“Born to run”, when the future of rock ‘n’ roll became reality
“Springsteen does everything. It is a punk of Rock’n’roll, a Latin street poet, a classical dance dancer, an actor, a jester, a bar band leader, a formidable rhythmic guitarist, an extraordinary singer and a great rock’n’roll rock composer. He drives a band as if he had always done it. (…) Bruce Springsteen is a show. Each syllable adds something to its final goal: to free our spirit while freeing its own, putting her soul bare through music.
This description written in 1974 by Jon Landau in a local newspaper, is the least cited part of the most famous phrase: “I saw the future of rock ‘n’ Roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen”. If the first has become one of the best known phrases in the history of rock, the second is the most vivid and passionate portrait of the young Springsteen. Less than a year later, that article would have turned into a prophecy made: on 25 August 1975 “Born to Run” was released.
Springsteen chose to celebrate it by publishing the unpublished “Lonely Night in the Park”, an unpublished song with original sessions, recently completed. There are no other celebratory releases – one will probably arrive in the autumn, but dedicated “Nebraska”, on the occasion of the release of the film “Deliver Me From Nowher”. 20 years ago a celebratory box came out: the first of a long series of catalog releases dedicated to the rediscovery of the classics: it did not contain unpublished, but a live of ’75: at the Springsteen time it was not so prolific in writing and engraving as it would become shortly after and the process was very tormented, a watershed in the boss’s career and in some ways even in the history of rock as we know it today.
The tormented story of a classic
Between ’74 and ’75 Bruce Springsteen is at the last call. The first two albums, “Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ” and “The Wild, The Innocent & The and Street Shuffle”, had shown talent and personality, but sold little. Columbia, who had contracted him as “new Dylan”, demanded results. As Peter Ames Carlin says – author of the “Bruce” biography which recently published “Tonight in Jungleland”, a volume dedicated to the genesis of “Born to Run” – the criticism was enthusiastic, the restricted public. The label, under a new direction, came to an ultimatum: to record a single radio and, only if it worked, finance a new album.
Springsteen already had an idea: “Born to Run”, a noted title looking at the cars running at night at Asbury Park. The song was born from three fundamental agreements of rock, but was built as an epic work, with melodies and arrangements that mixed Phil Spector and the urgency of the rock’n’roll.
In the early months of 1974, with the renewed and Roy Bittan on the floor, Max Weinberg on drums-the sound, slowly and not without hitches: with the fundamental help of Jon Landau, passed from the role of critic to that of co-producer. Landau enters the control room together with Springsteen and the manager Mike Appel (with which the relationship will break sharply after the disc).
Build an epic sound, tell epic stories
“Born to Run” is the classic “either it goes or breaks it”. Springsteen has a precise sound in mind: the wall of sound filtered through rock’n’roll, blues, r’n’b. But it is difficult to find the key to making that orchestral and cinematographic sound: it was Landau who told the boss to stop working on the disc, that the time had come to publish it. The bet is won: the result is these eight songs that redefined the very idea of American rock; Epic ride based on the plane (that of Roy Bittan) and on the winds (the sax of Clarence Clemons, of course, but also the Brecker Brothers, destined to become established jazzists). Springsteen as a conductor, has been able to put together one of the largest rock groups, the and street band, becoming the boss.
But the greatness of “Born to Run” is not only in epic music. It lies in the stories of these songs in the interpretation pathos. Springsteen manages to tell the American dream and its contradictions, the desire to escape to make up for a lifetime as long as you are in time, the attempt to find a way out. Themes that deals with an unparalleled poetic force in “Thunder Road” and “Born To Run”: the title track is the most played song of the boss’s career, the “Stop and Go” the false end and the furious restart, they entered history thanks to the concerts, where Springsteen has transformed each song into a collective ritual. The acoustic version of the “Tunnel of Love” tour are also memorable: the Protagpnists were not running away, “They Were Just Looking for Connections”, will say in 1989, in those concerts, reviewing the nature and motivation of that story.
The cover
The photographer Eric Meola took the photo that became an icon: Springsteen with his Fender (a melting of a telecaster and an esquire) on the neck, placed shoulder on the shoulder to Clarence Clemons on an openable cover. In 1975, in an America still crossed by racism and with an almost exclusively white rock, that image was a manifesto, a message of brotherhood that his band embodied.
The session took place on June 20, 1975 in his study on Fifth Avenue, and lasted a few hours. Initially Meola would have liked to make the cover in Ellis Island as a tribute to the “Runaway American Dream”, but in the end the choice of the study prevailed. Springsteen insisted to include Clemons on the cover and Meola used a platform for the boss, to bring it to the Big Man level – Nickname the result of its size and height. It was the only cover of an album taken by Meola – who became an established photographer: he remained in contact with Springsteen, but the careers took different paths, even if they periodically continued to feel.
Springsteen and Clemons would have recreated on stage several times over the years that pose, including the memorable opening of the Halftime Show of the 2009 Super Bowl, in front of millions of spectators.
The inheritance
On August 25, 1975 “Born to Run” transformed a talent of worship into a generational voice. It was the album that also called the liturgy of the boss’s concerts and transformed it from the future of rock ‘n’ roll, from eternal promised to reality. A reality that still lasts today.
“I Really Wanted to Rock Your Souls”, tells at the end of “Springsteen on Broadway”, before closing with “Born to Run”, in minimal and acoustic version. A sort of secular prayer: uinquant years later, those words and songs still do exactly this; They shake our souls.
Amen.
