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All rights reserved.Born to Run - Springsteen, Bruce (CD 1987)
| Track Listing 1. Thunder Road 2. Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out 3. Night 4. Backstreets 5. Born to Run 6. She's the One 7. Meeting Across the River 8. Jungleland
Album Notes Personnel: Bruce Springsteen (vocals, guitar); Steve Van Zandt (vocals); Suki Lahav (violin); Michael Brecker (tenor saxophone); David Sanborn (baritone saxophone); Clarence Clemons (saxophone, background vocals); Randy Brecker (trumpet, flugelhorn); Danny Federici (organ); Roy Bittan (keyboards, glockenspiel, background vocals); David Sancious (keyboards); Garry Tallent, Richard Davis (bass); Max Weinberg, Ernest "Boom" Carter (drums); Mike Appel (background vocals). Producers: Bruce Springsteen, Jon Landau, Mike Appel. Recorded at The Record Plant, New York, and 914 Sound Studio, Blauvelt, New York. BORN TO RUN is the album that turned Springsteen from a phenomenon into a superstar. His first couple of releases found Bruce working out his fascination with Dylan and Van Morrison on earthy, wordy, folk-rock-R&B tunes full of soul and punch. On BORN TO RUN, Springsteen became even more ambitious, synthesizing Spectorian production with Orbison-esque drama and Duane Eddy-influenced guitar work, creating something grand enough to be called rock opera but too proletarian to ever claim that title. BORN TO RUN was also the first album where the Boss began to crystallize his recurring theme of working class America's doomed-but-passionate rage against its circumstances. With the earnestness and emotion that bursts forth from Springsteen's street poems, the album is never less than exhilarating, and songs like "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" (a tongue-in-cheek history of the E Street Band) provide humor. "She's The One" puts the Bo Diddley beat to its most effective post-'50s use, and the title track is Springsteen's quintessential underdog epic. Editorial Reviews Vibe (12/01/1999) Q (01/01/2003) Rolling Stone (12/11/2003) Uncut Mojo | Find errors in the product description? Submit a catalog update request now. | ||||||||||||||
  Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run Is The First Rock Album I Ever BoughtReview created: 07/25/01 by: AliventiAsylum -- a member of Epinions  Pros: everything Cons: nothing I can still remember it as clear as anything: I was about twelve years old and visiting friends in New Jersey. I wandered into a K-Mart and into the record department where I first caught glimpse of the album cover. "Yeah," I thought, "That's that Springsteen guy I've been hearing so much about." I had to wait a week until I got home to play the album, but when it did, my world changed. Albums I'd owned up until then included The Bay City Rollers, The Partridge Family, and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Disco and bubblegum... For the first time I heard rock. Meaningful songs about the optimism, promise, fun, and dreams of youth. Songs about making choices that were good and bad. Songs about life, not Get Up and Boogie. Springsteen's songs have always meant a great deal to me. He is easily my favorite musician of all time and my favorite songwriter. Only Glenn Tibrook and Chris Difford of Squeeze are able to paint a picture with their lyrics as eloquently as he does. Springsteen's backup - The E Street Band - are what put him over the top. There is not one weak musician in the group. These are the songs that I grew up with; the songs I heard over and over again; the songs I could relate to; the songs that made me wait a ridiculous amount of time to get tickets to concerts - and later pay ridiculous prices to scalpers; the songs that even now make my heart skip a beat when I hear those first few notes come over the airwaves. The album (yes, album, not CD - I still own more than 300 of them) starts off with my favorite song of all time, Thunder Road The screen door slams Mary's dress waves... What a picture that paints! The rest of the song keeps painting the same picture and I can actually see the story unfolding in my mind as he sings of the optimism a boy feels after graduating high school and urging his girl to leave town with him. You ain't no beauty, but hey you're alright... This line is my favorite in any song ever. I guess I always felt that was like he was talking about me because that's how I saw myself. The next song is Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out When the change was made uptown And the Big Man joined the band... Anyone who's a Springsteen fan knows that The Big Man is Clarence Clemons, his sax player. This song is something of the story of how Clarence joined the E-Street Band. It's a rollicking and fun number that does paint a picture of a kid walking through the city when he comes upon this great musician and gets him to join his band. Night comes next And the world is busting at its seams And you're just a prisoner of your dreams Holding on for your life Cause you work all day To blow em away in the night... Another song in many ways similar to Thunder Road. It seems like the same person could be singing both of these songs - maybe Mary in Thunder Road wouldn't leave town. This is one of two songs that have not gotten much airplay from this album, but I really like it anyway. It was always a pleasure to hear this song coming from my cassette player as I got off work. Backstreets is next Running for our lives at night in them Backstreets... It's a song that romanticizes spending a summer "just hanging out" with a girl who eventually would end up cheating on the protagonist. It's a song that tells of pain and suffering and of fond memories that will always be tainted now. The second side starts with Springsteen's anthem Born to Run In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines... Cars or motorcycles and girls are the theme throughout most of Springsteen's songs, and this one ties them together better than any other. When he urges Wendy to Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims And strap your hands across my engines... it is one of the most sweetest allegories I'd ever heard. This song is non-stop rock. Even when it seems to slow down it never really does, and then the music comes crashing back all the harder. On She's The One I can hear the influence of 50's music on Springsteen. The general bass line reminds me a lot of Born to Hand Jive. With her soft french cream Standing in the door like a dream I wish she'd just leave me alone... A song about a girl that he just can't get out of his head; someone he knows could break his heart intentionally, but he is falling in love with her. Meeting Across the River is a soft ballad about someone who's about to blow his whole life apart, and possibly take his friend Eddie down with him. The horn work on this song is fantastic. We gotta stay cool tonight, Eddie Cause man we got ourselves out on that line... The protagonist wants to believe he's going to come through this fine, but the slowness of the music leads us to believe all will not be well. It's got a certain somber tone to it that denotes things will not go as planned. The album concludes with the epic, Jungleland. At over nine minutes, it's a long one, but definitely one of my favorites. Springsteen rarely does it in concert anymore but I'm glad to say I got the chance to hear it in my younger days. The midnight gang's assembled And picked a rendezvous for the night They'll meet neath that giant Exxon sign That brings this fair city light... Again, I can see all of the events he talks about happening as the song unfolds. It's a song that starts out as a rock number, slows down with Clarence Clemons' sax solo, and then winds up almost as a ballad. I pulled out my album for this review and having been bought more than twenty years ago, the edges are yellowing and the record itself looks scratchy from being played so much. I don't recall it ever skipping, though. Thank God for CDs now, but there's something about pulling out this album and looking at it and thinking about how much it meant to me... This is my 150th Epinion and I wanted to make sure to mark it by reviewing something that means so much to me. I am going to try that with all my milestones, since #100 was my review of Shea Stadium. Other Bruce Springsteen reviews: Bruce Springsteen: Blood Brothers ~ Bruce Springsteen: Born To Run 30th Anniversary Set ~ Bruce Springsteen: Live in NYC ~ Bruce Springsteen: The Rising 2001 Patti Aliventi Review ID: 10000000000234116 Epinions.com ratings are not included in the item's average rating. Links in this review may have been removed. |
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