Lined with the Light of the Living: Born to Run (1975)

Tonight's entry:

(1975)

"Born to Run established a sound and identity powerful enough to permanently alter the perceptions of those who heard it, whether they liked what they heard or not." - Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce

Bryan: Variations of "Here is the album that finally justified all the hype about Bruce Springsteen" appear in practically every review of Born to Run. (Many by critics who had added considerably to said hype in the first place.) It's difficult to disagree. The album is self-conscious attempt to establish a dividing line for his career and evolution as an artist. Here's another quote from the Carlin book: "Whenever Bruce listened to the first two albums, all he heard were things he wished he'd done differently. The overstuffed lyrics, the stilted sound, the distance between what he needed to say and what came out of the speakers. In a country awash in irony and disbelief, he needed to create a work that reestablished rock'n'roll as a cultural force with the power to inspire and even create change in your life, in your town, in the world around you."

As always, I’m joined by Bryant, who appears as a hologram that only I can see or hear.

Bryant:  My advice as a hologram is that, if my mobile emitter gives out, just paste of photos of a double-thumbs-up, and that’ll adequately represent my stance for this album.

Bryan: Mine too. Why bury the lede? This album's awesome, and every song pretty much rocks. 

Taking a slightly different approach here, as we kinda reviewed these two at a time in our original back-and-forth, so that's how we'll divy them up here. Also, previously I'd been providing a link for each song, but I got to thinking - if we go through the whole catalog, and that's the plan, that's an awful lot of links to videos that will undoubtedly "die" sooner or later. Such is the nature of youtube. I like the idea of saving any interested parties a step and I'd be glad to if I could be assured the link would always be there. Since I cannot, I'll save the links for alternate versions or live performances that come up in the discussion. 

One! Two! Three! Four!

"Thunder Road"

"Tenth Avenue Freeze Out"

Bryan: 4/5 and 4.5/5 Both tunes are faves from the '75 to '85 Live, so it's always been a little disorienting hearing the studio versions. To this day, actually, which is kind of funny - I must have listened to that Live set everyday for months after getting it for Christmas in 1986, so it got good imprinting time on the young McBrains.

Bryant:  "Thunder Road" - 4.5/5  "It's a town fulla losers ... I'm pullin' outta here to win"  I mean, that kinda sums up this entire era, doesn't it? Not solely; it's got plenty of help from other songs in Bruce’s songbook. Obviously, I think "Thunder Road" is great stuff. The only thing that keep me from scoring it higher is that I wish Bruce's vocals were a little more full-throated. But that's okay. He's saving 'em up. We'll get there. "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" - 4.75/5 Tempted to go the full 5 here; not gonna, but tempted. This is the sound of a whole bunch of people having fun together in a big room, flying birds at all the people they got away from in order to be there. So, obviously, it's a metaphor for the pilgrims sailing to the New World. Or something like that. Either way, great - GREAT - playing from the band, and I love Bruce's vocals here.

Bryan: Everytime I hear the "Tenth Avenue" horns now, I think of the Van Zandt anecdote from Bruce and elsewhere, where Steve dropped in the studio to say hi to his old pals and they couldn’t get the horns right, so, after offering his blunt opinion to an already-exasperated Bruce, who admonished him to "fix it, then!" he re-arranged them on the spot and got it right.

Welcome back, Miami Steve.

Bryant:  I always forget that Steve was sort of unceremoniously shown the door right at the beginning of the E Street Band. No fault of Bruce’s apart from not putting his foot down, but he wasn’t the first young artist to get pushed around in that way, and wouldn’t be the last, either. I can’t help but wonder what Van Zandt might have added to those first two albums. That’s life for you, though; what-ifs rattling around in a dusty sack.

"Night"

"Backstreets"

Bryan: 4.75/5 and 4.75/5 Love these. The only thing that prevents me from giving them scores of 5 apiece is because like you, I’m saving ‘em up. But let's not kid ourselves - this is vital stuff from the band. I can see some of Bruce's grumpiness re: the mix in "Backstreets," but it has a lot of parts to juggle. Great live version here.

Bryant: "Night" - 4.25/5 I love this one, but it has no personal connection for me, which is why I'm scoring it a little bit lower than some of the others. But can I imagine a person loving it so much that it damn near makes 'em lose their mind when it begins?  I sure can. "Backstreets" - 5/5 Boy, it really is a muddy mix, isn't it?  (Or if not the mix, per se, something in the recording.) Doesn't matter a bit to me. This is about as good as music gets.  Hey, remember when I hinted that Bruce was saving his most full-throated vocals? Well, they show up toward the end of this. And how. I should probably have something else to say, but I'm inferior to the task; this song is too good for me to explain.

Bryan: My sister and her husband used to have a beagle who would howl along with any ambulance or police siren that went by their house – actually, not just those, he’d join in with any full-throated howling in general. I imagine more than a few beagles out there join in with Bruce when this stuff at the end is cranking on the stereo.

"Born to Run"

Bryan: 5/5 "The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive." At some point during the writing of The Stand, King had this album cranked. Probably at all points. That line always makes me think of it, though. Has anyone ever mashed up images from The Stand mini-series to this tune? I wish I was in junior high with such time / energy on my hands.

Bryan: I deduct a minor point for the "Together, Wendy, we can..." only because I always think it sounds, I don't know, Meatloaf-ish/ too-close-to-musical-theater to explicitly name the girl addressed by these universally-accessible lyrics, but then I happily give it back because I'm not some kind of oblivious jerk. Usually.

Bryant: 5/5 Is this the greatest end-of-side-1 to beginning-of-side-2 combination in recording history? "Backstreets" followed by "Born to Run." Damn; for the win, as they say.  If it isn't THE best, it's got to be on the shortlist. It's one of those songs that has earned - and will likely permanently retain - true-classic status. And sometimes, when they get canonized like that, you wonder if a song is really that good. In this case, it's absolutely that good. It's the sound of moving into the future, but with an eye toward bringing all the good things about the past along with you; it's not an abandonment of the past, it's a rescuing of it. Evolution through nostalgia. Genius.

Bryan: I dated a girl my senior year in high school who hated Springsteen so much (specifically this song, whose lyrics she always mocked) that I downplayed how huge a fan I was to the point where I pretended to agree with her. This was a horrible betrayal of The Boss, and at the time I felt kind of terrible about it. Later, in the 90s and 00s when I wasn't listening to Bruce so much, I didn't feel terrible about it. I wondered if perhaps she'd been right and I was just young and dumb. Now that I'm older and wiser, though, I'm back to feeling terrible.

Bryant: I would imagine that a great many breakups with favorite bands/musicians has been prompted by romance (would-be or otherwise). Probably also a lot of music has been discovered in that process. And we know how much music has been GENERATED by that process. Bottom line: I think Bruce would forgive you.

"She's the One"

Bryan: 5/5 I love "On the Dark Side" by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band as much as the next guy, but it's obvious in retrospect how much of a general lift of the mood/ riff of "She's the One" it is. Growing up in RI the Beaver Brown Band were hometown heroes and there was always talk of how they'd have made it big if it weren't for the perception of being Springsteen and the E Street Band, Jr. I get it, but then there's the fact that their signature tune apparently is just "She's the One" jr. I don't say this to be cruel, only sheesh, people. Anyway, just amazing. One of my favorite tracks.

Bryant: 4.25/5 Here's another one that I just don't have the personal connection with, for whatever reason. It's never occurred to me before that "On the Dark Side" is a bit of a lift of this one, but yeah, for sure.

"Meeting Across the River"

Bryan: 2.25/5 I see what he's chasing, but I don't think this one really goes anywhere. It's more about fitting this mood onto the record / taking a musical and emotional breath between "She's the One" and "Jungleland."

Bryant: 2.25/5 I'm gonna just copy your score on this one. I thought about deviating by a quarter in either direction and couldn't decide which direction to go, which tells me to just stay right here. Anyways, yeah, it's fine. Good song, evocative and well-played. Only on an album like this would it feel like a loser. Not even then, really.

"Jungleland"

Bryan: 5/5 Like I said up there, it's rare when someone can earn the rapturous praise Spingsteen earned with every show and every record and then self-consciously sit down to live up to it and not just do so, but instantly surpass and forever encapsulate the image going forward. And the trick was - it wasn't image, it was just his getting clearer and clearer on mission statement. As perfect a side closer as the title track is a side opener. We talked about the Bruce movie - they should just make a movie based on this song. (I bet that's what The Heavenly Kid set out to be, then they got sidetracked.)

Bryant: 5/5 If Clarence had never done a thing else in his life, he'd have ascended into the pantheon just for the mid-song sax solo in this one, which is rapturous. I can't imagine what it must have been like to be in the room when that happened. Amazingly, the rest of the song is almost as good. So yeah, 5/5 for sure. Oh, and a line from this song actually appears as an epigraph in The Stand (the first one in the book, in fact), so the loose King connection rolls on!

Bryan: What is this riff anyway – "Sweet Jane?" It comes in most prominently around the 2 minute mark. How does he get away with this stuff? I’m thinking of the Peter Gunn riff for "Pink Cadillac" and a couple of other high-profile-swipes-in-plain-sight. I shouldn't say swipes, more like strong nods.

Bryant: I don’t fully hear that as a lift of "Sweet Jane." I do hear a similarity, but I also hear differences. I don’t have the musical vocabulary to describe what I mean, alas! But hey, if you steal, steal from the best.

FINAL

THOUGHTS

Bryan: Total 35.25 Avg 4.41 Best album in the discography?Not for me, but had the band broken up after the first three albums, this would be one epic curtain call.

Bryant: Total 35 Avg 4.35 I'm surprised to find that I'm ever so slightly lower than you on this one, but it's pretty close. Bottom line for me, it’s one of THE all-time great rock albums.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

"The stories Springsteen is telling are nothing new, though no one has ever told them better or made them matter more. Their familiar romance is half their power: The promise and the threat of the night; the lure of the road; the quest for a chance worth taking and the lust to pay its price; girls glimpsed once at 80 miles an hour and never forgotten; the city streets as the last, permanent American frontier. We know the story: one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love.

What is new is the majesty Springsteen and his band have brought to this story. Springsteen's singing, his words and the band's music have turned the dreams and failures two generations have dropped along the road into an epic — an epic that began when that car went over the cliff in Rebel Without a Cause. One feels that all it ever meant, all it ever had to say, is on this album, brought forth with a determination one would have thought was burnt out years ago. One feels that the music Springsteen has made from this long story has outstripped the story; that it is, in all its fire, a demand for something new." 
– Griel Marcus, Rolling Stone

PERSONNEL

Bruce Springsteen – lead vocals, producer, lead and rhythm guitars, harmonica, percussion

Roy Bittan – piano, Fender Rhodes, organ, harpsichord, glockenspiel, background vocals on all tracks except "Born to Run"

Big Man – saxophones, tambourine, background vocals

Danny Federici – organ and glockenspiel on "Born to Run"

Garry W. Tallent – bass guitar

The Incomparable Max Weinberg – drums on all tracks except "Born to Run"

Ernest "Boom" Carter – drums on "Born to Run"

David Sancious – piano, organ on "Born to Run"

Little Steven – guitar, background vocals, horn arrangements, alto horn

PUB QUIZ

Robert DeNiro was a big fan of Bruce and the E Street Band and has seen them live innumerable times since the early 70s. On the Born to Run tour, Bruce began the encore portion of the show by asking the crowd "Are you talkin'... to me?" several times.

See you next Saturday for Darkness on the Edge of Town.