Springsteen only had a three-record deal, so this was his “last shot.”
Bruce had one last chance to make it real. Or at least that’s how the story goes. With 1975’s Born to Run, a 25-year-old Bruce Springsteen felt like his very life was on the line, which is probably why he drove himself — and the E Street Band — to the brink of breakdown over the tortured months of its creation. In November 2005, a couple of hours before going onstage for a show on his solo Devils and Dust tour, Springsteen called Rolling Stone to talk about making Born to Run, which was released August 25th, 1975. Here’s the full transcript of that conversation.
I was signed [to Columbia Records] with John Hammond and Clive Davis, and then after my first record, Clive Davis was gone and I fell into disfavor for the second record. A different group of people came in. Nobody had an investment in me, and we were just slipping through the cracks. I think when The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle came out it, wasn’t particularly promoted and I always remember going to radio stations where they didn’t know I had a second record out. (Rolling Stone)
It was almost an acoustic flop
Recording started off well, as the E Street Band laid down the first side of the album quickly in the spring of 1982. But Springsteen also wanted to include some acoustic, pared-down songs in the vein of the scratchy solo demos he’d made while writing for the record.
I remember when the riff came into my head. I’d been listening to the record “Because They’re Young” by Duane Eddy, and I’d been listening to quite a bit of Duane Eddy because I was into the twangy guitar sound at the moment.
“I’d been listening to Duane Eddy, the twangy guitar sound, Roy Orbison, the very unusually and unstructured songs, and, of course, [Bob] Dylan.”
“So, those are the three things that kind of found their way — and inspector records — so, those are the three things that really found their way into Born to Run because I was never really much of a revolutionary musician,” he continued, “but I was an alchemist. I put a lot of things together along with stuff I pulled up out of myself.”
But it was one of those things that I can’t completely trace back. I mean, I had these enormous ambitions. I wanted to make the greatest rock record that I’d ever heard, and I wanted it to sound enormous and I wanted it to grab you by your throat and insist that you take that ride, insist that you pay attention, not to just the music, but just to life, to feeling alive, to being alive.
Bruce Springsteen’s early, handwritten manuscript to “Born to Run,” the rocker’s 1975 star-making hit, was expected to fetch between $200,000 and $300,000 when it went up for auction but only reached $44,000
According with Reuters the working draft, a single page of ruled paper pulled from a spiral notebook, is written entirely in Springsteen’s hand, the auction house said.
Most of the handwritten lyrics did not make it into the final version of the 4-1/2-minute song, a soaring rock anthem in which the singer asks his lover to break free with him from a small U.S. town. The manuscript does contain a near match to the completed chorus, Sotheby’s said.
