At the start of 1974, Bruce Springsteen’s piece of the American dream was running away from him.
The 24-year-old rock ’n’ roll wannabe from Freehold, NJ, had been signed to a record deal just two years earlier, when his then-manager Mike Appel marched into the office of famed producer and Columbia Records executive John Hammond and brashly said: “So you’re the guy who found Bob Dylan. I wanna see if that was just a fluke, or if you really have ears, because I’ve got somebody much better than him.”
Despite the cocky sales pitch, Hammond was knocked out by Springsteen’s romantic lyrical imagery and muscular sound, honed playing in various bands up and down the Jersey Shore.
Eventually, the “new Dylan” tag would become a cross to bear — despite sensational live shows, Springsteen’s first albums, “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.” and “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle” (both released in 1973), sold far less than Columbia had expected.
With their backs against the wall, Springsteen and his E Street Band had no choice but to go for broke, putting everything they had into “Born to Run.” The recording just about broke him, with Springsteen obsessing over the lyrics, fretting over keeping his record deal and trying to cope with band changes all at the same time.
“Bruce was obsessive,” Appel tells The Post. “He tried everything because he was frightened of not living up to everything he could live up to. We just had to do it, because we had nothing to fall back on. Sometimes that’s the best thing in life.”
Forty years on from release, here’s how the Boss shaped a rock ’n’ roll masterpiece against all odds.
Recording of the song “Born to Run” took place in spring and summer of 1974, with Springsteen and the band — bassist Garry Tallent, organist Danny Federici, pianist David Sancious, saxophonist Clarence Clemons and drummer Ernest “Boom” Carter — laboring for six months to create a dense, multilayered epic, reminiscent of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound productions from the 1960s.
While writing, Springsteen hung a poster over his bed of Peter Pan leading his Wendy out of a window.
It was a clear inspiration, as the image of a man holding on to his youth and leading a girl named Wendy away from drudgery was fed into the lyrics: “Wendy, let me in, I wanna be your friend, I want to guard your dreams and visions.”
“My shot at the title,” Bruce wrote years later of the song. “A 24-year-old kid aimin’ at the ‘greatest rock ’n’ roll record ever.’?”
Peter Ames Carlin (author of the Springsteen biography “Bruce”): “Columbia gave Bruce and the band just enough money to produce one song to show he could make great singles and prove the next album would be worth making. That’s why they took six months on ‘Born to Run.’ Every single note had to be perfect, otherwise they knew they would be going back to Asbury Park empty-handed.”
I said to Bruce once, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ He said, ‘I’m carrying the psychic load!’
- Mike Appel, former Springsteen manager
David Sancious: “The first version of the song was written during recording of [the album] ‘The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle’ in 1973. I think Bruce wrote three sets of lyrics at least. It got a lot of treatments — he doesn’t let go of things until he’s happy.”
Changes at Columbia Records during 1973 meant that Clive Davis (a big early advocate of Springsteen’s) had left and Irwin Segelstein had replaced him as president.
When the latter heard “Born to Run,” he rejected the song — one aide dismissively called it “Born to Crawl” — and funding for recording the album was cut.
Springsteen and the band were dejected and as Tallent remembers, they were “ready to be booted from the label” altogether.
But Appel played a masterstroke by leaking the record to DJs across the country who embraced it immediately, creating instant buzz. The band also got an unexpected helping hand from Segelstein’s son.
Mike Appel (Springsteen’s manager from 1972 to 1976 and co-producer of “Born to Run”): “Bruce did an interview with the Brown University press in 1974 and mentioned that Irwin didn’t know what he was about. None of us knew that Segelstein’s son went to Brown University [and] was a big fan. [He] read that article and immediately called his dad to protest [the label’s treatment of Springsteen]. After that, Segelstein called me and we buried the ax. We were back in business.”
But first, they had to deal with Sancious leaving to start his own band, Tone, and taking drummer Carter with him. Ever the perfectionist, Springsteen auditioned 60 people in total for the vacant positions, settling finally on Queens native Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg as replacements. Even after the exhaustive search, Weinberg’s appointment was not unanimous, with Federici voting against his addition. The stress of getting everything just right loomed.
Appel: “Bruce would come in sometimes, and I could see he was looking very deep within himself. I said to him once, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ He said, ‘I’m carrying the psychic load!’?”
The band cemented itself by touring at the end of 1974, and they decamped to the Record Plant recording studio near Times Square to create the rest of the album in 1975.
Springsteen’s possessiveness remained. Recording sessions went on around the clock. Clemons spent 16 hours working on the sax solo for final track “Jungleland” to ensure he played every note just as Springsteen demanded, while engineer Jimmy Iovine (now an Apple exec and co-founder of Interscope Records) developed his own unique way of dealing with the exhaustion.
“I had a piece of Wrigley’s spearmint gum, took the gum out of the wrapper and I chewed on the aluminium foil,” he recalled in 2005. “The pain was so severe that I knew it would wake me up!”
Appel: “The first time [Springsteen] played me ‘Jungleland’ I didn’t like the middle section because the lyrics didn’t have the usual Springsteen-style romance. He got up, feeling a little insulted, and walked out on me. But the next day, he comes back in and plays the song again. The middle of the song now had the high poetry of Bruce Springsteen. Bruce could be a pragmatist, too. He saw what I was saying. Nobody knows it all!”
Carlin: “A song like ‘Backstreets’ had a lot of elements of what was going on around Asbury Park and the Jersey Shore; these old towns were crumbling, something was ending. They’re projections of Bruce’s experiences.”
Finally, by July 1975, the record was complete. Or so everyone thought. Upon hearing the master tape while in a hotel in Pennsylvania, Springsteen decided it was still not up to scratch and threatened to throw it into the pool and record a live album instead.
Appel: “I said to Bruce, ‘If you really think the songs are dogs, let’s go back and make some more.’ He looked at me, saw that I was serious about doing it, and said ‘OK, I guess it is done!’ He used to always say ‘Don’t use any reverse psychology on me.’ But every once in a while, I had to.”
“Born to Run” was released Aug. 25, 1975, to rave reviews and earned Springsteen his first Top 10 Billboard album. (Guitarist Steven Van Zandt joined the band as they went on tour.) Columbia, who had all but given up on the act just a year earlier, now put their full promotional support into the album. But all that support only vexed the naturally shy singer even more.
Appel: “Bruce recoiled against the publicity campaign when he played London for the first time in October 1975. The label had gone around putting up signs around the venue saying ‘London’s Finally Ready for Bruce Springsteen’ and he tore them all down himself.”
Carlin: “He hated himself for needing the exposure. He worked so hard to create this moment, but when he got into that moment, it grossed him out.”
Appel: “The peak of the hype was the [celebratory] Time and Newsweek cover stories [which ran the same week in October 1975]. When they came out, [Springsteen] said to me, ‘What’s the backlash? Everyone’s going to look at me like some kind of whore, touting myself to the world.’ He came from an era where everybody was against . . . shameless self-promotion.”
Sancious: “When ‘Born to Run’ made it big, I wasn’t surprised. [At the end of concerts,] Bruce would do a solo piano version of ‘For You’ [from the album ‘Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.’]. I remember thinking that what he had was unstoppable. It was going to happen, one way or another.”