I first heard this record after getting my first tax rebate, aged 18, that would put it sometime after April 1981, and asking a work colleague for a recommendation on an album to buy that was outside of what I would usually listen to. That work colleague, Rob, said  “Born To Run” without hesitation. I went to the record shop at the end of the street (Inferno  Dale End in Birmingham. I was possibly even served by Simon Efemey who I have worked with for years he being The Wonder Stuff’s long time sound engineer but at this time was the manager at Inferno), bought a copy and fell for it the very first time I played it. Me and Rob are still friends, we’ve been to see the Boss and the E Street Band together a couple of times and I’ve thanked him many times over for that suggestion.

After 2 critically, if not sales wise, well received albums “Born To Run” felt like it needed to be “the one” for Bruce Springsteen

“I wanted to make the greatest rock record that I’d ever heard, and I wanted it to sound enormous and I wanted it to grab you by your throat and insist that you take that ride, insist that you pay attention, not to just the music, but just to life, to feeling alive, to being alive.”

Recording had begun in May 1974. Columbia had given Springsteen a huge budget in order to achieve that elusive hit. Springsteen was aiming for a “wall of sound” effect but recordings got bogged down. By the Spring of 1975 manager/Producer Mike Appel had been replaced by Jon Landau (a journalist and confidante of Springsteen’s and, since this period, his manager) and engineer Jimmy Iovine. The sessions proceeded much more successfully.

“Born To Run” was released in August 1975 with a huge marketing campaign prominently featuring Landau’s quote from a live review of a show in Boston, “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen”. It worked, the album charted in the US in the second week of September 1975 peaking at #3. It broke Springsteen to the US and the world and has been certified 7x Platinum in the US (7 million sales).

The album is a loosely connected series of stories all taking place during one long summer day and night. Springsteen has said that it introduced "characters whose lives I would trace in my work...for decades”. It opens with the early morning harmonica of “Thunder Road”. You are introduced to the album’s central characters and its most important question…do you want to take a chance? Springsteen has described “Thunder Road” as an invitation, you can stay here where things will remain the same and you’re comfortable and safe or…you can jump in this car with me and we can see this world and have an adventure together.

“…Hey what else can we do now? Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair

Well the night's busting open these two lanes will take us anywhere…”

And so the adventure begins. “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” tells the story of the E Street Band (this was the first album featuring pianist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg) and their “full on block party” as Springsteen has described it. “Night” has one of our characters doing what he does, working all day with the boss on his back, then finding that girl, jumping in his car and losing himself in the night.

Side 1 finishes with “Backstreets”. We saw Springsteen in July last year in Italy and he played this song, the first time I’d heard it live since 1988 on The Tunnel Of Love Express tour. On the surface it’s a boy meets girl, they have a great time and then split up song. Springsteen has said it’s about

“…youth, the beach, the night, friendships, the feeling of being an outcast and kind of living far away from things in this little outpost in New Jersey. It's also about a place of personal refuge. It wasn't a specific relationship or anything that brought the song into being.”

It’s one of “Born To Run”s epic set pieces that frame each side of the album, with the other songs supplying the little details in between. If you read his biography which shares a title with this album, many of the events places and characters in songs like “Backstreets” are in there so you know he was writing from experience.

Side 2 of “Born To Run” kicks off like a freight train smashing through a brick wall. That machine gun drum intro (played by Ernest ‘Boom’ Carter, the only Springsteen recording he ever played on. How about that as a claim to fame) is quickly followed by the now famous 6 note riff and the set up “In the day we sweat it out on the streets, Of a runaway American dream”. It’s a song about moving forward, getting away, freedom. It’s got that same invitation that “Thunder Road” had, are you willing to step into the unknown to look for something (better) ? “Tramps like us, Baby we were born to run”…and you thought he was just singing about cars and girls…

“She’s The One” is a love song driven by the Bo Diddley beat. Dance music for that hot summer evening. “Meeting Across The River” is a story within a story. Two small time Jersey guys are gonna cross the river to do a little favour for someone in the Big Apple and they just gotta be cool and they’ll earn some big bucks. It sits beautifully in a gentle Jazzy setting (Trumpet by the great Michael Brecker) and is a song of hope, aspiration, desperation and not a little sadness.

It all comes to a close with “Jungleland”. Everybody is in here, all the characters, winners, losers and the mid-nighters coming together for this grandest of finales

“At record’s end, our lovers from “Thunder Road” have had their early hard-won optimism severely tested by the streets of my noir city. They’re left in fate’s hands, in a land where ambivalence reigns and tomorrow is unknown.”

Is the barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge Wendy, or Terry maybe ? Fights in alleys become ballets, the car horns out on the roads become an opera and everybody wants to do battle…with guitars. All that is then taken on a soaring flight by one of the greatest Saxophone solo’s you’ll ever hear, I gots a lump in my throat just thinking about it, The Big Man Clarence Clemons at his finest. 

“This was the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom; from here on in, it was going to be a lot more complicated.”

“Born To Run” is quite simply one of the greatest albums made by anyone, ever. From the music within to the cover shot of Bruce and Clarence (unbelievably a picture of a white man in close proximity with a black man still caused consternation in some parts of the USA in 1975 !), it was a big deal. It set up a sound that people think of even now as Springsteen’s, Roy Bittan’s grandiose piano intro’s, Clarence Clemons huge saxophone solo’s, Bruce singing about cars and girls (even though he’s singing about so much more than that), a sound I’ve always thought of as cinematic, if you closed your eyes you could see those streets and the giant Exxon sign and Mary, Wendy, Terry and the Magic Rat. 

Jungleland - https://youtu.be/l6IwxpL-ZDk?si=HkK8hNv8mNvTnCKN 

Bruce Springsteen’s 2nd album was again recorded at 914 Sound Studios in NYC, its title gave his band their name and we add another longterm member to the E Street Band as Danny Federici shows up on Accordion and Keyboards. It’s a VERY different sounding record from his first. I’m guessing after the singer/songwriter debut this is much more what Springsteen and his band sounded like live during 1973. Springsteen has said many times that he saw the early E Street Band as almost a Soul revue band and that style is definitely evident here, and damn, some o’ this gear is funky.  There are a couple of instrumental interludes before and after songs on this album that show this infant E Street Band as a groovy unit indeed and I’m surprised haven’t been sampled by some Hip-Hopper at sometime (maybe they have, it’s not like I’m an expert when it comes to Hip Hop). 

Two of the first three songs, “The E Street Shuffle” and “Kitty’s Back” show off the band’s chops perfectly. “The E Street Shuffle” ends with one of those instrumental interludes and if I played it to you blind and asked who it was you ain’t never throwing out Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band as a possibility. “Kitty’s Back” starts all Bluesy guitars and extended solo’s (the electric guitars are definitely here on this record) and after a couple of minutes explodes into a Brass driven Southern Soul groover. We saw him and the band play it live in Italy last summer and it was one of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen at a Springsteen show.

Sandwiched between those two foot tappers is, to my ears, one of Springsteen’s great songs, “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”. If you ever read his biography great chunks of this lyric are expanded on as the song is basically the story of the writer growing up in and around Asbury Park. The boys dancing with their shirts open, the greasers, the boys in their high heels, the factory girls, the tilt-a-whirl, Madame Marie…they’re all in there. It’s another of Springsteen’s songs that was covered, this time by The Hollies. A word of warning, never, I mean NEVER be tempted to listen to their version, it’ll put you off the song forever, yes it’s that bad !

“New York City Serenade” and “Incident On 57th Street” are another pair of homages to that place across the river from Jersey. The latter of the two not only has the most gorgeous, nagging melody ("Goodnight, it's alright Jane, I'll meet you tomorrow night on Lover's Lane”…beautiful) but it also segues into a true Springsteen classic. The first occasion that I knowingly heard Bruce Springsteen would have been the endless times the promo clip for “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” was played on the Old Grey Whistle Test (I think it was taken from the 1979 “No Nukes” benefit concert at Madison Square Garden so that dates it). It seemed like every time I watched the show, it was on. But what a song it is, the tale of a boy in a band whose girl’s Daddy really doesn’t like him but he’s just got a big advance from the record company and he’s going places, with Rosalita. It’s an uptempo, big shit-eating grin on your face, rock ’n’ roll testament and was the song Bruce and his band most often closed shows with from 1973 right through to 1985 (the 3 shows I saw during that period, it was on the setlist at all of them). You wanna know what hooked me in to Springsteen ? It was things like “Rosalita…”.

On its release the album was lauded by critics but that didn’t turn in to sales. It didn’t chart in the UK until 1985, on the back of “Born In the USA” fever. It’s a far more groovy and at the same time romantic record than “…Asbury Park…”. What’s going on here on songs like “…Sandy”, “…57th Street” and “Rosalita…definitely points toward where Springsteen is going and what’s coming next. Hold on tight cos a wild ride is about to begin…

Incident on 57th Street - https://youtu.be/ioQcvijom28?si=iRZdit7HpYNmfsNu

Right then, if you’re not a fan of New Jersey’s finest export since Taylor Ham (or is it Pork Roll ? answers on a postcard please), and if you’re not then shame on you, you may wish to go do something else for however long it takes me to make the next 27 blog posts. And as we’re going to see The Boss and the E Street Band on Sunday it’s appropriate that this is how we begin the week.

Bruce Springsteen had been playing bars along the (New) Jersey shore since the 1960’s with bands like The Castilles, Child, Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom & the Sonic Boom and the Bruce Springsteen Band. Gig after endless gig sometimes for 4 or 5 hours a night, paying his dues, learning his chops. But he wrote his own songs and dreamed of crossing the river to New York City and making records of his own music.

In June 1972 his managers secured him an audition with legendary Columbia Records talent scout John Hammond (who was instrumental in the careers of Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday, Pete Seeger, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Cohen and many others) which resulted in a record contract and Springsteen being in 914 Sound Studios in NYC by October to record his debut album, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.”. He gathered a band around him, some of whom were starting on a very long journey with their new boss. Clarence Clemons on saxophone would remain with Springsteen until his passing in 2011 and bass player Gary W Tallent is a member of the E Street Band to this day. These were supplemented  by musicians Springsteen had played with for years including pianist David Sancious and drummer Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez. 

The album was originally set to feature 5 songs with a band and 5 with Springsteen alone (management and Hammond preferred the solo tracks, Springsteen preferred those with the band) but when Columbia President Clive Davis heard the record he rejected it saying he didn’t hear a single. Springsteen quickly wrote “Blinded By The Light” (with the help of a rhyming dictionary he later admitted) and “Spirit In The Night” and the revised track listing (2 solo and 7 band songs which makes me think to find out what happened to the 3 solo performances that went missing) was accepted.

There are songs here that Springsteen still performs live now. When we saw him in 2016 he opened the show with “For You”. He also started to become more widely known as a go to songwriter and songs from this album were recorded by others. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band had a hit in 1976 with a cover of “Blinded By The Light” (probably the first time I heard a Springsteen song, I just didn’t know it at the time) and David Bowie recorded versions of “Growin’ Up” and “It’s Hard To Be Saint In The City” during the sessions for “Young Americans”, sessions to which the songwriter was invited and reportedly found strange and didn’t really like Bowie’s versions of his songs when he finally heard them as it’s said Bowie wouldn’t play them in front of Springsteen.

It’s a somewhat different Bruce Springsteen from the one we’ve came to know. The solo songs are very Dylan-esque and wordy, one of Columbia’s publicity campaigns proclaimed he had "more words in some individual songs than other artists had in whole albums", not sure if that’s a compliment or not. But the roots of what he was to become are there if you pay close attention. Also, and somewhat surprisingly, apart from on first song “Blinded By The Light” there are no electric guitars to be heard on this album, it’s a very different sound to the Bruce Springsteen of just 2 or 3 years later. 

“Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.” was released on January 5th 1973, on that day Springsteen and his band were in the middle of a 4 night stand at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania (the site of a legendary bootleg recording in 1975). They would stay on the road right up until October 1973, somehow fitting in the recording of their next album which was released in November. As he says between songs on “Live 1975/85”…”it was goodbye New Jersey, we were airborne”.

It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City - https://youtu.be/B2Rju9FVE2M?si=ioGG5fCeH6ARgPds