From The Chicago Tribune:

After 30 years, Springsteen's `Born to Run' is music to live for
By Greg Kot

November 13, 2005

When it was first released 30 years ago, Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" pulled off an improbable feat that wasn't fully appreciated at the time: It pushed the artist's career into fast-forward, even as the music embraced the past.

Now a richly appointed boxed set arrives Tuesday commemorating the era when Springsteen appeared simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek: "Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Edition" (Columbia, $39.98 list price). The original album -- which went on to sell more than 8 million copies worldwide sounds more than ever like the end of an era rather than the beginning of one. That's because "Born to Run" now ranks as the last of its kind: an album that fervently believed that rock 'n' roll could save your life, or at least change it profoundly.

Today, such a notion might seem silly or quaint until one listens to the first few seconds of the freshly remastered title track -- a drum roll followed by a jet-engine roar of massed guitars, keyboards, saxophone and glockenspiel and suddenly that old-fashioned idea starts to sound almost reasonable.

The album arrived as a burst of restless optimism, a shot of rock 'n' roll bravado, at a time when pop culture and society in general were in the doldrums. A few years later, President Jimmy Carter would deliver a speech that described An America suffering "a crisis of spirit" in the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, rising oil prices and a declining economy.

"Born to Run" crashed in at the decade's midpoint. Many of the '60s icons (the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Who, the Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby Stills Nash & Young) were either gone or on cruise control, and punk still hadn't come kicking and screaming to life. What Springsteen offered was not a new sound, but a full-on celebration of an old one. He self-consciously fused Dylan's lyricism with Phil Spector's production values and Roy Orbison's operatic vocals.

Sure, it was melodramatic, bombastic, and way, way over the top. But it was also inspiring, especially to those who missed rock 'n' roll's first two waves of giants in the '50s and '60s. The 30th anniversary box, which also includes DVDs of a 1975 concert and a documentary about the making of the album, puts that feat in fresh context.

Among the revelations is that the music Springsteen and his E Street Band made during the recording sessions sounds vital, larger than life, almost in spite of the arduous process required to make it so.

It turns out Clarence Clemons' extended saxophone solo on "Jungleland" really wasn't a solo at all, but a meticulously scripted musical passage that required 16 hours to record, note by painstaking note. One song, the 4 1/2-minute title track, gestated for six months, going through numerous incarnations, including one with strings and a backing choir that makes Springsteen cringe as he listens to the playback decades later in the 90-minute documentary DVD, "Wings for Wheels: The Making of `Born to Run.'"

Six months to record a single song?

"A song should take about three hours," E Street guitarist Steve Van Zandt wryly notes.

But that fastidiousness put Springsteen on the road to stardom. His ambition was plain: to write and record a blockbuster after his first two albums, "Greetings from Asbury Park" (1973) and "The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle" (1973) flopped. When "Born to Run" arrived, his anointment by Time and Newsweek seemed to fulfill the 1974 prophecy of Jon Landau, the critic who would become Springsteen's co-producer and manager: "I saw rock 'n' roll's future, and it's name is Bruce Springsteen."

Springsteen was simultaneously embarrassed and gratified by the hype. "I wouldn't have [had] it any other way," he says on one of the set's DVDs.

With "Born to Run," Springsteen honed his exuberant live sound by paring his songs to make them punchier, less wordy and more concise. The title song is a more disciplined cousin to the sprawling "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" from his previous album; the latter was a huge concert favorite, but was too unwieldy for radio programmers. "Born to Run," in contrast, was tight as a fist, and became Springsteen's first top 40 hit.

`A dividing line'

It was, as Springsteen says, "a dividing line" for his music. What makes it vital three decades later is that the album was made during a period when Springsteen knew he had to move forward, but wasn't sure exactly how. The tension between what he was and what he would become gives "Born to Run" its power. Here was the moment when the loose gypsy rocker who favored frantic R&B rave-ups and epic arrangements started moving toward the type of crafted anthems that could conquer a hockey arena.

That's why the two-hour concert DVD, "Hammersmith Odeon, London '75," is so instructive. Little live footage from this period in Springsteen's career is available, let alone an entire concert, and the London show will come as a revelation to those who didn't catch up with Springsteen until years later when he had graduated from theaters to headlining stadiums. At the relatively intimate Hammersmith Odeon, Springsteen was still figuring it out. He had not yet settled into a routine with his recently retooled band, and the music bristles with go-for-broke possibility.

Springsteen doesn't talk much between songs, and his camaraderie with his bandmates is still evolving. Van Zandt, keyboardist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg were new additions, and there is no hint of the choreographed rituals that would infiltrate later E Street tours, particularly around the time of the 1984 blockbuster, "Born in the U.S.A."

Instead, the band concentrates on the music, and the collective focus is laserlike. The tempos are faster, nearly manic in places, and Springsteen is a wiry, stocking-capped soul man. His movements are less mannered than they would become, and he appears at times to be lost inside the whirlwind, eyes shut, head tilted back, hands clapping, voice growling, a New Jersey Shore answer to Van Morrison.

At this point, the E Streeters are still a gritty R&B band. The theatricality that would infuse later live versions of "Born to Run" and "Jungleland" is missing. But there's a confidence in the music itself that overshadows any hint of showmanship, or even the need for it. A few of the songs from the first two albums, with their rush of words and extended solos, come off as overbaked. But the "Born to Run" material burns white hot. "She's the One" turns its Bo Diddley groove into a syncopated storm, as Springsteen and Van Zandt shout harmonies into each other's faces.

Three years later, this same band would reach its creative peak during the "Darkness on the Edge of Town" tour. But on this night, their union and the songs from "Born to Run" are still fresh. New muscles are being flexed, and well-worn rock 'n' roll themes -- cars, girls, the night -- are taken out of the garage for one last ride.

Romantic songwriting

"Born to Run" represents a last gasp for a certain kind of songwriting: the Romantic escapism of Orbison, Spector, Buddy Holly and Brian Wilson. Punk's sarcasm and skepticism were just around the corner, and the age of irony would soon follow. There was nothing skeptical or ironic about "Born to Run." Its setting was a long, hot summer night, and its stories of longing and restlessness were conveyed in eight songs that stretched out like mini-movies.

Springsteen calculated every gesture, down to the expansive introductions for the songs, all of which were composed on piano. The arrangements were nearly as thick as Spector's "wall of sound" productions from a decade earlier. The E Street Band had to relearn how to play, as Springsteen aimed for a simpler, denser sound, rather than the hyperactive sprawl of his previous albums.

After it was done, Springsteen -- and rock itself -- would be changed. His lyrics would become even sparser, his stories bleaker, his music more hard-hitting and direct on subsequent albums, such as "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "The River." By the time of "Born in the U.S.A.," the Jersey soul stirrer would give way to the muscular celebrity in blue jeans, with an American flag as his backdrop.

On "Born to Run," Springsteen knew he was losing his innocence, and that knowledge gives the album its enduring power. He was going for broke, calibrating every note for maximum impact. He knew that even as a gateway was opening, another was closing behind. Or, as he warns on "Thunder Road":

"The door's open, but the ride ain't free."

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gregkot@aol.com

Join Greg Kot for a "Greet the Press" question-and-answer session and reception at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday in Tribune Tower benefiting the United Way. Minimum donation is $25 per person. Reservations necessary. Registration and details at chicagotribune.com/greetthepress or call 312-527-8800 or e-mail rsvptribuw@tribune.com.


Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

From NEW YORK POST page six:

Born to Run 30 Years On

Lenny Kaye, longtime New York guitarist and Patti Smith sideman:

"To me, 'Born to Run' is the full realization of the power of Bruce's art. He was a guy
who'd been at it for so long, he was like a dam being burst. You could feel all this
energy and force and talent just aching to find its moment to break through, and
that's what 'Born to Run' did - it was this great declaration of identity.

"Rock 'n' roll in 1975 was hardening its arteries; it was getting so slick and
professional. Bruce and his musicians were certainly not punk rock amateurs, but
they imbued it with a heart and soul that was like a reawakening of why someone
picks up a guitar in the first place. He took the charisma of the artists that gave him
nurture and heated it up in his own primordial soup, and sent it out into the world."

Allan Pepper, co-owner of the West Village club Bottom Line:

"Bruce first played the Bottom Line in July 1974, and he was kind of developing the
persona. You could see he was a work in progress. I thought he was good, but I didn't
get what everybody was jumping up and down about. One year later it had all come
together in such an amazing way - it had all coalesced. I was just blown away. In all
the years we were in business, he set the bar for how good it could be when you were
at your best. When you saw him, you instantly became a believer. Everybody felt he
was singing directly to them. He's just had a magic and a charisma that is unlike
anybody that I've ever seen."

Scott Kempner, Dictators guitarist, and the leader of the '80s New York band the
Del-Lords:

" 'Born to Run' totally changed my life, instantly. I don't think I'll ever play a record as
much as I played that record. It was the crystallization of so many things that were,
as Bob Dylan said, blowing in the wind. What he did was encapsulate Lieber and
Stoller, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the British Invasion - all of the elements of what
made rock and roll magical to me. At the time, it could not have been more
revolutionary in its ability to look back and bring those elements into the present.

"That record reshuffled the deck. Rock and roll in those days - you had the prog-rock
influence, and it was just this big pompous dinosaur. That record really cut a big hole
through the morass of the early '70s. It brought it back down to guys in leather
jackets and jeans."

Dave Marsh, Springsteen biographer and longtime friend:

"To me that record is about exceeding your own expectations, and about recaching
as far as you can reach and doing it because at the end of the day if you fail and you
wind up with nothing or even dead, you didn't fail because you lived out your
expectations, you didn't let yourself down. It's about people who feel trapped in the
small time looking to get into a bigger world, and that is completely autobiographical,
not only for Bruce but for all those guys. I mean, these are a bunch of yokels from
Central New Jersey, who were held in a certain place by social forces, and their own
expectations, and this thing comes along and suddenly more is possible. That's one of
the reasons it's lasted 30 years - because that's the classic American goal, and it was
made by people who realized it."

Copyright © 2005 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New York Times:

'Born to Run' Reborn 30 Years Later
By Jon Pareles

November 15, 2005

In the spring of 1974, Bruce Springsteen was a skinny, tousled 24-year-old Jersey Shore songwriter about to make his third album. He was under pressure. Although he was an East Coast club sensation and a rock critics' favorite, his first two albums hadn't sold enough to convince his label, Columbia, that he wasn't a flop. It could have been his last chance.

Yet he went into the studio not to make a commercial hit, but to make a masterpiece. "We had ambition to burn," said Jon Landau, who is now Mr. Springsteen's manager. He produced the album with Mr. Springsteen and his manager at the time, Mike Appel.

"We knew exactly what we wanted," Mr. Landau recalled in an interview last week. "We were not in it to do something average. We were not in it to get any particular song on the radio. We were in it to do something great."

The result - after 15 months of writing and rewriting, relentless 18-hour recording sessions and the replacement of half the E Street Band - was "Born to Run," released on Aug. 25, 1975. It would transform Mr. Springsteen from a local sensation into an American rock archetype.

Thirty years later, Mr. Springsteen is rereleasing "Born to Run" in a box set (list price $39.98) that Mr. Landau described as a "victory lap." It includes a remastered CD of the original album and two DVD's: "Wings for Wheels," a documentary on the making of the album, and "Hammersmith Odeon, London '75," a two-hour concert film of Mr. Springsteen and the E Street Band going all out to win over a skeptical audience at his first concert in England. Tucked at the end of "Wings for Wheels" is another performance: Mr. Springsteen leading his 1973 band in Los Angeles, playing three songs, including "Thundercrack," which wouldn't surface until Mr. Springsteen released his collection of outtakes, "Tracks," in 1998.

The documentary, including video shot during the recording sessions that has not surfaced until now, shows some of the trauma of the recording process. Film of the London concert, which sat unwatched for three decades in Mr. Springsteen's archive, presents a heady, rambunctious triumph: unabashed Jersey guys running on nerves, adrenaline and virtuosity.

"Wings for Wheels" draws on video shot by Barry Rebo, who was then a Jersey Shore fan and friend of Mr. Springsteen and is now the chairman of Emerging Pictures, a national network of digital movie theaters. Mr. Rebo shot his first film of Mr. Springsteen on Super-8 in 1970, and went on to videotape Mr. Springsteen in the studio and onstage for a decade.

"If I wanted to be a cameraman, which was my goal, he was the most perfect subject I could have," Mr. Rebo said in a telephone interview on Sunday, before heading to Atlantic City to see Mr. Springsteen perform. "He was shy, but onstage he would change into this unbelievably charismatic musician."

Mr. Rebo amassed more than 100 hours of video and film of Mr. Springsteen, including his celebrated club shows at the Bottom Line in Manhattan and the Roxy in Los Angeles. "Either it was going to find its way to the public or it was going to be the ultimate home movie," Mr. Rebo said. Mr. Springsteen bought Mr. Rebo's material earlier this year, and the new box set offers the first public glimpse of it.

In 1974, Mr. Rebo brought an early black-and-white video camera into 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt, N.Y., where Mr. Springsteen began recording "Born to Run." Mr. Landau politely described 914 as "a beat-up old funky studio"; among other things, the piano, which was at the core of the songs, would not stay in tune. Mr. Springsteen labored there for months, between playing club dates, over the four-and-a-half minutes of the song "Born to Run."

Thom Zimny, who directed "Wings for Wheels," said that virtually all of the music on the DVD is not from the finished album, but from the innumerable outtakes. (The DVD menus use snippets of studio conversation.) One fascinating section shows how the layers of the song "Born to Run" were stacked up, highlighting tracks within the song's dense mix. "There's no way to tell how many overdubs there were," Mr. Zimny said. When the song was complete, the E Street Band keyboardist David Sancious and drummer, Ernest (Boom) Carter, quit. Their replacements, Roy Bittan on piano and Max Weinberg on drums, are still in the band.

Mr. Springsteen also struggled in Blauvelt with the album's epic closing song, "Jungleland," which he would not finish for another year. "They were stuck," Mr. Rebo said. "It was Bruce trying to hear something and articulate it to people who had never made a record like that."

Using a camera modified with the tubes from a security camera so he could shoot in low light - sometimes just the light of the meters on the control-room console - Mr. Rebo captured an exhausted-looking but determined Mr. Springsteen, dissatisfied with the sound and calling for endless retakes. Yet when Mr. Springsteen got behind a microphone to sing "Jungleland," he had clearly thought through every dramatic inflection, from whisper to howl.

Mr. Springsteen invited Mr. Landau, a rock journalist who had proclaimed Mr. Springsteen "rock and roll future,"to the recording sessions, and Mr. Landau started offering advice. He convinced Mr. Springsteen to leave Blauvelt and move to a first-class recording studio, the Record Plant in Manhattan, where the album was finished.In "Wings for Wheels," Mr. Springsteen describes the album as the most theatrical songwriting of his career. He says he strove to make the songs cinematic, complete with scene-setting introductions, larger-than-life characters and atmospheric interludes. "The initial lyric would have been like a bad B picture," he observes. "The end product was supposed to be like a good B picture imbued with a certain spiritual thing."

"Born to Run" is "the dividing line" between his adolescent and adult work, Mr. Springsteen says. It is also as much an endpoint as a beginning. Suitelike songs like "Thunder Road" and "Jungleland" have more in common structurally with elaborate, multipart songs like "Rosalita" than with Mr. Springsteen's later songs.

"He didn't want to make a sequel," Mr. Landau said. "And he's never made a sequel. There was a culmination of part of his writing that he doesn't repeat."

Longtime fans of Mr. Springsteen may be surprised to see Mr. Appel appearing prominently in the documentary. He was the manager who helped Mr. Springsteen get his recording contract and who pushed the reluctant label to keep pouring more money into the making of "Born to Run." Mr. Landau said, "Mike was very good at just knocking down doors and, you know, beating people up till he got what he had to have."

Mr. Appel and Mr. Springsteen produced the song "Born to Run" before Mr. Landau began working with them. But Mr. Landau came to supplant Mr. Appel as Mr. Springsteen's main adviser. After the album was released - and beyond the period covered by the documentary - Mr. Landau and Mr. Appel would grapple over Mr. Springsteen's career.

The long-term contract that the young Mr. Springsteen had signed with Mr. Appel's production company, Laurel Canyon, gave the company control of Mr. Springsteen's publishing rights and gave it more royalties per album than Mr. Springsteen would receive.

In 1976, when Mr. Springsteen wanted to begin work on his next album, with Mr. Landau producing, Mr. Appel refused permission and later got an injunction to prevent them from working together. Mr. Springsteen had his contracts audited, and one accountant's report described them as "unconscionable exploitation." After nearly a year of lawsuits and countersuits, Mr. Springsteen and Mr. Appel reached an out-of-court settlement. Mr. Springsteen got his publishing rights, and he and Mr. Landau began recording "Darkness on the Edge of Town."

Still, Mr. Appel might have inadvertently helped Mr. Springsteen finally complete "Born to Run." Mr. Appel had booked a tour assuming that the album would be finished. According to Mr. Landau, the last possible day of recording before the band hit the road was a marathon in which Mr. Springsteen and the saxophonist Clarence Clemons pondered every note of Mr. Clemons's saxophone solo in "Jungleland" for some 16 hours.

"That was a nightmare," Mr. Landau said. "He had a vision in his head. And the only way he could work it out was through a certain amount of trial and error with Clarence. And he was in a very obsessive endgame on the album."

Mr. Landau recalled: "He was finishing with Clarence in one room. The band was in another room. They were mixing 'Jungleland' without the sax, waiting to put it in, in another room. And at 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock in the morning they just rolled out of the studio, got in a van and drove up to Providence and began the tour."

The full theatricality of Mr. Springsteen's songwriting for "Born to Run" comes through in the Hammersmith Odeon concert DVD. The show was filmed and recorded in 24-track sound. Mr. Springsteen had almost forgotten about it until he started looking through his archives recently. "I was told, 'He's going to be sending over some footage,' " Mr. Zimny said. "It was 16 cans, unlabeled, from 1975." The films were silent, separated from the recording, so Mr. Zimny had to do some lip-reading to connect images to songs.

Onstage, Mr. Springsteen wears a floppy knit cap that gets nearly as much of a workout as he does; band members have wide-brimmed hats and loud suits with bell-bottom pants. They tear through the songs: "Born to Run" has probably never been played as fast before or since, while "She's the One" starts with Mr. Springsteen's lone harmonica and builds its Bo Diddley beat into a syncopated jackhammer. And if Mr. Springsteen was nervous - he had spent the afternoon rampaging through the theater getting rid of promotional fliers that seemed like too much hype - it barely shows as he struts and clowns and emotes and sweats. "We were seeking that spotlight out, we were trying to do something that would be noticed," he says in the documentary. "You wanted something that was explosive." He was just a Jersey guy, ready to take on the world.