August 14, 2007
Bruce Springsteen Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:50 PM EST Ross Warner’s excellent feature story on Bruce Springsteen, which led the AmericanHeritage.com lineup yesterday, hearkens back to a time when rock music was badly in need of creative rejuvenation. Revolting against the soft-pop sensibilities of acts like Donny Osmond, the Bee Gees, Chicago, America, Elton John, and the Carpenters, all of whom dominated the charts in the early 1970s, Springsteen injected a much needed sense of working-class vitality into popular music. “In 1974,” remembered the rock journalist Bill Flanagan, “everything was either folky or everything was jazzy but everything was tasteful.” Combining elements of jazz, funk, Motown, and rhythm-and-blues, the various incarnations of Springsteen’s Band—Child; Steel Mill; Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom; the Bruce Springsteen Band; and finally the E Street Band—enjoyed increasingly wide appeal among working-class men and women who frequented the Jersey Shore music scene and who found the prevailing sound an inadequate soundtrack to their youth. In conceiving Born to Run, Springsteen set out to create an album that would “explode in people’s homes and minds and change people’s lives.” Set against the E Street Band’s energetic blend of horns, keyboards, guitars, and percussion, the album’s title song it was a rollicking ballad of escape, packed full of cultural references that any young person from a working-class town like Freehold or Asbury Park would immediately have appreciated. Its first lines introduced what became Springsteen’s favorite metaphor—the automobile as an engine of liberation. In the weeks following his debut performance of “Born to Run,” Springsteen recorded a rough, four-and-a-half minute track of the song. Sensing the need for build-up, his manager, Mike Appel, distributed it to select disc jockeys, and within weeks it became an underground hit. Young people flooded record stores seeking copies of the new single, which did not yet exist, and radio stations that had not been on Appel’s small distribution list deluged CBS with requests for the new album, which also did not exist. In working-class Cleveland, disc jockey Kid Leo played the song religiously at 5:55 p.m. each Friday afternoon on WMMS, to “officially launch the weekend.” Clearly, Bruce’s growing fan base not only liked the song; they understood it. In his analysis of “Thunder Road,” the opening track on Born to Run, Robert Hilburn, the music critic at the Los Angeles Times noted that the song was a “classic rock ’n’ roll tale of a rebel-underdog kid, pinned down by the restrictions of his environment, inviting his girl, who has her own doubts and fears, to escape to a better life.” Missing from Hilburn’s assessment was class; the young heroes in “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” are in flight from a very specific condition. As Springsteen told a reporter several years later, “I know what it’s like not to be able to do what you want to do, because when I go home, that’s what I see. It’s not fun, it’s no joke. I see my sister and her husband. They’re living the lives of my parents in a certain kind of way. They got kids; they’re working hard. These are people, you can see something in their eyes. . . . I asked my sister, ‘What do you do for fun?’ ‘I don’t have any fun,’ she says. She wasn’t kidding.” When Kid Leo played “Born to Run” at 5:55 each Friday afternoon to “kick off the weekend,” he was offering musical flight to people like Bruce’s sister. “It’s like, you gotta watch out—that’s the way it’s gotta be to get control,” Springsteen observed. “All of a sudden you get kids, get them jobs and houses and mortgages and bills, all of a sudden. Jesus Christ, if they don’t work they’re gonna loose their house, they’re gonna lose their kid, they’re gonna lose their money, they’re gonna lose their self-respect, they’re gonna lose everything. That’s how America imprisons everybody.” In “Thunder Road,” the narrator begs Mary to “roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair/ Well the night’s busting open/ These two lanes will take us anywhere/ We got one last chance to make it real/ To trade in these wings on some wheels/ Climb in back/ Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.” With 16 percent of non-college-educated youth either unemployed or underemployed, and many of their more fortunate peers awaiting the next round of layoffs or cutbacks, the promise in Springsteen’s music had special resonance. Musicians cannot reverse economic recessions or redress inequality. Springsteen understood this and focused on those matters he could tangibly address as an artist. “Things like Watergate,” Springsteen said, “—people have lost their ability to dream. It’s been knocked out of people.” For at least some Americans in mid-1975 the street poet from Asbury Park offered people a little bit more.
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