The 1975 song Bruce Springsteen built to last 1000 years: “It will always do that”
It was a crisp and sunny day in Freehold, New Jersey. Bruce Springsteen was in the car with his mother, perhaps solemnly pondering his father’s mental health struggles. After all, this was something he did a lot in his youth.
Then, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ crackled onto the radio. It impacted like a bird hitting the windshield. “The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated,” Springsteen later wrote.
“He inspired me and gave me hope,” the would-be Boss continued. “He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a 15-year-old: ‘How does it feel… to be on your own?’” It may well be that from that moment on, Springsteen was destined to be a songwriter.
He was fated to pursue a similar sense of profound illumination laid out by Dylan before him, holding a candle to the darkened corners of society, and warming the disenfranchised therein. As Springsteen later put it, “The best music… is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.”
The problem was that when he became a songwriter, his label promoted him as ‘the next Dylan’ ahead of the release of his debut, Greetings from Ashbury Park, NJ, in 1973. But Dylan hadn’t gone anywhere. The world wasn’t craving ‘the next’. It was like trying to sell a desert midway through the main course. So, his album flopped.
The now-revered effort petered out at a peak of 60 in the US charts and failed to travel well overseas. Springsteen himself was even rattled, commenting, “I became self-conscious about the Dylan comparison”. He was an artist in transition, unsure of his own identity.
When his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, peaked at 59, he also became an artist on the brink of being dropped by his label. Whatever followed had to be big. Springsteen knew that more than anyone. So, at the tender age of 24, he began writing Born to Run, pouring his life experiences into what may well have been his last record.
“I had these enormous ambitions for it,” he said. “I wanted to make the greatest rock record that I’d ever heard. I wanted it to sound enormous, to grab you by your throat and insist that you take that ride, insist that you pay attention – not just to the music, but to life, to being alive.”
He wanted to provide the sort of experience that he had been floored by almost a decade earlier when ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ came rattling through his mother’s radio, grabbed him by the lapels, and rattled him around like a second-hand Skoda trundling over a cattle-grid.
With the title track, he achieved just that. ‘Born to Run’ remains his masterpiece. The song is the pure distillation of Springsteen as an artist. Its resonant potential is why he is still so wildly loved. “It was a record of enormous longing, and those emotions and desires never leave you. You’re dead when that leaves you,” he wrote. For all the “Highway 9” specifics and distinct Americanisms, it is universally about retaining some degree of romanticism in life.
“The song transcends your age and continues to speak to that part of you that is both exhilarated and frightened about what tomorrow brings,” he said of its timelessness. “It will always do that – that’s how it was built.” After a shaky childhood of uncertainty and an even more uncertain start to his musical career, this was Springsteen’s attempt to craft something solid that he could be known for in 1000 years to come.
It’s a record that races towards the sun, vaporising the lactic acid that pumps through its veins, like a piston running at full steam on spent fumes. Some say music is about escapism, but that never really seems to be the case. Songs like ‘Born to Run’, on the contrary, sharpen the focus of reality, shifting the mist of inertia that distends upon our everyday lives. People will always need that cloud-shifting sunshine… it has kept ‘Born to Run’ relevant for 50 years, and it will continue to do so forevermore.
It retains a bit of magic. As Springsteen put it, “People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That’s when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three.”
With ‘Born to Run’, he figures he did just that. As he writes in his memoir about the lasting magic he’s always looking for, “It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock ’n’ roll bands. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ’n’ roll will never die.”
