Chapter 1
Watch the World Explode
On a page in his notebook, the song was coming together. It was the fall of 1973 and Bruce Springsteen was in Asbury Park, watching the street racers in their souped-up cars orbiting the Ocean Avenue/Kingsley Street circuit on a Saturday night. The parade of muscular, lovingly detailed automobiles stirred something in him—the way the cars animated their owners’ spirits. The candy shades of red, purple, and blue, the racing stripes and hand-painted eagles, the dazzling chrome and shimmering glass. And the power of their engines: the low rumble as they idled, the jet roar of takeoff. On the circuit the drivers moved slowly, steering wheels trembling in their hands, fully alive in their vehicles’ power and beauty.
Like animals pacing in a black, dark cage, senses on overload . . . / They’re gonna end this night in a senseless fight / And then watch the world explode.
Circling and revving, drifting slowly and then blasting off. Where were they going? It was an interesting question, just as compelling as where they came from and what brought them out into the night, to circle with their friends and rivals, to put it all on the line. One car had words running down its flank, a chain of cursive letters canted forward as if pulled by the finish line off in the distance. A dare, a philosophy, an explanation. Or maybe the title of a movie. Did he actually see it on a passing racer? Or did it simply pop into his head? Something that ought to be on a car, or maybe on his own tour van. Bruce wrote it in his notebook, in case he forgot it. He’d never forget it.
Born to run.
By the end of 1973 Bruce Springsteen was in a tough spot. His first album on Columbia Records, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, had been released that January. Critics and a small cadre of fans had loved it, and his second album, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, released that November, won the same acclaim, but also the same weak sales. That hard fact, along with a shift in Columbia Records’ upper management, meant that Bruce had fallen increasingly out of step with his record company. It was taking longer and longer for his manager, Mike Appel, to get his calls returned. Especially now that he was trying to figure out when they’d be getting the money they’d need to fund recording sessions for Bruce’s next album. We need to think about it, Mike, he kept hearing from the executives.
When he finally got an answer in the early weeks of 1974 the news was frustrating, at best. Go make a single, they said. If it sounds like it could be on the radio we’ll pay for the rest of the album. Appel tried to protest: Bruce isn’t a singles act, he argued. It’s all about albums, that’s been the plan all along. But that hadn’t worked, the executives said. So this is your chance. Go make a single.
Appel took the news to Bruce, who absorbed it, nodded, picked up his notebook. He had a new song that felt different from what they’d done before. Maybe that’s what they should work on. He wasn’t done with it yet, but the bones, and the essential feelings, were there.
The chords for the song, and the melody of the verses, found their shape nearly immediately. Focused on directness, if not simplicity, the central part of the tune revolved around three basic chords, the I-IV-V progression heard in so many rock songs: “Louie Louie,” “Twist and Shout,” the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby,” and at least a dozen of Chuck Berry’s most classic hits, while the guitar riff in the verses combined “Telstar” with Duane Eddy’s guitar twang. The descending chords in the second part of the verses, along with the I-vi-IV-V resolution of the chorus, traced their lineage to another corner of rock history (think “Duke of Earl,” “This Boy,” “Surfer Girl,” et al.), while the ascending modulations in the bridge and the fast tumble back down to the root chord at the start of the next verse are the only traces of the elaborate constructions on Bruce’s first two albums. The bones of this song came from rock ’n’ roll’s most fundamental musical archetypes.
One early draft of the lyrics was called “Wild Angels.” Scrawled on a sheet of lined notebook paper, the verses describe a litany of modern urban catastrophes. Murderous junkies turn shotguns on soldiers on leave from Fort Dix. Them wild boys did it just for the noise / Not even for the kicks. Roads crumble, drivers are crushed beneath their own cars. The game is so rigged, it’s murderous. This town’ll rip the bones from your back / It’s a death trap / You’re dead unless you get out when you’re young.
He wrote more drafts, filling notebook pages in hotel rooms in the wee hours after shows, or while lounging on the musty sofa in the little bungalow he’d recently rented in a working-class section of Long Branch, north of Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore. The lyrics evolved, but the darkness persisted. Baby, tonight I saw the fast rebel / Crushed beneath the wheels of his own hemi began one verse. By the end we see the rebel breathing his last, clutched in the arms of his “beautiful surfer girl.” In another version the narrator witnesses the death of all his heroes, crushed beneath the weight of / Their own Chevy Six. And what of the beautiful surfer girl? . . . Dead on a beach in an / Everlasting fix.
It feels unexpected, nothing like the songs on his first two albums and even less like the work he’d do over the next few decades. But in the moment, as he was watching the world and absorbing the culture that reflected how it felt to be alive in that moment, it had the ring of truth. “I was naturally close to a sort of rock ’n’ roll gothicness,” he says. “That was just where I was coming from, from all the B movies I saw, and from growing up in Asbury Park with the hot rods, you know, spinning around the circuit on a nightly basis.”
Bruce kept working, filling his notebook. Taking out lines, adding new ones, revising what he had, pulling it apart, crafting new verses and weaving those in. Eventually the words began to clarify and lose their hysterical edge. The gloom, and the sense of danger, persisted. Still, by the start of the spring Bruce’s words identified something glimmering on the horizon. A vision, at least, of somewhere else. A potential end point for the one phrase that could be found in every draft of the lyric: Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.
It’s the early fall of 2024, the morning of Bruce Springsteen’s seventy-fifth birthday. We’re in the living room of a house on the New Jersey shore a few miles south of the town Bruce’s songs have made famous. It’s a nice, if not extravagant, beach house, the sort of new construction that feels like it could have been here a century ago. But the enormous seaside windows and unexpected angles of the living room describe a more recent history. Sitting in an armchair that faces a large fireplace, Bruce is remembering what it was like to be a twenty-four-year-old kid. His dark eyes are sparkling. Just a week ago he played a weekend-capping show at the Sea.Hear.Now festival in Asbury Park. The festival’s main stage was on the beach where the younger Bruce used to surf, swim, and, when he didn’t have anywhere else to go, sleep. To mark the occasion he dispensed with the set list he’d built for the shows he’d been playing on tour over the last two years and dug deep into his earliest albums with rarely-played-these-days songs, including “Blinded by the Light,” “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?,” “The E Street Shuffle,” “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” and the 1973 outtake “Thundercrack.” After the concert he threw a small after-party in the back room of the Wonder Bar, one of his oldest haunts in town. Refueling with a cheeseburger and fries, he exulted over the show and the sight of all those faces gazing up at him from the sand. “I kept thinking, this was the place, you know. This is where it all happened. Only there didn’t used to be so many people here. It’s coming alive, man. And it’s great.”
“Born to Run” came near the end of the show, in a ten-song run of bangers from Bruce’s fifty-plus-year career that kept the crowd singing, dancing, and roaring. The scene would have been beyond his imagining when Bruce was trying to fulfill his record company’s demand for a song that might appeal to more than his small cult of fans. But he’d already been a performing musician for close to a decade by then, and he knew what he could do when he set his mind to it. “You know, hey, it’s a new day,” he says. “It’s a new world. It’s a new life for me, and who am I? Let me decide on that, right? I’m not going to be defined by what other people are telling me, who I was or what I should be. I’m going to be defined by my own thoughts about who I am and who I want to be.”
Who he wanted to be, what he hoped “Born to Run” would help him become, was this: a rock star.
Bruce introduced the song to the band at a rehearsal just after the start of January 1974. They were set up in the garage outside bassist Garry Tallent’s father’s place near Asbury Park. It was cold out there, the musicians wore sweaters, coats, and hats to ward off the chill, but the new song cut through the frosty air. Tallent clocked it immediately: “I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a keeper, really.’ ” They ran through it a few times, Bruce explaining the song’s pace and feel, slowing down to play the dozen or so changes in the bridge section. They set it aside for a week or so while they went up to Cambridge to play a three-night stand at Joe’s Place, then put some more work into the new song during a quick stop at 914 Sound Studios in Blauvelt on their way back to New Jersey. “I think we had the song, or the bones of the song, and I was interested at first in getting the sound right,” Bruce says, tossing a few logs onto the blaze he’s got crackling in the expansive fireplace. “So we went up and recorded the song with very few lyrics. Maybe tramps like us, we were born to run, or maybe a few other things. Not a lot of the lyrics. But we started recording like that. And because we didn’t really know how to get the sound we wanted it took us a long time.”
While they were there Bruce showed them another new song, a sprawling, multisectioned piece called “Jungleland.” This one was more complicated than the other tune, with more rough spots in the arrangement and some instrumental transitions Bruce hadn’t started to figure out. He turned to his musically erudite pianist David Sancious for help, and they sketched a jazzy, piano-led vignette with the driving rhythm of “Kitty’s Back,” a recent tune that was the jazziest song he’d ever committed to vinyl. The lyrics were just as grim, if rudimentary, as those of the other new song, describing an evening under the pier with Fast Eddie and Cool Jerk, gettin’ hard and drinkin’ beer until the boardwalk rats turn their rage onto the narrator, lighting his shirt on fire and sending him reeling for home. Things were rough all over in Bruce’s vision, where every evening ended in violence or some form of humiliation.
You throw up on your landlord’s step / And you get up and go to work . . .
It was a strange and gloomy world, almost cartoonish in its violence and degradations. It was, in some part, a reflection of the diminished society Bruce saw through the windshield during those long drives on tour from city to city. The nation that had marched so boldly into the 1960s had wound up spending the decade being traumatized by assassinations, trapped in an unwinnable war, and tangled in racist myths that were as ancient and misguided as any fairy tale. The first half of the 1970s had been even more dispiriting, with the long, slow reveal of President Nixon’s criminality, an unwinding economy, and spiraling inflation caused in part by the Arab oil embargo. This also resulted in gas shortages that struck at America’s most essential ideas about itself: independence, self-determination, and the freedom to hop in your car and go anywhere, anytime. The nation’s horizons were closing in, its sense of possibility, and spirit, foreshortened. What had been a land of dreams had awakened in the withering light of an unforgiving dawn.
And Bruce’s own sense of possibility, at least when it came to his career as a recording artist, was also beginning to fracture.
Chapter 2
Nashville
It was Monday morning, January 28, 1974, somewhere between Norfolk and Nashville. Bruce, in faded jeans and a hooded sweatshirt worn over a T-shirt, slouched in the passenger seat of a rented station wagon. His guitars rode on the back seat, the other luggage in the way back. His songwriting notebook—eighty pages of lined paper, the kind high school students use in class—sat next to him on the front seat. Mike Appel drove while Bruce worked the radio dial, twisting from left to right and back again, searching the static for a good song.
The two made an unlikely but surprisingly well-matched pair. Appel was a few years older, with shorter hair, neater clothes, and the restless energy of a man who was trying to get somewhere else. Bruce was just as ambitious but moved through the world more quietly. He talked less, tended to the edges of the room, and kept watch. When something caught his eye he reached for his notebook and clicked open his pen. You never knew what he was seeing, what he was thinking, not until he stepped onto the stage, saw his musicians around him, and counted to four.
One song ended and the headlines crackled from the dashboard speakers. Another Nixon aide had pleaded guilty to conspiring in the Watergate scandal. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier were preparing for their latest rematch. Bob Dylan’s tour with the Band was about to play three concerts at Madison Square Garden, Dylan’s first advertised show in New York in nearly a decade. Another piece of news caught Bruce and Appel’s ear: the Arab oil embargo was squeezing the gas supply and sending prices rocketing to fifty cents a gallon and beyond. The nation’s gasoline reserves were dwindling, and Congress was warning citizens to gird for rationing. Bruce wondered how they were going to get from show to show without gas for their cars. Appel said it was for him to worry about; Bruce should focus on the songs. Bruce reached over, picked up his notebook, held it on his lap, felt for the pen in his pocket. It was one of the few things he always had with him: pen and paper, guitars and cords, strings, picks, a few pairs of socks and underpants, T-shirts and sneakers. Everything he needed to survive in the world he’d made for himself, on the highway, perpetually on the move, chasing his vision.
Copyright © 2025 by Peter Ames Carlin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
