“Born to Run” (Bruce Springsteen)

This week we’re looking at some of my favorite classic rock tracks from the mid-70s, starting with today’s classic song of the day, Bruce Springsteen’s immortal “Born to Run.” This song was the lead track on side two of 1975’s Born to Run album; released as a single in August of 1975, it rose to #23 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #17 on the Cash Box Top 100. You’d think it would have placed higher, wouldn’t you?

“Born to Run” is the definitive song of Mr. Springsteen’s long and illustrious career. He started writing it in 1973, when the title flashed into his head. He didn’t start recording it until January 8, 1974, when he brought the then-current version of the E Street Band into 914 Sound Studios, Blauvelt, New York, to work on this tune and “Jungleland,” a previous classic song of the week.

Bruce and the band continued working on “Born to Run” through August 6, when they put the final touches on the thing. Springsteen was inspired by Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound recordings and loaded his song up with  more than a dozen guitar tracks, saxophone, multiple keyboards, bass, drums, glockenspiel, background voices, and a string section—72 individual tracks in all. The result was a magnificent, almost operatic piece of music, encapsulating all that was great about rock and roll into four and a half minutes of sonic perfection. There wasn’t anything like it before and there hasn’t been anything like it since. It grabs you by the throat from its opening notes and then keeps on going higher and higher.

The E Street Band at this point in time was evolving. “Born to Run” featured Springsteen himself on vocals and acoustic and electric guitars, Clarence Clemons on sax, Danny Federici on organ and glockenspiel, and Garry Tallent on bass. The track also featured, in their final recording with Springsteen, David Sancious on pianos and synthesizer and Ernest “Boom” Carter on drums. (That’s right, this was one track on the album that didn’t feature Bruce’s new drummer, Mighty Max Weinberg—and Max has said he never did quite figure out what Boom, a jazz drummer, played on the crazy instrumental break before the final verse.)

“Born to Run” is all about escape—in Springsteen’s case, escaping out of dreary, oppressive Freehold, New Jersey, on Highway 9. It captures the youthful quest of freedom from everything holding you down, the hope that moving someplace, anyplace else will lead to a better life. It’s all there in Springsteen’s anthemic lyrics:

In the day we sweat it out on the streets
Of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through the mansions of glory
In suicide machines
Sprung from cages on Highway 9
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin’ out over the line
Oh, baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run

I often wonder whatever happened to Wendy and the guy with the chrome wheeled, fuel injected muscle car. Did they ever get away, did they ever find anything better, or was the highway “jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive” with no place left to hide? God, I hope they got away, like we all wanted to get away when we were that young.

Almost fifty years later I hear Springsteen’s words and feel that same youthful fire and desire to race away from the confines of the straight world to freedom and something better. I imagine a lot of you feel the same, that you hear this song on the radio or the Internet and start singing along in a much-too-loud voice for someone your age. “Born to Run” is a song that grabs you once and never lets you go, speaking to all generations of a certain age, all trapped in place and longing to get away, hoping against hope to get out while they’re young. Baby, we all want to believe that we were born to run.