The story of how Roy Orbison inspired Bruce Springsteen on ‘Thunder Road’
The entire career of Bruce Springsteen has been a love letter to the glory days of rock ‘n’ roll. Back when he was gigging around his native New Jersey, ‘The Boss’ always saw the genre as an escape, putting his characters on a lost highway where they might be able to find redemption at the end of the song. All tales of redemption have to start with a bang, and Springsteen hit on electricity the minute he brought in ‘Thunder Road’.
Making Born to Run was no easy feat for the musician. When going through the first sketches of the album, Springsteen wanted it to sound closer to what he had heard from Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound recordings when he was a kid. As he inched closer to getting the record done, he was burning through cash in the studio and draining the energy of himself and the E Street Band trying to get it off the ground.
If he was going to make a dramatic statement, ‘Thunder Road’ was where it would take place. When sequencing the album, Springsteen knew the song had to be the first thing you heard, telling on Vh1 Storytellers (via Songfacts), “What I hoped it would be was the sense of a larger life, greater experience, sense of fun, the sense that your personal exploration and possibilities were all lying somewhere inside of you”.
Across the track, Springsteen talks about the hopes and dreams outside the sleepy suburb and coercing his girlfriend, Mary, to come out to see the sights with him. As he talks about the dreams outside their town, he cast his mind to one of the greatest singers to grace rock ‘n’ roll.
Before The Beatles had washed up on American shores, Roy Orbison was the number one poster boy. Orbison had an angelic voice with the drama you would traditionally hear from an opera singer. As Springsteen talks about getting out of his town, Orbison’s ‘Only the Lonely’ plays on the radio. A song about heartbreak, ‘Lonely’ is the late musician’s greatest breakup song, and suggests only lonely people know how he feels after picking his heart off the floor.
Upon hearing Orbison’s creation, Springsteen imagines a life where he and Mary don’t have to be lonely, where they can ditch their parents’ ideas for what they want to be and make something of themselves somewhere else. As the volume swells with every single chord, Springsteen knows that his salvation lies in rock ‘n’ roll. When he finishes and rides off in his car with Mary, Clarence Clemon’s horn line drenches the song in drama, as if you’re seeing the first scene in a stage play about Jersey misfits. This Jersey boardwalk melodrama wasn’t just for show, though.
Springsteen meant every word in this song, and Roy Orbison’s words gave him the strength to keep moving with his rock and roll dreams. Just like Spector had been his reference point for production, Springsteen had Orbison as a teacher, to show him how to write about the elements which make up a rock ‘n’ roller’s heart.
