The song Bruce Springsteen originally didn’t feel was “strong enough”
There’s only one word that should come to mind when listening to Bruce Springsteen for the first time: power.
The songs he made were always going to be fantastic from a writing perspective, but the kind of rush that the E Street Band provides behind him is like being caught in the middle of a musical tornado half the time. They are all putting everything they can into giving their audience a good time, but even for ‘The Boss’ there are a few songs that are almost too ambitious for them to take on.
But is Springsteen ever one to back down from a challenge? Hell no. He was always going to speak his mind when he had a guitar in his hands. Even if the subject matter is a bit heavy for most others to deal with, the frontman would always be able to have the music carry him, no matter if the tune has any other singer breaking down trying to get out every word.
When he first started, though, the clear solution to any emotional piece was to make the track longer. There’s nothing wrong with elongating the tune to get every drop of emotion out of it, but it was clear that a few things needed to be tweaked if they wanted to get off the ground in the same way that their idols did. And while Born to Run did give them their ticket out, even that wasn’t short of a few long masterpieces.
‘Jungleland’ spends most of its runtime sprawling out across nine minutes, but for all of its lengthy ruminations, it never feels long. The track practically carries the listener through every piece of the tune, and when listening to Clarence Clemons’ glorious saxophone break, the band have the audience floating on air before Springsteen’s voice brings everything back down to Earth. That’s already a Herculean task, but how the hell was the title track supposed to pack all the drama into five minutes?
The band had all the power they needed to make the tune work, but ‘The Boss’ was never fully satisfied with the track done for weeks. There were many times that he would walk back home in tears knowing that they didn’t have the right sound yet, and while the band did eventually capture a bit of magic in the studio when the final track was laid down, the frontman had his doubts later on.
While it’s no fault of the band, Springsteen felt that the group had a lot to live up to when they played their legendary performance at the Hammersmith Odeon, saying, “‘Born to Run’ came up in the middle of the set! It was just like your new song. And I remember that was hard to play because it was a studio production, and I never felt like we had a strong enough version of it for it to be a closer for the first year or two.”
But when listening to the band nowadays, they could work that kind of magic with their eyes closed if they wanted to. The song itself might not have the most complex chord progression or anything, but it’s the finer details that make everything work, like the syncopated bass parts on the recorded version to make sure everyone locks in on that unison line in the bridge before coming right back to the final verse of the tune.
A lot of mechanics might go into the track, but not everything that they play is about getting everything right on the money. Everyone knows the kind of sentiment of those lyrics, and even if they aren’t in Springsteen’s position, driving out to find their dreams, the reason why the song works so well is that you know that every soul on that stage believes in the power behind those words.
