combined to suck the mystique out of pop. The element of the unknown is a vital factor in the way music — especially rock ‘n’ roll — is received and perceived, both for performers and their fans. It generates a curiosity in listeners and allows the artist to separate himself from their audience, essential in the cultivation of a public or stage character. When you know everything there is to know about a performer, it’s much harder for them to adopt the necessary persona required to present a given song, and consequently less likely the song and its performance will resonate as it might have otherwise. The ease with which we access information and entertainment from anywhere in the world — while extremely useful and a lot of fun — has had a detrimental effect on the way people, especially younger people who know nothing else, respond to such things. Today’s youth cannot be expected to be as passionate about music or anything else in the same way their parents were, in part due to there being no mystery surrounding their obsessions. There isn’t the same depth of involvement or interest because there is nothing left to the imagination.

Another consequence of this has been the deceleration of pop’s progression. While there will always be good music, new musicians — despite their best intentions — cannot be expected at this stage in rock ‘n’ roll history to create records that will reverberate on the same massive scale among fans and within the industry. As he approaches sixty, Bruce Springsteen, while still a busy songwriter and performer, is happy to live off past glories. Who can blame him: Born To Run sounds as fresh ever and as relevant as ever. It’s just too bad the “poets round here don’t right nothing at all.” MTV still stands for Music Television, but for today’s teenagers the Jersey shore belongs to “The Situation” and Snooki, who incidentally has already made the cover of Rolling Stone (a feat not achieved by Springsteen until 1978, coinciding with the release of his fourth album). The future of rock ‘n’ roll looks bleak. Bring on the wrecking ball.