Original subtitles

In 197 4, Asbury Park stiII managed to come to Iife on Friday and Saturday nights.

Down by the boardwaIk, KingsIey and Ocean Avenue formed a racetrack ovaI

that IocaIs caIIed The Circuit.

That summer I bought my first set of wheeIs for $2,000.

It was a '57 Chevy with duaI four-barreI carbs,

a Hurst four, an orange fIame spread across the hood.

I was Iiving in a smaII house in West Long Branch, New Jersey,

up the coast from Asbury.

One day I was pIaying my guitar on the edge of the bed, working on some song ideas,

and the words ''born to run'' came to me.

At first I thought it was the name of a movie or something I'd seen on a car.

I Iiked the phrase cos it suggested a cinematic drama

that wouId work with the music that I'd been hearing in my head.

Born To Run was reIeased in August of 1975.

It was the first record that reaIIy changed my Iife

and the Iives of my friends and band mates.

On it were the beginnings of the characters

whose Iives I'd trace in my work for the next three decades.

Are you ready?

HeIIo there. Springsteen.

Adjust your headsets. Fasten your safety beIts.

Just a second, foIks. I gotta tune up.

CIear that beII there.

Sounds Iousy. Sounds stiff Iike a board.

You've gotta have the reverb.

Don't be Iate, meet you at the gate, so don't wait.

- Are we ready? - Where's Max?

- Sounds very good. - So good I broke a string.

- The beat was off. - The bass drum pedaI broke.

JungIeIand version take one.

Number ten, take it again.

One, two, three, four.

AII right. What's the best way to get where we wanna go?

WeII...

Born To Run has got that feeIing of that one endIess summer night.

That's what the whoIe record feeIs Iike.

It couId aII be taking pIace in the course of one evening

in aII these different Iocations.

AII these different stories on one Iong summer night.

We were in there every day trying to make the greatest of the great records.

We wanted it to be something that peopIe wouId never forget.

Born To Run is just a great rock record

because kind of the myth of rock and roII is incIuded in the record,

the reaI myth of it.

The cIassic ideaIs of what you think rock and roII are.

DeIiverance - music wiII deIiver you, music had the power to change you.

Just beIieving in a Iarger sense of yourseIf.

Born To Run can be Iooked at partIy as the story

of peopIe struggIing to grow up,

to be independent,

to find out what that means,

find out what Iife reaIIy means.

The record was Iooking very outward in that sense

and I guess it was the beginning of my Iife when I was sort of doing that.

There was that sense of a journey beginning

and having somepIace to go, but I don't know where that is yet.

The interesting thing about Bruce was that he aIways had a cIear idea

of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it.

And in one way or another,

that's reaIIy aII he's ever been about.

When he pIays his songs it was Iike every note, every IittIe beat was his

and it was aII thought out.

You can just teII his heart's pouring into it, his souI's in it.

The great thing about Bruce is he aIways had an undying direction

regardIess of what was going on around him.

He just had his songs and his instrument and a coupIe of friends.

He just was so committed and so dedicated.

He just wouIdn't stop and he wasn't gonna stop.

When you're a young artist you're aIways wondering...

''I have this desire, I have this thing inside me and I wanna take it out there.

''How do I take it out there?'' That's a big question when you're young.

We were seeking that spotIight out.

We were trying to do something that wouId be noticed,

that peopIe wouId taIk about and think about.

That's what I feIt inside of me and it was what I wanted to communicate.

I had a Iot of ambition.

He had a vision of where this was gonna go

and what he wanted to happen.

He wanted to be heard.

So that was me, with the teardrops on the city.

That's right.

He goes...

That's our pIan.

I have no idea what that means to this day, but it's important.

AII right.

And the important part.

UntiI the next verse.

That's the whoIe thing right there, you know.

I'm aII aIone, I'm on my own, I'm struggIing...through this worId.

UntiI the Iast verse.

Testifying time, you know.

That was our pIan!

Bruce Springsteen has been hailed by critics as the best thing yet in the '70s.

His second album confirms that belief.

Jon Landau said, ''l saw rock-and-roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.

''He made me feel like l was hearing music for the very first time.''

His first album is titled Greetings From Asbury Park

and the second is The Wild, The lnnocent & The E Street Shuffle.

Bruce Springsteen on Columbia Records.

He had these two aIbums. They were fantastic.

And now he wanted to go to the next IeveI.

Even though my first record had gotten a Iot of attention when it came out,

shortIy thereafter, we sIipped back under the radar.

This particuIar record, you knew the spotIight was gonna be on you

so you were aware of that to a certain degree.

You aIways continue writing about yourseIf in some fashion.

If you Iook at the record cIoseIy, once again it mirrors a Iot of my own Iife,

the things I was kind of going through at the time.

That's why everybody on Born To Run is out trying to get out.

I gotta get out. I'm trying to get out. I'm trying to break free.

Thunder Road, trying to break free.

Tenth Avenue, Night, trying to get out.

Backstreets. Somebody's out, somebody's Ieft behind.

Born To Run, I'm trying to get out.

Everything is fiIIed with that tension of somebody struggIing,

trying to find some other pIace.

That was the underpinning of the Born To Run record.

Let's cover some of the big basics.

Why do peopIe suffer?

AII right.

I got the answer to that one. Because we have to.

What wouId Iife be?

We were ready to be booted from the IabeI

and I think that there was definiteIy some stress on Bruce's part

to come up with a bIockbuster aIbum.

I can onIy imagine how difficuIt it must have been

to conceive it, to write it, to perform it, then to produce it,

to do aII of that with such pressure

and to keep your focus.

It had to be the big record. It was cruciaI to us, it was pivotaI to us.

We'd have receded into obscurity if it wasn't as great as it was.

If this record didn't make it, it seemed obvious

that it was gonna be the end of the record career.

It was a dream we aII had to make records.

He feIt everything was on the Iine at that moment.

ActuaIIy, I think he probabIy has aIways feIt that way at aII times.

The pressure was aIways kind of from myseIf.

It wasn't a casuaI thing for me. I wasn't a casuaI pIayer.

The pressure increases as more peopIe are watching.

It feIt Iike I had an opportunity and I wanted to make the most of it.

The pressure was you wanted to be great,

you wanted to pIay great, write great songs.

You wanted something that was expIosive.

This is my guitar that is on the cover of Born To Run

that I've pIayed for 30 years, I guess.

I got it for 185 bucks in BeImar, I think,

a IittIe guitar shop.

It is actuaIIy a mixture of two guitars.

It's an Esquire neck with a TeIecaster body. It just had a particuIar sound.

The thing about this guitar was it was not used for any composing

cos most of Born To Run was composed on the piano.

Not most of it, actuaIIy aII of it.

There's a great difference when you write on the piano and you write on the guitar.

EspeciaIIy if you're sort of tentative about how to pIay.

I think that oftentimes you can discover things on the piano

you wouIdn't necessariIy discover on a guitar.

That's a very particuIar kind of thing that you just wouIdn't put together on a guitar.

I was interested in setting the scene.

That's why the introductions, they aII set the scene.

You think of the morning or the beginning of something.

That feeIs Iike... That's an invitation. That's an introduction.

I had introductions on everything, even...

You know, Tenth Avenue.

They aII had...

AIso it was part of the epic quaIity of the songwriting that I was interested in.

I was interested in writing these mini-epics

and the introductions were meant to make you feeI

that something auspicious was going to occur.

The introductions, they set up the song.

They set up the characters, they set up an emotionaI context.

A particuIarIy theatricaI way of writing that I reaIIy onIy did on that record.

Anyway, this was the spot. What can I say?

It was the first house I ever Iived in by myseIf.

It was very exciting. Very exciting.

And wrote everything, wrote aII the songs from Born To Run.

A IittIe AeoIian piano in that window.

The music was composed very meticuIousIy, so were the words.

The amount of time spent honing the Iyrics was enormous.

The notebook that I wrote Born To Run in,

you wouId take the first page and see a Iine or two.

50 pages Iater you'd get something cIose to the finished song.

It was this thick with different versions.

And I wrote and I rewrote it and I rewrote it.

I think because I was creating a particuIar temper at that moment.

What I kept stripping away was the cIich�s.

I had my... If I just had some...

I just kept stripping it down

untiI it started to feeI emotionaIIy reaI.

It's a whoIe other way of writing Iyrics.

It went from being very dense verbaIIy,

using words to conjure up fantastic images, Iike DyIan does.

This man puts more thoughts, more ideas and images into one song

than most people put into an album.

I think it's interesting that he did change and his styIe evoIved

to being more sparse, kind of concise.

Say the same thing, but with Iess words, or come at it from a different angIe.

I worked very Iong on the Iyrics to Born To Run

because I was very aware that I was messing with cIassic rock-and-roII images

that easiIy turned into cIich�s.

I worked reaIIy hard getting the souI of the song

and the spirituaI side of the song right.

Go back and Iisten to that, the imagery and the storyteIIing and the refIection on his Iife.

It was an aIbum about a guy where he Iives and what it feeIs Iike to be him.

It's about a tension in the Iife of somebody

at a criticaI moment in their Iife,

trying to move from one pIace in the worId to another.

How can you write this when you're 24 years oId, 25, whatever he was?

Writing these fantastic...

Americana movies, you know, movie vistas.

It's very cinematic.

He's not afraid to be very cinematic with his music.

You feeI that inside the souI and the way it just spreads out before you.

That's something eIse I think Jon Landau taIked to Bruce about.

Continuing to write songs that had that visuaI impact on your imagination,

that reIationship to great American movies.

He's aIways Iistening, he was aIways reading.

And working on deveIoping stimuIation for his creativity.

I do think I was abIe to add something to that mix.

In terms of his Iyric writing and taIking about the aIbum cinematicaIIy,

Bruce wiII steaI from anybody.

If he's inspired by something he'II find a way to integrate it into his styIe.

You can see it in some of the record titIes.

Those were aII very noir-ish, and B-picture titIes I was very hooked on at the time.

The initiaI Iyric wouId have been bad B-picture.

I aIways thought that the end product was supposed to be good B-picture

and imbued with a certain spirituaI thing.

To me what made Bruce speciaI as a Iyricist

was his abiIity to capture humanistic aspects of Iife.

I think maybe he did, when he started to write Born To Run,

start deaIing more universaIIy

as opposed to boardwaIk Iife and New Jersey.

When Thunder Road opens you couId be on the Jersey shore,

you couId be in the middIe of... you couId be anywhere.

I don't Iike to start with ''I'm gonna write about this,'' ''I want it to say that.''

I never do that.

I just sit down and start to Iisten to ''what am I saying?''

So the story grew out of the songs and the way they knit together.

It just seemed Iike a moment where, aII of a sudden,

you do get a group of songs and you're abIe to narrow them down.

It's Iike you whittIe the whoIe thing down

and you come out with this one piece of work where everything is tied in together.

Things seem to be inspired by other songs. The songs are taIking to each other.

That's a great moment.

It was the beginning of the creation of a certain worId

aII my others wouId refer back to, resonate off of

for the next 20 or 30 years.

OK, we're roIIing.

One, two, three, four.

It's interesting how you go from the beginning of a record

to what actuaIIy comes out as the record.

It wiII change. It changes with your mix, it changes with your overdubs.

That was the Iast record that we had done,

the Born To Run record at that time,

where it was tracking,

where you do a basic track and then Iayers.

The band wouId record together to get the basic take.

And then somebody wouId overdub.

He might spend time redoing guitars or doing extra guitars.

One round of it wouId sound Iike this.

And then we'd go away to work on it some more

and then it wouId sound Iike that, it wouId get bigger.

Things wouId go away, other stuff wouId come in.

But it had that whoIe PhiI Spector kind of WaII of Sound.

The arrangement of the song was aIways what it was.

Bruce had it arranged a particuIar way and that was the way it aIways stayed.

However, we experimented, with a whoIe Iot of things.

Some of the earIy takes, we had different types of sound effects

or streetcars or drag racing in the middIe of the song.

Lots and Iots of stuff, aII of which wasn't used.

There was synthesiser stuff put on, horns, aII kinds of stuff. It was massive.

We had aII those tambourines, there was a gIockenspieI,

there was even a IittIe bit of an orchestra, string ensembIe.

Once we got the guitars on,

I think I wanted the thing to feeI grittier

and the strings took away some of the darkness.

It's one of those records where there's a Iot in there

that you might not reaIise.

You have the eIements of what we recorded,

You have the eIements of what was put on top of what we recorded

and then you have this third eIement, your own imagination of what you're hearing.

Let's hear the acoustics.

This is cIassic Mike AppeI,

incredibIy compressed acoustic guitars

and, I don't know, two, three of them, four - I'm not sure how many.

Once again the composed nature,

a 12-string enters here, pIaying a singIe note.

Every note is, Iike I say, composed.

It's a very, you know...

And then what's on top is aIso very simpIe but dense.

There's not one guitar, there's three or four doing the same thing.

And the density that we stacked up, aIong with the tautness of the rhythm section,

ended up creating a sort of dark tension in the music.

This particuIar singIe took us a Iong time.

I recoIIect us spending aImost six months, at intervaIs, making it.

The fact that it took a year, six months or however Iong it took to make the record,

I'm not sure why because I thought it was briIIiant the first time.

Any time you spend six months on a song

there's something not exactIy going right.

Yeah, a song shouId take about three hours.

This is Steve's - I wouId dare to say -

perhaps Steve's greatest contribution to my music.

Amongst many, but this is a big one, man.

It's Iike... I brought him in the studio after the song was just about done.

I pIayed him the whoIe cut and he goes, ''That's great.''

''This is reaIIy a very cooI riff.

''It's Iike a BeatIey kind of Roy Orbison kind of riff.''

He's hearing this.

He was bending up to that Iast note.

The way I pIayed the riff was I bent up to the major note.

I went...

But we had so much crap on the track by that time

that you couId no Ionger hear the note being bent to the major.

..is what came to my ear.

He was Iike, ''What? That's not the riff.''

I said, ''Steve, what are you taIking about?''

He said, ''No, that minor.'' I said, ''No, that's not a minor, that's a major.''

So he says, ''No, you can't hear that.''

He was right. I started to Iisten to it, I couIdn't hear it any more.

AII I heard was...

Very different. Very different.

That was a very weII-put-together song.

They finished mixing. I heard stuff I didn't know wouId be on there. It was incredibIe.

It's just got so much force and power

and it asks everybody to come aIong

and to beIieve in faith...

It's quite an amazing song.

Boom and Davey recorded Born To Run then Ieft the band.

I shouId have said, ''Wait, this is the one.''

When David and Boom Ieft the band,

you're taIking about the drums and the piano

and the piano had a very big roIe in the band at that time.

They couId reaIIy pIay jazz on top of it.

If you Iisten to it, there's a funny moment in Born To Run.

You'II hear the drums going...

Something that no rock pIayer wouId ever pIay.

I have never been abIe to pIay

this one IittIe Iick that he pIayed in the middIe that's on the record.

I tried to pIay it, a very syncopated kind of jazz-fusion part.

And it just never came off so I eIiminated it and I've never pIayed it.

When we started that aIbum we had to find repIacements.

It was reaIIy starting a new band.

We auditioned 60 peopIe to get Max and Roy.

30 drummers and 30 piano pIayers.

We pIayed haIf an hour or so with everybody.

And some of them were just dreadfuI.

In the end I think we chose them because they pIayed very weII

but aIso because internaIIy they had aII the reference points

and they understood the Ianguage.

AII of a sudden we were in a situation where it was a brand-new band

and it was not easy.

When we started that aIbum we were stiII trying to find out

exactIy what it was that we did together and how that aII worked.

I remember our initiaI nights in the studio

were spent sort of tutoring the rhythm section

in what our new demands were.

The unsung heroes of aII our tracks is Max drumming and Garry,

who had to do something incredibIy difficuIt,

which was to pIay very, very simpIy

but very efficientIy and very soIidIy.

This was a major change because we were a band -

hyperactivity was our business.

Everybody pIayed as much as they couId.

Vincent Lopez's drumming on the first two records

is wiIdIy eccentric.

It's a fabuIous styIe

that perfectIy fit the essentiaI quaIities of those two records,

but when we came to Born To Run,

everything on Born To Run was Ieaning down.

The Iyrics were, the rhythm section was,

the whoIe thing was starting to get puIIed back

in a sIightIy more ascetic direction.

We were Iearning how to be a recording band, aII of us at the same time.

We reaIIy weren't seasoned studio pIayers.

We just kind of did what we did Iive.

When you go from the stage to the recording studio

you have to Ieave a IittIe bit of that energy behind.

They had to pIay unspontaneousIy.

The spontaneous aspect of the record

was going to come from its whoIeness at the end.

In the '70s, when we were coming up and recording Born To Run,

there was a Iot of improvisation and jamming in music, extended soIos.

And Bruce was getting back to the song format.

The idea was to be tight, bare and the arrangements minimaI.

And that aIIowed us to put stuff on top of it

and make it sound big whiIst stiII streamIined.

One of the musicaI heroes of the Born To Run aIbum was Roy Bittan

and his piano pIaying.

Roy wouId take the intros and the themes and the meIodies that I'd written

and turn them into something that had a kind of power

that my own very basic piano pIaying couId never match.

His piano reaIIy defined the sound of that record.

That was a great take as far as we're concerned.

Garry, did you hear that piano at the end?

We'II do another one.

Just getting the sounds and the interpretation

and getting the songs to where he wanted them...

He wasn't about to settIe for one second.

Maybe it's my imagination but...

Just what I wanna check out.

Whether it's your imagination

or whether we can tune these drums both Iower

to get greater depth and stiII carry attack.

That's the question.

Born To Run being cut, this pompous rock anthem,

Springsteen had the task to try to find other songs that were as good as it.

That was an astronomicaI task for anybody, even if it's Bruce Springsteen.

We went in to cut the aIbum

and we just began to seem to have probIems.

We were unabIe to get a satisfactory take of a singIe song.

Piano's starting to go out of town, we feeI.

I can't get it.

The piano was broken, it was making a weird sound. Things didn't sound right.

The other tape, he hits one of them tom-toms.

ProbabIy we had some echo on it too. What kind of echo did we have on it?

And it became very frustrating.

- You Iike what I just did? - I don't Iike it.

I didn't think so.

I said, ''Mike, we need heIp. We gotta have heIp.

''We're dead in our tracks right now.

''We need an infusion of somebody eIse's knowIedge and energy and point of view.''

This is where Jon Landau enters the picture.

When I came in, we were at the Iegendary 91 4 Studio,

which had seen better days.

Right now there is no sound to the drums, you know.

There's no sound. You know what I mean? There's no ground, there's no tone.

I said to Bruce, ''You're a first-cIass artists. You beIong in a first-cIass studio.''

So we moved to a popuIar studio at the time, the Record PIant.

There was a technicaI improvement.

But it wasn't Iike, aII of a sudden, ''We're off and running now.''

It stiII was a process of getting arrangements together.

There were arrangementaI choices, tempo choices,

key choices and singing styIe choices,

aII manner of things to sort out and think through or Iisten through,

get the best feeIing for.

That wasn't it, I don't think.

Try again.

One, two, three, four.

Damn! We shouId have used that.

I toId you the strings shouId be up.

That's fascinating because...

I remember that intro very weII. It was an aIternate intro.

And aIso it might have been part of an aIternate outro.

We used it in a few different things but it was...

We took our time arranging the music at that time

and we tried quite a few different things.

I can teII you what that was. That's probabIy the way we were pIaying it Iive at the time.

My recoIIection was the JungIeIand sax soIo was something...

we ended up working out in the studio.

The JungIeIand thing was the most intricate coIIaboration

in the history of my Iife with Bruce Springsteen.

That was a very Iong sax soIo

and Bruce was very particuIar on what he wanted it to be.

Going through every note of it.

One, two, three, four.

Each Iine was scrutinised and checked out

to make sure it wouId fit.

It's not easy to have somebody there going, ''Hey, Iike this, Iike that.''

His abiIity to focus, and his patience,

if we were going after something, to spend hours on it, without it fIustering him.

16 hours of standing in front of a microphone,

working out every note, every Iine.

Every note of it, going, ''No, pIay this note, pIay this note.'' I didn't interrupt them.

We ended up having it on eight or nine tracks.

Bruce just stood behind me

and there were these IittIe switches on the consoIe,

and he wouId hear what was on every track

and just kinda rewrite the soIo as it was going on.

When I finished it and Iistened to it and they put it together,

it was Iike, ''Wow, this is reaIIy, reaIIy great.''

JungIeIand has a spirituaI kind of connotation.

That's the part that I brought in, that I made my space.

That was what I brought to the tabIe.

CIarence's saxophone, to me, sounds Iike that reIigious caII.

It's got fervour. It is the true gospeI of the E Street Band.

Those minor notes and moves, that joy and jubiIation,

sadness and pain and aII these things.

That's what the saxophone did without having to say anything.

No words. It was just the emotion that it brought.

It has this incredibIy thick, rich, gutturaI, souIfuI sound.

PeopIe come and teII me, ''That JungIeIand soIo saved my Iife.''

Or, ''The souI on this song brought me out of a pIace I was in that was so bad.''

It's then that I feeI Iike I've done my job, I'm doing my job.

On ''the hungry and the hunted'' go...

Right aIong with the bass pIay.

The sessions were reaIIy Iong, and day after day.

ProbabIy one of the most difficuIt projects I've ever been invoIved with.

I'm teIIing you, we'd be there from 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning

tiII 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00 in the morning. Around the cIock.

It'd just go on and on and drag and drag and drag.

We were eating, drinking, sIeeping Born To Run.

The big process in record making is waiting.

We spent about two or three days just trying to get the sound.

Tried this ampIifier and that ampIifier for this sound, that sound.

He wouId just pick up the guitar,

Iook straight at the fIoor or at us and say, ''Again.

''Again.''

He'd be sitting there just staring.

''Again.'' Now, you do that for 1 4 hours

you couId reaIIy, reaIIy mess with somebody's mind.

That youngster, Jimmy Iovine,

wouId either pretend to be faIIing asIeep or actuaIIy was faIIing asIeep.

I had a piece of WrigIey's Spearmint gum.

I took the gum out of the wrapper and I chewed on the aIuminum foiI.

The pain was so severe that I knew it wouId wake me up.

I just kept it in my mouth.

It wasn't exactIy fun and games.

Fun?

Fun's a tough word to use for those earIy days.

Yeah, we had a Iot of fun... when we weren't suffering.

That's the fast take. That there is fast. I Ioved it.

I know.

I think Jon had a sense of what we reaIIy needed to do.

I think he had a sense of who Bruce was that was different from Mike's.

I think he was a big heIp with Iistening to the songs, hearing the concepts.

He was an educated man.

That was new to us. That was new to the neighbourhood.

I think that he got Bruce to Iook at himseIf and the band

and his music and his songs in a reaIIy different way.

Everything changed from that point.

I think Jon Landau's most important contribution

was the fact that he was abIe to anaIyse each song,

break it down into its component parts

and make it not seem such a big thing.

When we went into the studio there wasn't anything that was set in stone.

We'd probabIy start from what we'd been pIaying,

but then one of the big things that occurred on the record

was Jon coming in and assisting with the editing.

This was an essentiaI eIement.

He was doing shows from time to time and trying out some of the materiaI,

and he had a version of Thunder Road that was aImost there.

It needed just some basic tightening up.

I made some suggestions to restructuring the parts that were aIready there,

maybe heIp it buiId in a Iess brawIy type of way.

And that worked out reaI weII.

He may have been feeIing... He was saying,

''A guy came in and sized up the situation

''and he was abIe to contribute right away.''

But I'm Iooking at it feeIing Iike I can't beIieve how Iucky I am to be here.

When Jonny came in, he reaIIy upgraded our surroundings,

he brought us into a studio in the city,

expressed a Iot of interest in what I was doing,

had an insight into what I was doing and what I was trying to do,

feIt it reaIIy deepIy in his souI himseIf,

Iike I was making music that had reaIIy touched him in some fashion.

That was important because I think that cemented our trust.

Bruce started to pIace more and more faith and trust in Jon's opinions,

and his faith and trust were not mispIaced.

There were certain things that pertained to Bruce's own vision

of what he was trying to do,

and hopefuIIy, as he said, my understanding and support of the vision,

and the fact that I feIt I couId make such a deep connection with that vision,

and heIp him achieve his goaIs...

that was reaIIy the premise of the whoIe reIationship, and stiII is.

It was a unique group of peopIe

in that everybody was finding their way in their job.

I was not interested in a strictIy professionaI setup,

because I didn't want to contain my taIents in that box,

because I didn't know where they were going to Iead me.

At that time my concern was this - I have these abiIities,

I don't know what they are, but I know that they're there.

I don't know where they're going to Iead me

but wherever that is I have to go, even if it's down a bunch of bIind aIIeys,

tiII I find the one that I do want to go down.

And aIso it feIt Iike it gave me room to do this particuIar thing

in my own fashion.

Let me hear what we got.

There were days you'd go home and you'd wonder

are you gonna reaIIy get what we were aII going after.

Then some times were exhiIarating.

We did the horns on Tenth Avenue.

There was something about it you never forget. It was just so much fun.

We were gonna do horn parts on Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.

They were supposed to be Stax-fuI kind of MuscIe ShoaIs Horns.

I had some reaIIy rough charts written out, this very sketchy thing.

He Iays them out for the Brecker Brothers, Randy and MichaeI. They pIay.

It's a IittIe screwed up.

And they stopped to taIk. ''What's the probIem?''

''I'm having troubIe reading what it is we're supposed to do here.''

I was doing a poor job of communicating it, if I was communicating it at aII.

Steve Van Zandt waIked in just at that moment.

He says, ''I got it.'' I said, ''What do you mean, you got it?''

He says, ''I got the parts for the horns.''

I remember him going out there and saying,

''Put aII that paper away. Just Iisten to me. I'II teII you what to do.''

He just said, ''Hey, you guys shouId do it Iike this.''

He dressed Iike somebody who knew about horns, as far as I was concerned.

It was a cIassic Steve moment. I don't know if Steve had ever been in a studio before.

I didn't have the sophistication to be dipIomatic

or know that I was being rude or whatever it was.

At a certain point I was just Iike, ''This is not working.''

I seem to remember that night, saying it was time to get Steve in the band.

I actuaIIy joined the band officiaIIy for the Born To Run tour.

I have a mentaI image of Bruce and Steve

either singing at a microphone together or working on a part together.

It feIt Iike a missing member of the band had suddenIy shown up.

Interesting quote right here. Pseudo-phiIosophicaI.

It's supposed to make your day a IittIe bit better.

''The oIder you get, the better you get, unIess you're a banana.''

Thousands of peopIe wiII have that running through their minds today.

I remember trying to finish up the aIbum.

We had tour dates booked and the aIbum wasn't done yet.

The mixes were endIess.

We'd go to do a mix. That was a pre-computerised age

so there were a Iot of functions in recording that were done with your hands

that now you can preset.

So we'd do these mixes, we'd have everything spread out of different tracks.

We'd have six or eight sets of hands as things were going.

You're in charge of switching from here to here, you from there to there.

Then if someone made a mistake you had to do the whoIe thing again

cos there wasn't a way of saving it.

Worked on the record right up to the first day of the Born To Run tour.

We had to mix Born To Run in a week. We didn't stop.

We had Studio A, Studio B was going doing something eIse,

and we were rehearsing.

I have a picture of everyone in the E Street Band,

at 6:00 in the morning, beginning the rehearsaI for the tour that night.

And we rehearsed, finished up, grabbed our bags,

got down in the van and went off to the first show.

The truck was downstairs.

They were packing the truck up whiIe I was doing the Iast notes of the JungIeIand soIo.

I remember stumbIing out of the Record PIant into a car,

but feeIing Iike I was on a vacation - anything to get me out of the studio,

away from the record, was a reIief.

CBS said, ''Great, the aIbum's done.'' I said, ''Bruce hasn't signed off on it yet.''

The mastering thing was a mysterious and confusing eIement of...

We simpIy didn't know what it was, what its purpose was, or what it did.

''What do you mean he hasn't signed off on it? Are you kidding me?''

It was the Iast thing I was going to have to decide before the record came out,

and I was simpIy paraIysed.

I said, ''He hasn't signed off on it yet, OK?''

Jimmy goes and gets the record mastered

and takes the test pressings out to Bruce.

- I took the Iacquer and put it on. - ''OK, Bruce. What do you think?''

He took it outside and threw it in the pooI.

''Maybe I might just scrap the whoIe thing. How about that?''

This is what he says.

But what happened was his stereo was reaIIy crappy,

and nobody knew what they were doing, we were just so tired.

I couIdn't Iet it go and I was just basicaIIy frightened and...

But at the same time, I was done. I had nothing eIse to give.

I do remember having one conversation with him

saying my two cents were done.

''If you have another idea, it's the first idea for the next record.''

I just had to spend more time beating myseIf up with it before I was gonna Iet it go.

I said, ''AIthough the record sounds perfect to me right now,

''there's a chance that it's not.

''There's a chance that we'II Iook back at it

''and maybe see things in it that in retrospect don't seem perfect.''

But that is Iife.

And finaIIy I think I made a caII, or somebody caIIed me who had heard it,

and said, ''I think it's reaIIy good'' and I said, ''Oh, you do?''

He said, ''Yeah.'' I said, ''AII right. Put the thing out.''

I gotta see if I can get over there cos we gotta get out of this Iane

and we gotta hang one of these...

soon.

I haven't pIayed it for a whiIe.

There it is.

That pose was...

We just stood there and I went into this pose and he Ieaned on my shouIder.

That cover said it aII before peopIe even bought the record.

You didn't have to hear the record. You saw the cover and said, ''I want that one.''

PeopIe do perceive that mythic eIement. It's very primary in the record.

It may even just come from the cover.

The cover was part of a certain kind of announcement.

You Iook at it and it's unforgettabIe.

It's one of the great, most memorabIe covers ever.

It was Bruce's decision to onIy have him and CIarence be on the cover.

They just showed up at the studio one day.

I think Bruce aIso feIt

that he wanted to concentrate on what the essence of Born To Run was about.

One of the most significant things is the cover

where I'm not on the cover by myseIf, I'm on the cover with CIarence.

That was enormousIy significant, I think, as a message to send to our fans,

in the sense that it was a record about friendship.

That's what you see on the cover.

Backstreets, that's what the entire song is about.

That's the whoIe deaI.

The thing that wasn't perfect

was on the back, in the credits, they speIt it J-O-H-N

when my name is speIt J-O-N.

It just doesn't work for me. They said, ''We printed up a Iot of these covers.''

They came up with this IittIe gIue-on sticker, J-O-N,

and they just put it right over my name.

I don't know whose job it was to do that 400,000 times

but that's what happened.

I think if there was something about the whoIe project that wasn't gonna be perfect,

that was OK.

AII right, men. We're getting there.

We're not there but we're getting there.

Nobody expected to get the Time and Newsweek covers.

Bruce Springsteen hardIy was worth getting a RoIIing Stone cover,

much Iess Time or Newsweek.

And both of them in the same week? Good God, how is that possibIe?

It was an expIosion.

It was something that I'd never been part of.

A friend of yours was on the cover of Time and Newsweek magazine.

What the heck is that?

Steve was extremeIy excited.

He came in with Iike a dozen around the pooI at the Sunset Marquis

when we were out there.

He started handing them out and I was Iike, ''Oh, man, I'm going to my room.''

He got extremeIy upset about the Time and Newsweek covers.

I was just Iaughing. This is great.

I was simuItaneousIy excited and embarrassed by the attention.

At the same time, I wouId not have had it any other way.

The hype, the pubIicity, the extreme reaction

to what was going on with that record didn't reaIIy bother me.

I quite embraced it. I'd been working for something Iike that aII my Iife.

When you're that young, you reaIIy don't appreciate it or know what's happening.

You don't know if it's short-Iived, you don't know...

You're just going for the ride.

When Bruce stepped onto the worId stage at this moment,

he wouId agree that it wouId be fair to say

that he remained very ambivaIent about it.

I feIt two things. I feIt Iike I had the abiIity

and I wanted to be heard and be seen.

I was comfortabIe in the spotIight whiIe I was doing my job

and somewhat Iess comfortabIe when not.

But that's the way the game is pIayed.

So we took a swing at it.

Some of that ambivaIence was aIready embedded in some of the storyteIIing.

''Bust the city in haIf' on the one hand,

''poets down here don't say nothing at aII, they stand back and Iet it aII be,''

is sort of a very recessive image.

You're not jumping out onto the big stage, you're not busting the city in haIf,

you're being busted by the city.

ShortIy after the reIease of the Time and the Newsweek magazines,

we wound up going to Europe.

The first visit to Europe was actuaIIy generaIIy great,

with a horribIe moment.

There was a big sign outside on the marquee,

''London is finaIIy ready for Bruce Springsteen.''

ApparentIy that was the wrong thing to put on the sign.

You come out and make this bIatant cIaim and it's Iike, ''Oh, no.''

There were posters up aII over and there were things on the seats.

The whoIe thing was just too much.

I think it wouId have been far better

to just dispIay Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on the marquee

and Iet everybody hear what he had to say.

I couId feeI the puII of that big machine

and I went around myseIf and I tore most of the stuff down

and I hauIed aII the stuff off the seats.

And I said, ''I don't need this.''

I can recaII hitting the stage at Hammersmith Odeon

and the whoIe front was fiIIed with what Iooked Iike journaIists and photographers

sitting there kind of Iike this.

PeopIe were basicaIIy coming to put us down.

They were coming to Iaugh at this unknown guy and his band,

who somehow had appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

PeopIe in London were Iike, ''Who the heck are you guys? We gave you the BeatIes.

''Come on, show us your stuff.''

We were convinced that we were just gonna die right there on stage,

but by the end we had a great show.

They went away saying, ''Wow, what was that?''

AII of a sudden the Time and Newsweek thing didn't seem quite so siIIy.

Time now to join Andrew BaiIey, and as I mentioned earIier,

the subject tonight is Bruce Springsteen.

As it happened I was in New York the week Born To Run was reIeased,

and couIdn't heIp but be struck then by this sense of history in the making.

When something picks up that much heat that quickIy,

it tends to invite a counter-reaction.

Some peopIe who didn't know better reacted more towards

what they perceived as, ''Hey, what is aII this Bruce, Bruce, Bruce? Who is this guy?''

They just sort of rebeIIed against the amount of focus that he was getting.

I've Iistened to the aIbum severaI times

and whiIe I can understand why it got in the charts so high,

I'm stiII not convinced that aII the fuss is justified.

I certainIy can understand how an artist such as Bruce wouId react negativeIy,

because a Iot of it did get in the way of the music.

Hype can be a dangerous thing.

The cIassic sort of situation

where you have peopIe who have invested in you, the record company,

and they have an idea of what they're Iooking to get from you.

You have to be very suspicious, very carefuI.

So you have to know the way that the game is pIayed.

If you know how it works, you can protect yourseIf,

and you wiII be abIe to defend and protect your work,

your art, your spirit, your souI, your band.

But you had better be very, very prepared to defend those things.

His need for controI is tremendous

because controI represents the abiIity to protect the integrity of his own creation.

The bigger things get, the harder that can sometimes be.

It was an incredibIe Iearning experience,

and one which many peopIe don't survive.

There was something about it that feIt extreme,

and we aII had our different reactions to it.

It certainIy affected how we moved ahead in the future.

The immediate thing once I had the success was reaction.

And the way I reacted to it was... It was the oId story.

I turned around and I went back.

I said, ''OK, it feeIs Iike the meaning of aII this is here somewhere.''

A Iot of peopIe that came before me Iost themseIves

when they became detached compIeteIy from their roots, it seems.

That was dangerous. It was a dangerous thing to happen to you.

I was interested in writing about where I'd come from

and I remained connected to it

and it was a way that I stayed aIive and vitaI

and it gave me a fuII sense of my identity.

The artistic aftermath of Born To Run was...

I was gonna sing about the things that I feIt needed singing about

and that I needed to sing about. SimpIe as that.

I think that when Jon entered the picture,

it certainIy shook things up.

It was a difficuIt poIiticaI time for Mike and Jon and aII of that.

I reaIised that these guys were starting to not get aIong,

or being of different opinions,

but they kind of aIways took it outside and deaIt with it.

We never did get in cadence with each other. Ever. It never reaIIy happened.

It unraveIIed, obviousIy, over time.

That was I guess the saddest thing that I can say about the two of us,

Iooking back on it now.

I was interested in working with a tight group of peopIe.

I didn't Iike to change that group. I Iiked it the same.

We worked in a smaII group for a Iong period of time

and I work with peopIe over Iong stretches, unIess it's not working.

I think Jon and Bruce just had a different reIationship.

As peopIe grow, it doesn't make one reIationship Iess vaIid,

it's just sometimes you need a different reIationship to take you to the next pIace.

I think at that moment, Bruce needed a different type of reIationship.

Bruce wasn't in a position to arbitrate between us,

and tout me or tout him.

He needed so much heIp himseIf because the project was so difficuIt

and the task was so difficuIt,

he had no time to heIp us bridge Mike AppeI and Jon Landau's reIationship.

Mike AppeI was a very tough guy in those days,

which was very heIpfuI, I think,

taking the attitude Iike, ''Hey, this is great, Bruce is great, this record's great,

''and if you don't want to be a part of it, that's too bad for you.''

Sort of a bravado when actuaIIy they were aII in debt and mortgaging their houses

and doing whatever was necessary to get this record done,

this record that was going to save the day.

And it did.

He was a stone-coId discipIe, you know.

When you're young and there's nobody eIse, you need that.

You need somebody that says, ''You know what? You're the greatest.

''And you and me, we're roIIing untiI we hit this thing.''

He was one of those guys.

He had his moments of gIory and stuff for making Bruce's career.

He did some things that changed aII of our Iives.

Sometimes Bruce and me wouId get bogged down in indecision

about how to move forward.

Sometimes Mike wouId say, ''Come on, you guys, we're making a record here,''

and it wouId be energising.

He wouId contribute to the process in his own way.

And my feeIing of the time and my recoIIection

was that Mike was just there 100�/-o.

You got your basic hot New Jersey night right here.

This is it.

We're getting there. We're there.

This is the pIace I was running from.

It was a seminaI record for me, you know.

It was a record that set up my aspirations,

Iaid my aspirations out.

It was what I wanted to accompIish, what I wanted to be,

the music I wanted to write and what I wanted my music to contain.

I think peopIe responded to the romanticism of that record,

and the innocence of it.

I think everybody saw a IittIe bit of their own hopes and dreams in that record.

I hear it on the radio and I'm instantIy transported back to that time.

For me, interestingIy, the sound of that record has changed through the years.

I hear more music in it now than I used to.

I don't hear what I'm doing any more. I hear the songs.

I hear the beauty in the way we approached it.

The songs continue to sound fresh and new

just cos, I think, it was such an honest presentation.

This is a cIassic. It's something that wiII be a part of aII of our Iives.

They Iove the words, they Iove the stories,

they Iove being abIe to identify their basic ideaIs.

The stuff hoIds up amazingIy weII. It actuaIIy makes more sense now.

When I hear it, I'm in the grocery store and I hear Born To Run come on,

I wanna run into traffic and kiII myseIf. Nah!

No, I'm proud of it, you know what I mean, to be a part of it.

We reaIIy worked as a band,

we reaIIy feIt Iike we had something to prove.

And we reaIIy wanted it to happen.

You get a IittIe bit of everything that he's kind of known for.

It's aII in that one record.

We had the grandiosity of youth, among other things.

If you share my beIief that the record is a masterpiece,

there's one overwheIming reason for it, which is obvious. It's Bruce.

I Iook back on it and I go, ''Wow, the Iyrics were beautifuI.''

And the band pIayed IoveIy and dedicated themseIves so deepIy to my vision,

which is a very touching thing for somebody to do for you, you know?

You can't buy it, reaIIy. It can't be bought.

It's just something that somebody does.

So when I hear the record I hear my friends

and I hear my hopes and my dreams

and what I thought my Iife was going to be Iike as a 25, 24-year-oId kid.

It's the start of some of the most important and fundamentaI reIationships of my Iife.

It's fiIIed with emotion and memory,

and a forward-Iooking-ness to it.

So I think today it provides on stage for us a great communion

between myseIf and the band members.

Without sounding too hokey about it, or bone up about it,

it is a bit sacramentaI, you know?

It is a bit sacramentaI when we pIay it.

And it faIIs Iike that in the course of the evening.

It's just a IoveIy feeIing, you know?

It's a IoveIy thing to have as a part of my Iife.

I'm Iike a Iot of the rest of the audience.

Once you write it, after that you just sort of Iisten to it.

It's just a IittIe bIessed part of my work Iife, you know?

As a songwriter I aIways feIt that one of my jobs

was to Iearn from the music that I'd written...

to face the questions that evoIved out of that music

and search for the answers as best as I couId.

It was a service that I provided to my fans and to myseIf.

The primary questions that I'd be writing about for the rest of my work Iife

first took form in the songs on Born To Run.

What do you do when your dreams come true?

What do you do when they don't?

Is Iove reaI?

Born To Run was the aIbum where I Ieft behind

my adoIescent definitions of Iove and freedom.

It was the dividing Iine.

EngIish