For all it owes to Phil Spector, it can be compared only to the music of Bob Dylan & the Hawks made onstage in 1965 and ’66. Rolling Stone contributing editor Jon Landau, Mike Appel and Springsteen produced Born to Run in a style as close to mono as anyone can get these days the result is a sound full of grandeur. In one sense, all this talk of epic comes down to sound. 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. 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. 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. What is new is the majesty Springsteen and his band have brought to this story. We know the story: one thousand and one American nights, one long night of fear and love.

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. 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. 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.

And it should crack his future wide open. 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. Both radiated self-consciousness, whereas the ballyhoo led one to hope for the grand egotism of historic rock & roll stars both seemed at once flat and more than a little hysterical, full of sound and fury, and signifying, if not nothing, not much. The legendary three-hour sets Springsteen and his E Street Band apparently rip out night after night in New York, Province-town, Boston and even Austin have generated a great tumult and shouting but, short of flying 3000 miles to catch a show, there was no way for an outlander to discover what the fuss was all about.Ĭertainly, I couldn’t find the reasons on Springsteen’s first two albums, despite Columbia’s “New Dylan” promotional campaign for the debut disc and the equally thoughtful “Street Poet” cover of the second. As a determinedly permanent resident of the West Coast, the furor Bruce Springsteen’s live performances have kicked up in the East over the last couple of years left me feeling somewhat culturally deprived, not to mention a little suspicious.

Born to run album songs