In the summer of 1975, Bruce Springsteen was nobody’s Boss.
His nascent career was crumbling, just another overhyped “new Dylan” about to get dumped by his label. Two band members had quit. The boardwalk’s bard was wrestling obsessively with his third (and last?) album, spending a whopping six months on a single song.
Yet Springsteen remained sustained by a lonely but ambitious vision, convinced he could re-create the symphonies echoing through his head for an audience of millions.
He was right.
“Born to Run” was released in August 1975, a rock ‘n’ roll masterpiece that assumed near- mythic proportion. Thirty years later, as a special anniversary edition of the album was readied for release today, Spring-
steen recalled how making the record consumed his young life.
“Everything I knew and dreamed about was packed into those songs,” Springsteen told The Associated Press. “I had the desire to be great, to do something passionate, to capture something about living that I was yearning for myself. I wanted the whole thing.”
He got it, from the opening notes of “Thunder Road” to the album-closing epic “Jungleland.” But little came easily as he chased an elusive sound that was part Roy Orbison, part Phil Spector and all Springsteen.
For Clarence Clemons, the E Street Band’s sax player, that meant 16 straight hours creating the magnificent solo that anchors “Jungleland.” For “Born to Run,” the single that announced the album’s arrival, sessions stretched over half a year.
“I was 25 years old, with no place to go and nothing to do – that helped,” Springsteen said. “We worked, and worked and worked. It was very frustrating. But in the end, luckily, all of everything we did ended up in there.”
In a documentary DVD accompanying the remastered “Born to Run,” band members offer their recollections of the arduous recording sessions.
“Everyone remembers the experience quite truly,” Spring-
steen said with a laugh. “And everyone was centered around this thing, that we suffered. No one forgot that. Everyone had that in common.”
They all shared another thought: Springsteen, child of the Jersey shore arcade, was going for the brass ring this time.
“I knew, because I knew the songs, that this album was going to be phenomenal,” said Jon Landau, the album’s co-producer. “I knew Bruce Springsteen’s determination. I knew there was no way it was going to miss in achieving its musical goals.”
Even if, in Springsteen’s mind, those goals often remained unreachable despite hundreds of hours in the studio.
“My obsessive/compulsive nature, which crippled me through much of the rest of my life, does come in handy once in a while,” Springsteen said.
” … I wanted something unique that you couldn’t hear in the live show.”
The anniversary package also includes rare footage of live shows by Springsteen and the band: a full gig from London’s Hammersmith Odeon show in 1975, and three songs done live in 1973 by an early incarnation of the band in Los Angeles.
After “Born To Run,” Springsteen wound up in a long legal battle with his first manager; his follow-up, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” took three years to arrive. By then, the bombast of “Born to Run” was in Springsteen’s rearview mirror, never to return on record.
Springsteen confessed he hadn’t listened to the album in two decades until earlier this year. But he heard it in the perfect setting: driving at night through the New Jersey landscape the album immortalized.
“I thought I knew exactly how it would sound, but it surprised me,” Springsteen said. “It was a nice moment driving back from the city, and it caught me by surprise again. There’s no other record (of mine) quite like it. I never made another one.”
