21. Bruce Springsteen, "Born to Run"

 

Rock is a house that contains many mansions, but if you're looking for an album that is a perfect example of the genre called "rock and roll" this is probably it.  Bruce Springsteen spent a year and a half on this 39-minute long album and said he wanted it to sound like "Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan, produced by [Phil] Spector."  Instead he got this album, which sounds like the Ten Commandments of Rock, a sound that would be often imitated but which at the same time is so uniquely Springsteen's as to be immediately recognizable and unduplicatable.

The top songs of 1975, when this album came out, were "Love Will Keep Us Together" by Captain & Tenille and "Rhinestone Cowboy" by Glen Campbell and "Philadelphia Freedom" by Elton John and while those are all admirable songs in their own right, they aren't really about anything.  The lyrics exist only to serve the song.  Springsteen was on some different shit, though.  His songs are about actual people and stories.  The album opens with "Thunder Road," a plaintive piano and harmonica and this evocative image:

The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways
Like a vision, she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey, that's me, and I want you only
Don't turn me home again
I just can't face myself alone again

And then you're off, launching into one of the rock operas that make up this album.  It takes four verses for the song to really open up, when the singer is offering Mary a choice to "climb in back, heaven's waiting down on the tracks."  In 4 minutes and 48 seconds, Bruce lays out the whole vision of what he's doing here - this is Mary's last chance to escape the stifling sameness of her hometown, but it's Bruce's last chance to make it, too; after two albums that failed to sell, this was quite literally his last chance to make it in the music business. 

And make it he did.  The title track, which, depending on who you believe took anywhere from six months to a year to finish, became one of the iconic songs in rock history, sprinkled with Bruce's signature car imagery ("suicide machines," "chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin' out over the line," and, uh, "wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims") and a perfect encapsulation of the Springsteen sound - the guitars (12 tracks of them, supposedly), the growly lyrics, the soaring crescendos, and of course Clarence Clemons' sax, a feature so instrumental that's who Bruce is leaning on in the cover. 

Like so many of the songs on this album (and Bruce's catalog in general), "Night" is also about escape, the working man constrained by the forces of capitalism during the day, only free when he can race his car at night:

And you're in love with all the wonder it brings
And every muscle in your body sings as the highway ignites
You work nine to five and somehow you survive 'til the night

I always been fascinated by "Jungleland," the album's closer, that starts with strings and a now-famous piano riff and spins out a tale of a Vietnam vet returning to a life on the streets, and contains maybe the most famous sax solo of all time, a three-minute gem that took 16 hours to record, Springsteen having Clemons play it again and again and again until he was sure it was perfect.  It also has a magnificent guitar solo between verses 4 and 5.

Pretty good album!

Is this album in my personal Top 100? No.