The review of Hotel California hinted at a dichotomy between, on the one hand, the gender-bending, experimental, slightly deviant aesthetic of British glam and, on the other, the rough-and-tumble, gun totin’, horse ridin’, unmistakably masculine Americana of the Eagles. Actually, I was just playing around, thinking maybe that this contrast is a bit fanciful and based on too small a sample. But, having now listened to Born to Run, I actually think there’s something to it. Alongside the Eagles, Springsteen was arguably the preeminent American rock act of the seventies, and this album is as male as it gets. But in contrast to the bushwackin’, lasso-swingin’ model of West Coast masculinity offered to us by Don Henley and his fellow desperadoes, the Boss presents us with a more East Coast vision of the white American male: the young, down-on-his luck blue collar prole, working all the hours god sends, chasing girls and getting wrecked in his free time. Most importantly, he is the proud owner of a beaten-up old banger that symbolises freedom, independence, and the prospect of escape from the small-town grind into a bigger, better, glittering, starlit future.
So you’re either a chillaxed, world-weary cowboy or a rust-belt labourer with a heart of gold and big dreams. Or, if you’re British, a mincing space oddity. Anyway, Born to Run sounds almost like a form of therapy for its progenitor – most of the songs are about Bruce’s formative experiences as a teenager growing up in New Jersey, and the narrative pattern is remarkably consistent. “Thunder Road” tells of a teenaged Bruce trying to convince his ambivalent sweetheart to take a ride in his rust bucket so that they can barrel down the interstate, and so that he can perhaps get lucky on the – if I read this correctly – train tracks, a most unusual location for the act of sexual congress, though what do I know of mid-70s New Jersey? “Born to Run” and “Night” offer basically identical formulas – our protagonist is summoned to his job every morning by the sound of a bell, rather like the benighted mill workers of nineteenth century Manchester, and he spends his nights chasing skirt.
But what he’s really in love with is not the girl, but “the machine” – that is, his car. As “Born to Run” observes, these knackered old wrecks are in fact “suicide machines”, the highways a graveyard for lost heroes. The car, then, has a multifaceted purpose; it is the means to get the girl, to escape the small-town grind, and to generate a rush of adrenaline and a feeling of aliveness by driving like a maniac – in short, the car allows the young man to become his ideal self. All complemented by the male addiction to risk-taking and, perhaps, the secret death wish of the benighted underclass, who are more conversant with the corrosive truth of our fallen world than college kids listening to Bob Dylan prattle on about civil rights.
It’s remarkable how much of Springsteen’s writing throughout his career has been about cars – “Thunder Road”, “Working on a Highway”, riding his brother’s car down to the river, the “Used Cars” of Nebraska – the list goes on. There are any number of tiresome Cultural Studies dissertations about how the car is the lynchpin of the American Dream – the massive wide-open spaces of the United States navigable and penetrable with the humble automobile, the final realization of the promise of freedom upon which the US was based. There’s an interesting contrast with Marc Bolan, who also constantly wrote about cars – but, ever the European fascist, he invoked them as symbols of beauty rather than freedom.
The Springsteenian attempt to transcend and escape one’s origins meets with variable results, to say the least. “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” are, of course, triumphant success stories. In the former, our hero “pulls out to win” from a city of losers, while in the latter, it seems certain that he and his sweetheart will finally find their place in the sun. This, then, is a vision of an achievable American Dream – work hard, get a car, get a girl, and things will get better. Indeed, these postwar decades were a time of massive social mobility for the Western working classes, who left the inner cities for bigger homes and cushier jobs in the suburbs. The happiest of endings was experienced by Springsteen himself, as he took his chance, headed to the bright lights of the cities of the East Coast, and made it big with his band – an experience related on the cocksure “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out”, which amply thematizes the euphoria of being young in a conurbation which is just waiting to be conquered.
So, to some extent, Springsteen was right about the glittering future that the invisible hand of the global economy held in store for he and his kind. But not everyone made it out, and those who did not were left to feel the full force of the chill winds of deindustrialization, globalization, and demotion into the underclass. Many of the stories on Born to Run do not have happy endings. The cascading Bob Dylan-esque lyrics of “Backstreets” tell of a faded relationship from Bruce’s teenage years set against the familiar backdrop of theatres, city parks, abandoned beach houses and, obviously, backstreets. We never learn what becomes of Terry, but Bruce’s closing battle cry of of remaining on the backstreets “until the end” is underpinned with melancholy, obviously constituting an oath that was eventually broken and was never to be restored.
The album’s two closing songs, meanwhile, abruptly introduce the dark side of the glorious tale of working-class triumph that much of the rest of the album has related. “Meeting Across the River” is surely about a desperate young man who, rather than submitting to the steady discipline of work and a regular wage, looks instead for one big payoff in order to escape his impoverished predicament and keep his increasingly jittery girlfriend onside. And so he arranges his “meeting across the river” in order to, presumably, rob a bank. For good measure, he takes along an accomplice, who he asks to stuff something in his pocket so that it looks like they’re armed. We never discover how this seedy story ends, or if the heist was successful, or even if Eddie was able to catch them a ride. But the strangely eerie fadeout seems to bode nothing but ill.
This sense of foreboding is only deepened by the album’s closing song, “Jungleland”, a West Side Story-style treatment of gang violence on the post-war streets of American cities. The song’s protagonist, “the Rat”, comes close to being saved from this lifestyle by romantic love – which, typically, Springsteen renders in the language of the automobile, or in this case, “soul engines”. But in the end, the Rat is doomed, a casualty of the game, and the world receives his passing with utter indifference, especially “the poets”.
Well, all the poets except Springsteen, of course, because the lyrics on this album are indeed worthy of being considered poetry. They are some of and maybe the best lyrics I’ve come across since I started this relentless plough through the history of rock music – superior, in my opinion, to Dylan, who is too opaque and whose excessive verbiage tips the balance too far in the direction of the text, swamping the songs with his overbearing intellectualism. Springsteen, by contrast, is better at getting the balance right – but not necessarily on Born to Run. In fact, my main complaint with this album is that the songs aren’t distinctively melodic enough. The music is driving, relentless rock, redolent of the industrial sprawl described by the lyrics, while the glory and heroism of the stories is channelled by shimmering piano, ecstatic saxophone, and triumphant strings. The twinkling piano notes in particular are a key and trademark feature of Springsteen’s music – they lend an almost fairytale-like quality to what are, in a sense, contemporary urban fairytales.
All of this makes for a remarkably cohesive sound and, when combined with the lyrics, an almost cinematic experience. But there’s nothing on this album that I’d consider catchy, and at times, the sound gets a bit too eye-rollingly epic, especially on the title track. I like it that Born to Run revolves around a coherent theme with a consistent sound, but at times it creeps uncomfortably in the direction of self-parody, a cartoon working class hero barrelling down the highway, arm around his girl, ready to take on the world, we’re going to live forever darlin’, blah blah blah. Fuck off Bruce – Ronald Reagan will be President soon, and then all your smalltown heroes will be well and truly in the shit. To whit; for my money, a better, bitterer, more restrained, more snappily edited balance between songcraft and poetry is struck on Born in the USA, a Reagan-era record if ever there was one. But that’s a story for another day.
7/10
Highlights: “Thunder Road”, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out”, “Born to Run”