“We were gone”: How a lawsuit saved Bruce Springsteen
One year after Bruce Springsteen’s seminal 1975 record Born to Run, the world was introduced to the immortal words of Rocky Balboa. The ultimate underdog, Balboa has become the pin-up boy for dogged resilience, and his ability to come back has told the world that anything is possible.
Even in 2025, when the furrowed brow of cynicism can rarely be unraised by the recital of a Hollywood monologue, we still hold some belief in the true comeback story. But why is Sly Stallone the poster boy for that? Well, let’s take a little look at where America was in the year of his film’s debut.
Morale was fractured after a brutal war in Vietman, mistrust was rife after the Watergate scandal and inflation was soaring, crippling the everyday American house into brutal poverty. They were in desperate need of a beacon of hope, someone to lean their belief into, against all the odds that were stacked against them. It just shouldn’t have been Rocky Balboa.
Because a year before he hit the big screens, Bruce Springsteen wrote the soundtrack to the working-class revolution. An album that could have been played in the smoke-filled bars of America, while its inhabitants ruminated on the meaning of life and what their dream-laced futures held for them.
The impact of the album on society was so profound, it’s hard to imagine a world without it. It’s firmly placed in the bedrock of modern and, particularly, American culture. Unbeknownst to many of the fans, its gravitas as the soundtrack for the underdog is rooted in its own experience of struggles, battling against the confines of the law while dominating the airwaves.
At that time, Springsteen was embroiled in a lengthy and messy lawsuit against his former manager, Mike Appel. After he had naively signed away most of his rights during the more youthful parts of his career, he found himself retaining less than a tenth of his income through his own music, and suddenly, Born to Run’s lucrativity was in the balance.
While powerful lawyers crossed the Ts and dotted the Is of the album’s bureaucratic paperwork, Springsteen was left wondering where to turn. While the lawsuit was ongoing, the studio would remain off limits, and so he was forced to recoup some remnants of a living during an extensive tour. One he called ‘The Lawsuit Tour’.
“People thought we were gone. Finished,” Springsteen explained, “They just thought Born to Run had been a record company creation. We had to reprove our viability on a nightly basis by playing, and it took many years. You had to be very committed. One thing we did well after Born to Run was, I said: ‘Woah.’ I got on Time and Newsweek because I decided to be. But I was very frightened at the train and how fast it was going when we got on. In a funny way, the lawsuit was not such a bad thing. Everything stopped, and we had to build it up again in a different place.”
Born to Run was the sound of a man flying the flag for creative freedom in the face of bureaucratic nonsense. But his live shows told the story of a man frightfully close to the top, taking a couple of necessary jabs to the face in order to sustain some genuine sense of longevity. After all, even Rocky didn’t win all of his fights.
