A defining moment in rock ‘n’ roll.
By: Hank Kalet
It is difficult to comprehend that 30 years have passed since "Born to Run" showed up in the record stores and Bruce Springsteen was elevated from critical favorite and scruffy Jersey kid into an icon of rock (as Jon Pareles called him Tuesday in The New York Times). But they have.
I can’t tell you where I was when I first became aware of the Boss, or where I was when I first started listening. I was 13 when the album hit the record stores and had no idea who this scruffy dude from my home state was. I was listening to AM radio at the time, more concerned about the Mets and Tom Seaver’s sublime 22-win season than rock ‘n’ roll.
"Born to Run" took the nation by storm that year, reaching number three on the Billboard pop charts, but it wasn’t until I entered high school that Springsteen became what can only be described as a force in my life.
I think it was an advertisement that changed things, a picture in the paper of the Boss in leather jacket and that funky cab-driver cap he used to wear. I had a friend, Rob, who lived a few doors down from me. We were looking over the music section and I told him I didn’t like Springsteen. Not that I’d heard Springsteen. I just thought I wasn’t supposed to like him because of the leather jacket. Keep in mind that, at this point, I was probably 14, maybe 15, and I was still listening to bands like Kansas and Styx, stadium-rock bands with no soul whose music was written to appeal to angst-ridden adolescents.
"You don’t like Springsteen?" he asked, surprised. "But you’re from Jersey." Rob had only moved to South Brunswick recently from Alabama.
I don’t remember my answer I assume I was a bit sheepish, perhaps I admitted that I hadn’t actually heard him I only remember listening to "Born to Run" with him (I can only assume he had a copy) and then, soon after, 1978’s "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (the first Springsteen album to make it into my record collection).
"Born to Run" had a dramatic sweep that Styx and Kansas only pretended at, but somehow managed to remain real and connected. The album was full of real places and real people. Tracks were built slowly from the ground up, their component parts slowly added, the ingredients mixing together to create that massive sound that still sounds fresh and explosive to my ears.
The critic Greil Marcus put it this way in Rolling Stone in 1975:
"It is a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on him a ’57 Chevy running on melted down Crystals records that shuts down every claim that has been made. And it should crack his future wide open.
"The song titles by themselves ‘Thunder Road,’ ‘Night,’ ‘Backstreets,’ ‘Born to Run,’ ‘Jungleland’ suggest the extraordinary dramatic authority that is at the heart of Springsteen’s new music. It is the drama that counts; the stories Springsteen is telling are nothing new, though no one has ever told them better or made them matter more. Their familiar romance is half their power: The promise and the threat of the night; the lure of the road; the quest for a chance worth taking and the lust to pay its price; girls glimpsed once at 80 miles an hour and never forgotten; the city streets as the last, permanent American frontier. We know the story: one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love.
"What is new is the majesty Springsteen and his band have brought to this story. Springsteen’s singing, his words and the band’s music have turned the dreams and failures two generations have dropped along the road into an epic an epic that began when that car went over the cliff in ‘Rebel Without a Cause.’ One feels that all it ever meant, all it ever had to say, is on this album, brought forth with a determination one would have thought was burnt out years ago. One feels that the music Springsteen has made from this long story has outstripped the story; that it is, in all its fire, a demand for something new."
It is amazing that, 30 years later, Mr. Marcus’ words still ring true. The album still burns with a passion built of the final stand, of a man with nothing to lose. As the documentary DVD "Wings for Wheels" that accompanies the newly remastered disc shows, Springsteen was obsessed with making the record, not with making a hit record or big seller, but with making a classic rock record. Every rock ‘n’ roll trope was put in play and reimagined yes, the Crystals and Phil Specter (it may be the only rock record to take Spector’s "Wall of Sound" approach and improve upon it) were in there, but also Chuck Berry and the surf bands, Roy Orbison and Mitch Ryder, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and nearly everything that had come before.
In that way, "Born to Run" is about rock ‘n’ roll, about its redemptive power, about the way it helped a skinny New Jersey teenager, an outsider, find his voice and, in the process, the voice of so many like him.
"Born to Run," in a lot of ways, escapes the kind of narrow classification that the industry now applies. It is considered classic rock, which really just means that it has entered the rock ‘n’ roll canon. But it has little to do with the sub-genres of its time.
It is not punk in the way we think of punk now, but to me it shared the cleansing power that the early punk records had. Long before I found the Sex Pistols and The Clash, there was Springsteen singing of the desperation on the backstreets of mythical New Jersey.
It changed the way I and a lot of people I know listened to music, forcing me to leave behind the self-referencing nonsense and empty noodling of progressive supergroups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes and Styx.
Springsteen, as well, closed a chapter in his songwriting with the record, moving toward the tighter, more controlled storytelling that would mark much of what he has recorded since. If "Born to Run" was youth’s last, desperate stand, then the albums that followed "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "The River," "Nebraska," etc. offer an exploration of the broken promises of the American Dream. But in so many ways each album comes back to the same story, summed up best by Springsteen himself in what I think is his greatest song, "Backstreets":
"Laying here in the dark you’re like an angel on my chest
"Just another tramp of hearts crying tears of faithlessness
"Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see
"Trying to learn how to walk like heroes we thought we had to be
"And after all this time to find we’re just like all the rest
"Stranded in the park and forced to confess
"To hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets."
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].

