Just close your eyes and listen. “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves. Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.” With those lines, you are already in the world of Bruce Springsteen. The curtains have opened, revealing a widescreen vision of New York and New Jersey teens, hoping to bust open at any moment.
That’s how Springsteen's magnum opus, Born to Run opens. A soft harmonica reels you in at the opening of “Thunder Road” before a new world has opened. Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle were just extended overtures to take Springsteen to this point. Unleashed by Columbia Records on Aug. 25, 1975, Born to Run announced that Springsteen was here.
Born to Run was a transitional record, catching Springsteen at the right moment. He was moving away from his original producer/manager Mike Appel and pianist David Sancious was on his way out to make room for Roy Bittan. Sancious, Appel and drummer Ernest ‘Boom’ Carter can be heard on “Born to Run.” But the other seven tracks on the album introduced us to the more familiar E Street Band sound that took more from Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound than the acoustic sound that might have fit his lyrics in the eyes of others.
It’s quite amazing that the album does only contain eight songs and nearly all of them are about the same topic. In each song, we have young people who just want to change their lives - it’s how they go about that that differentiates each song. In “Meeting Across The River,” a criminal tries to escape with one last score and the couple in “Backstreets” finds a different life in the dark corners of town. And in the epic “Jungleland,” a person named Rat tries to find his one last chance at romance amid a gang fight with police.
Forty years after its release, Born to Run is still an exciting picture of American life and really encapsulates the importance of the term “album.” Its unifying themes make it hard to imagine the final product without any of the songs that made it. While Springsteen may have made more ambitious and expansive albums since Born to Run, he carefully crafted a thesis for his entire career with a successful marriage of poetry and gutsy rock and roll.