'Born' Again, 30 Years Later

Springsteen looks back in a new boxed set "Born To Run" Bruce Springsteen (1-CD, 2-DVD set, Columbia) ****
Friday, November 11, 2005
BY JAY LUSTIG
Star-Ledger Staff

On Nov. 18, 1975, when the mania that followed the release of Bruce Springsteen's "Born To Run" album was at its peak, a concert by him and his E Street Band at London's Hammersmith Odeon -- their first European gig -- was filmed.

Springsteen barely noticed.

"Lost in my own private Idaho, I'd paid no attention to it," he writes in the liner notes to his new "Born To Run" boxed set. "I never looked at it ... for 30 years. At the time I was anxious to move away from the commotion and down the road, as the band and I were 'busy bein' born.'"

Now, Springsteen is finally revisiting that film -- and that entire crazy time in his life -- in the one-CD, two-DVD boxed set, which will be in stores Tuesday.

The CD, a remastered version of the album, presents the music with added clarity and sonic fidelity. Roy Bittan's piano sparkles, Max Weinberg's drumming seems more thunderous than ever, and guitar riffs previously buried in the mix become more prominent.

One DVD is the two-hour concert film, capturing the still-young, still-hungry band at its best. The other is "Wings For Wheels," a new documentary on the making of the album that provides some valuable context. Three 1973 concert clips, featuring Springsteen with an earlier version of the E Street Band, are included as a bonus.

The absence of outtakes or alternative versions of the album's songs is disappointing, especially since tantalizing snippets of them are in "Wings For Wheels." Still, the boxed set represents a near-perfect way to re-experience an album that many consider Springsteen's best.

With big-hearted anthems ("Thunder Road," the title track), atmospheric epics ("Jungleland," "Backstreets") and idiosyncratically arranged tunes (the punchy, horn-led "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," the pulsating "She's the One"), "Born To Run" never lets up. Influenced by Phil Spector's wall-of-sound productions, Springsteen piled up layers of sound to sometimes dizzying effect, but never lost track of the songs' emotional threads.

"Born To Run" sounded unlike Springsteen's two prior albums, and has still not been convincingly imitated by him, or anyone else. It's also an unusually cohesive album -- every song seems to relate to the others, sonically or thematically.

" 'Born To Run' has that feeling of that one endless summer night," Springsteen says in "Wings For Wheels." "That's what the whole record feels like. It could all be taking place in the course of one evening, in all these different locations -- all these different stories on one sort of long summer night."

It was not a fun album to make. Keyboardist David Sancious and drummer Ernest "Boom" Carter left the band after just one track was recorded, in order to play their own jazz-fusion music; Bittan and Weinberg replaced them. Fearful that he would lose his recording contract if the album wasn't a hit, Springsteen agonized over every note and re-recorded songs countless times.

He approached the album orchestrally, plotting out every bar. And he left nothing to chance: He even gave Clarence Clemons note-to-note instructions for his long saxophone solo in "Jungleland."

"He felt everything was on the line, at the moment," says Bittan, in "Wings For Wheels," before adding about his perfectionist boss: "Actually, I think he probably has always felt that way, at all times."

Elsewhere in "Wings For Wheels," Springsteen listens to outtakes from the sessions, plays solo versions of some songs, and visits his hometown, Freehold. He offers little or nothing about some songs ("Night," "She's the One," "Meeting Across the River"), but talks extensively about others ("Born To Run," "Thunder Road," "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out").

Rest assured, though, that even on the songs he examines, much of the mystery remains intact.
"I have no idea what that means, to this day," he says of the title phrase of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out." "But it's important."

Throughout the documentary, Springsteen makes it clear that the album, as a whole, couldn't be more important to him.

"When I hear the record," he says, "I hear my friends, and I hear my hopes, and my dreams, and what I thought my life was going to be like, as a 25-, 24-year-old kid. I see it as the start of some of the most important and fundamental relationships in my life ... I think today, it provides, onstage for us, a great communion between myself and the band members. Without sounding too hokey about it, or blown-up about it, it is a bit sacramental."

Six of the album's eight songs are included in the stunning concert film, which features a skinny, scruffy Springsteen, nearly bursting with energy -- a whirling showman on songs like "Quarter To Three," "She's the One," "The Detroit Medley" and "Spirit In the Night."

A subdued, piano/harmonica/vocals version of "Thunder Road" kicks off the show. "For You" gets a slow, pensive reading, and the band stretches out with long jams on "Kitty's Back" and "The E Street Shuffle."

The band has no trouble sustaining intensity through the twists and turns of "Backstreets" and "Jungleland," but the show peaks with a manic, almost punk-like "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City," featuring a biting guitar duel between Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt.

The three 1973 performances -- recorded at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles -- feature Springsteen with a smaller, jazzier, shaggier band. Original E Street drummer Vini Lopez, who played in a looser style than Weinberg, was still in the fold, and Van Zandt had not yet joined.

The band plays "Thundercrack" (featuring the kind of laid-back, spacy jam that would be more typical for a Grateful Dead show) and "Spirit In the Night," and keyboardist Danny Federici and bassist Garry Tallent switch to accordion and tuba, respectively, on "Wild Billy's Circus Story."
Between songs, Springsteen jokes about the tradition of dedicating songs to people onstage, and mentions that he had just been booked to open a show at Madison Square Garden.
"Anyone who wants their name said at Madison Square Garden, meet me backstage with a quarter," he says.

The first of five upcoming New Jersey shows on Springsteen's acoustic tour takes place Sunday at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City. For details, see the Ticket section of today's Star-Ledger.

A Top 10 of fun facts
Here are 10 things you may not know about "Born to Run.":
1. Other titles reportedly considered for the album included "From the Churches to the Jails," "The Hungry and the Hunted" and "War & Roses."
2. On the album's cover photo, there is a large Elvis Presley fan-club button on Springsteen's guitar strap.
3. Drummer Ernest "Boom" Carter, who was in the E Street Band for about 10 months, plays on the title track only. It's his sole credit on a Springsteen studio album.
4. Charles Calello, a one-time member of the Four Seasons, arranged and conducted the strings on "Jungleland."
5. It was planned at one point that "Thunder Road" -- named after a 1958 Robert Mitchum movie -- would open the album, in acoustic form, and end it, in a full band version. Only the band version made the final cut.
6. According to Springsteen, all the album's songs were written on a piano at a tiny rented house in the West End section of Long Branch, where he lived at the time.
7. The band finished recording the album at the Record Plant studio in New York in the early hours of July 20, 1975, then immediately left for Providence, R.I., for the first show of the tour that night.
8. The album's engineer, Jimmy Iovine, went on to become a leading record-industry mogul, co-founding the Interscope label (Eminem, 50 Cent, Marilyn Manson).
9. The album was not nominated for any Grammys. Best-album nominees that year included Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years" (which won), Janis Ian's "Between the Lines" and the Eagles' "One of These Nights."
10. A 1980 drive to make the title track New Jersey's official state song failed.
-- Jay Lustig and W.C. Stroby