Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Edition

Try to picture the rock scene in 1974, when Bruce Springsteen started writing and recording the album that would thrust him into the national consciousness. Elvis had hit merely 18 years prior; Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles had died or called it quits only three or four years earlier. Bob Dylan had been at it for a while and potentially seemed dated, though he was still only 33. The weight of pop music history was something that could be shrugged off, and with so much unexplored territory, bands felt an obligation to see where rock music might yet go.

In this environment Springsteen was just 24, still a kid; he'd been hailed as the New Dylan and had recorded two quirky albums but he wasn't a star. He had talent and ambition in equal measure but the thing that would put him over was his vision. Springsteen believed like no one else in the power and possibility of rock, which led him to places that seem strange and maybe even awkward to those who grew up with MTV and everything punk came to symbolize. His naïve but inspiring outlook found its purist expression in Born to Run, which Columbia has now reissued in a deluxe 30th Anniversary Edition packaged with two feature films-- one documentary and one concert-- on DVD.

Born to Run is a distinctive record, even in the Springsteen canon. Its world is one of impossibly romantic hyperrealism, where the mundane easily becomes fantastic, and it all happens line by line. Picture the depressed state of the Jersey Shore in the early 70s, the dull sense of an era gone, and then check Springsteen's description in the title track: "The amusement park rises bold and stark and kids are huddled on the beach in the mist." This could have been a couple of bored teenagers sitting on a bench bullshitting, but with Springsteen's imagery, some glockenspiel, and a deep sax drone, it's transformed into filmic splendor. The next phrase ups the ante: "I want to die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss." From one angle it's the kind of line that can make you wince, at best a silly emo cliché. The way Springsteen sang it in 1974, it wasn't a dorky diary confessional; it was unhinged expressionism, Kerouac with a bottle of red wine in his stomach. While everyone was zoning out in front of the TV this scruffy dude saw an opera out on the turnpike and a ballet being fought in the alley.

He wants to know if love is wild and real, he says, but reality isn't a particularly useful concept in the context of this record. A masterpiece Born to Run may be, but only on its own terms. Springsteen at this point didn't know much about women or relationships ("She's the One" is powerful and catchy but fails as a portrait of an actual person) but he had an instinct for drama, and his stories focus on plot and circumstance rather than character. Nearly every song touches on the central mythical image of the rock'n'roll era, the ideas of escape and abandon. The protagonist in "Thunder Road" thinks everything will change if he can make it out of town. The workers in "Night" suppress their daily rage by disappearing into a dark theater of sex after the whistle blows. Conflicts are all man vs. environment and man vs. society; Springsteen would get around to man vs. himself later, after he'd settled down and lived a little more.

The size extends to the sound, greatly improved on this reissue with the first wholesale remastering since it was first released on CD. Phil Spector was a well-known obsession of Springsteen's at the time, a logical complement to the room-sized thematic canvas he'd stretched. "Jungleland" and "Backstreets" are famously epic, but shorter songs like "Thunder Road" and "She's the One" seem constructed as mini-suites, with tinkly intros building to immense climaxes. The title track was Springsteen's "Good Vibrations", toiled over endlessly in the studio and smothered with endless layers of god knows what before finally being abandoned, flawed and perfect, to the loving arms of radio. His voice would never sound quite this strong again-- perhaps he never pushed it as hard-- and the slap-echo trailing a split second behind adds to the effect.

The first DVD, a complete 1975 show from the Hammersmith Odeon, is a major find. For someone like me who never got over the disappointment of only one song from 1975 on the Live 1975-85 box, this film is a revelation. The opening piano and harmonica version of "Thunder Road" is the scene setter, with a dim spotlight on Springsteen alone on a darkened stage and Roy Bittan playing somewhere behind. When the rest of the band joins him they have a ball, with a performance in turns earnest, theatrical, melodramatic, and clowning. It's an absolutely essential item in the Springsteen discography.

Wings for Wheels, the VH-1-ish documentary on the making of the record, is a third too long and will be of only marginal interest for anyone other than committed fans, but there's still something important here. If you can get past the repetitive and fawning testimonials from the band, producers, manager, etc., there's a wealth of information about the technical process of the album, with demonstrations of how songs evolved over time. Hearing the various parts of the dense "Born to Run" picked apart, for example, just the acoustic guitar or saxophone isolated, is like a mini course on how songs are mixed.

There's also Springsteen's own commentary on the songs-- what they mean and how he wrote them-- which is interesting if not always consistent with how I hear the record. When he says toward the end of the film that Born to Run was "the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom-- it was the dividing line," it seems to me he's exactly wrong. A dividing line may be visible, but Born to Run lies entirely on the dreamy and reckless side of maturity and is all the better for it. Every young person should be so lucky, to have a time in his or her life when the inflated romanticism of Born to Run makes perfect sense.