50 Years Ago, Bruce Springsteen Made a Masterpiece. It Wasn’t Easy.Every star’s career is the sum of wild improbabilities. So many things have to line up: ambition, talent, discipline, cultural timing, connections, support, perseverance and more than a little luck. Peter Ames Carlin focuses on a crucial make-or-break moment for Bruce Springsteen with “Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of ‘Born to Run.’”
Springsteen has been a top-tier rock star ever since the August 1975 release of “Born to Run” made him known nationwide. The album, his third, was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece when it came out. It’s the grandly Promethean statement of a 25-year-old rocker pouring all his experience, all his rock-oldie erudition, all his stage-honed reflexes and all his literary and commercial aspirations into songs that unabashedly reach for sweaty glory.
On the album, Springsteen sang about love, escape, dread, transcendence and desperate, determined motion: “It’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win,” he announced in its opening song, “Thunder Road.” Half a century later, he clearly won. Yet without some fateful choices and unlikely coincidences in 1974 and 1975, things could have gone very differently. (...)
At one point Springsteen was on a list of acts the label considered dropping. Carlin reports that the son of Columbia’s president was wowed by a Springsteen college concert, and let his father know about it. That may have helped.
Before agreeing to bankroll a third album, the label wanted Springsteen to deliver a single. Working in a cheap studio where equipment constantly broke down and the piano wouldn’t stay in tune, he perfected that single. He piled on instruments for months until he finished the song: “Born to Run” — four pounding, chiming minutes of dread, yearning and last-chance bravado.
The album was forged with idealism and fiercely guarded amateurism. Instead of hiring proven hitmakers, Springsteen insisted on working with his own young guys: his band members and his co-producers (Springsteen’s early manager, Mike Appel, and the critic turned producer Jon Landau). For a year, he agonized over every sound and every note, trying all sorts of alternatives, pressuring himself and the band to make a great album, take after take after take.
Once the album was done — working until the very last moment, till dawn before the band had to hit the road — Springsteen had so many second thoughts he almost scrapped it. He famously tossed an acetate of the album into a hotel swimming pool. Luckily, he was talked down, and “Born to Run” found the audience Springsteen deserved. (...)
Over the past 50 years, “Born to Run” has been absorbed as one among the many albums in Springsteen’s long and varied catalog. But in 1975 it was a do-or-die statement. The songs are all about dynamics, about the buildup from soft to loud, about the way a sudden drumbeat hits and a sung syllable can be heard and felt. For anyone not already familiar with its story, “Tonight in Jungleland” vividly summons the album’s struggle and its spirit.
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