PropertyOfZack is adding a new feature to it’s already established Review section, Throwback Reviews. To start off this subsection what better than maybe the greatest American album of all time, Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run. Check out the in-depth review below.

There had been two albums before it, and another band before that. But the August 25, 1975 Born To Run put Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band on the map. Greetings From Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle would be revisited and revered by new fans, but the third album is remembered as a cornerstone of rock and roll. Springsteen creates his signature dark inspiration infused with shameless hope through crashing guitars, rising vocals, tangling piano, and a common man’s words. Springsteen has a knack for creating characters with instantaneously accessible history and familiarity, and the characters and tales that live on Born to Run are archetypal frames fit just for Bruce’s catalog, and reappear throughout his work when you’d least expect it. Eight lyrically fluid but essentially different tracks constitute the 40-minute record that has sold over six million copies. It is a real record, made to be heard start to finish, and here sits the breakdown track-by track:

Side A.

1. The album creaks open with the soft harmonica over piano of “Thunder Road.” The song escalates as Springsteen gets close to singing a deep tune, pleading and offering a getaway. Definitive confidence riddles the closing verse, begging a loud sing-along and change of pace from the song’s melodic tentative open.

2. “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” bursts open with a swingy tune centering a saxophone. Springsteen rips a rawer voice and talks his way through the frustration of being caught in a traffic stop trying to get across the Hudson River from New York City to New Jersey, but this track is also about the history of the E Street Band. Saxophonist Clarence Clemens is “the Big Man” that joins the band, and he lends his guttural voice during the choral call and response, “and kid you better get the picture.” Clemens adds glamour to the saxophone and makes this unusual instrument an essential rock and roll sound. Springsteen closes the song in a fit, famously proclaiming, “Ain’t nothing but a tenth.”

3. “Night” is equally energetic but significantly more anthemnic. Max Weinberg’s drums don’t relent under Gary Tallent’s bass. A typical Springsteen tale of escaping the 9-5 workday and driving away the pain, this shorter track bridges the complex tales surrounding it.

4. The opening licks of “Backstreets” are strong, heartbreaking, and, if verbal, would be profound. They swell and calm throughout the song, slinking over a slower song. “Backstreets” has the raw edge of the stories told on The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle. Sometimes overlooked for its oddly energized melancholy, this track embodies the essence of painful teenage growth and recollection made hazy by time and only partially healed wounds. The sex of “Terry,” the subject of the song, is unclear and debated: In other songs, Terry is very clearly a woman, but Springsteen conveys a brokenness much more about friendship and less about romantic love. He screeches out “Where dancers scraped the tears/ Up off the street dressed down in rags” and proclaims “You’re like an angel on my chest/ Just another tramp of hearts/ Crying tears of faithlessness.” This epic of loss closes out the A-side of the album, a huge contrast to the promise at the end of “Thunder Road”

Side B

5. Flip the record, flip the emotion: the title track “Born to Run” explodes with those now-familiar low chords and undercutting organs. A dedication to the open road, to love, to a trusty speedy vehicle, this song lights up every stadium live and deserves play at the highest volume from every stereo, mainly because amateurs will attempt to sing out over The Boss. Springsteen seeps energy in every line, frequently forgoing actual words for “oh”’s and “woah”’s, and his signature “huh-ha-huh-hey! or “one-two-three-four” before the heartbreaking, ironic hope of “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes/ On a last chance power drive/ Everybody’s out on the run tonight/ But there’s no place left to hide.” The song’s pure lure is routed in Danny Federici’s organs, David Sancious’s keyboards and Ernest “Boom” Carter’s drums that underscore each refrain’s famous promise: “Tramps like us/ Baby we were born to run.”

6. Roy Bittan’s piano and harpsichord over Tallent’s bass create an energized eerie contrast that kick off “She’s The One.” Springsteen sounds almost like he is being moved to preach as he tells the story of a girl with “heart of stone.” It is his bizarre and precise description that gives his work unique life: “With her soft French cream/ Standing in the doorway like a dream/ I wish she’d just leave me alone.” “And no matter where you sleep/ Tonight or how far you run/ Oh she’s the one” he cautions before the bridge breaks open with Clemens’s saxophone dancing around Bittan’s organ and Weinberg’s beats.

7. Barely a whisper, “Meeting Across the River” is essentially a spoken word put to score. The basic conversational language sounds like eloquent poetry over the Randy Brecker’s bluesy trumpet that weaves along Bittan’s tragic piano. Springsteen speaks as the near down-and-out friend asking an Eddie for a way to the city to make a deal. “Hey Eddie, can you catch us a ride” trails off chillingly.

8. Suki Lahav opens the story on violin, but it quickly grows with The E Street’s drumming and guitars and becomes only their own; “Jungleland” is the Bruce Springsteen epic tale. Love springs between New Jersey and New York, kids come out in the hot, gritty summer heat, guitars and bands play, poets sing, shots are fired, cars dictate the night, and there’s a cop hanging out in the second verse. More importantly, Springsteen creates a true Jungleland: a place of random, natural law, of fleeting, interesting peace, of alliances and heartbreak, of simplicity, and of a persistent fight for individuality, for freedom. Bruce first contextualizes it: “And the kids ‘round here live just like shadows/ Always quiet, holding hands/ From the churches to the jails/ Tonight all is silence in the world/ As we take our stand/ Down in Jungleland.” A sweetly sad saxophone interlude breaks up the song into beginning and end, description and consequence. Bittan slowly hits keys under Springsteen’s regretful voice as it narrates what is now fact, what it has now learned: “In the tunnels uptown/ The Rat’s own dream guns him down.” The closing lyrics are some of the most defeated Springsteen has ever written, but soon after he finishes singing words, he breaks out into a soulful set of vocal calls, lifted by fluttering piano. The Calls of Jungleland are the essence of hope on the record, even if The Magic Rat never makes it out alive.

*****/*****

*This review was composed by Emily Coch