The song Bruce Springsteen snuck behind his record label: “A single nobody liked”
Singing any song is usually a vulnerable experience for its writer. Those words tend to be part of their soul before they’re even committed to paper, and when it’s time for them to lay them out in front of people, it’s enough to put most people in shambles at first. Bruce Springsteen was unafraid of what people would think of his heartfelt tunes, but when he finally got a chance to show ‘Born to Run’ to the record company, he was met with dead silence.
Because Springsteen was probably not going to sleep correctly until he knew that every piece of the puzzle for the album was right. He had been through two albums that had made people think of him as the Jersey transplant of Bob Dylan, and no amount of heartfelt lyrics would shake that unless he came through with a record that he could be proud of.
The album’s roots were all there, but it was just a matter of getting everyone into fighting shape. When sculpting the record, Springsteen’s vision of combining the styles of Roy Orbison, Phil Spector, and Chuck Berry under one roof was going to be no easy task, but looking at the first mixes of songs like ‘Thunder Road’ or the title track, it didn’t seem impossible, either.
There was only one problem when it came to time and money. When working on the record, Springsteen burned through long hours in the studio and worked his E Street Band down to the bone to finish the record. Before he was even finished, Springsteen mentioned being in shambles, thinking that it wasn’t going to come out.
When discussing the problems in Classic Rock Stories, Springsteen’s manager, Mike Appel, remembered everyone being deflated when the company rejected it, saying, “We were getting pretty desperate. I mean, six months’ work on a single that nobody at the record company liked!”
Springsteen was dangerously close to caving and releasing a live album, but Appel eventually found the best way to get around the label, explaining, “I suggest we take the tape directly to some DJs we’d built good relationships with. ‘Born To Run’ went to number one in Cleveland immediately, solely on airplay. CBS wanted to take me into the street and kick my skinny little ass all over this town.”
Despite coming up in the days before Ramones, this is probably one of the most punk rock moves that any musician has ever done. Since the record label slowly started to become the enemy after a while, getting a song on the air before they even had a record in the shops was the kind of underdog story that gave Springsteen’s label incentive to help him finish the record.
While the rest of the album capitalised on the promise that ‘Born to Run’ set up, it almost didn’t matter if the other songs were good or not. This was Springsteen endearing himself to the people by going around their backs, and as long as fans could sing along to the tune, that was everything he needed.
