The point of Peter Ames Carlin’s Tonight In Jungleland: The Making Of Born To Run isn’t to drop new, exclusive, never-before-reported behind-the-scenes reveals about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s revolutionary third album. It would be almost impossible to come up with stories that are truly new, because Springsteen’s career has been thoroughly documented by scores of music journalists (including Carlin, who wrote Springsteen’s authorized biography, Bruce) and even Springsteen himself in his 2016 memoir. Instead, Carlin uses his access to Springsteen and other key figures from that time to tell a story. Like Springsteen does across Born To Run‘s eight tracks, Carlin crafts a narrative, meticulously breaking down how, in the words of his friend, the late Springsteen chronicler Charles M. Cross, “it all [got] so great.” It’s a story of perseverance and wild self-belief; as Carlin writes about the time Mike Appel, Springsteen’s then-manager, released “Born To Run” as a single to radio stations without the record company’s approval because the executives were dragging their feet, “Appel wasn’t just going to sit quietly while those dipshits smothered his baby in its crib.” Here are the best insights from Tonight In Jungleland.

Columbia execs thought “Born To Run” was too busy

After the middling sales of Springsteen’s first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., and The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, executives at Columbia Records weren’t enthusiastic about the prospects of his still-in-the-works third album. When Appel finally heard back from them about “Born To Run,” which he was convinced would restore their faith in Springsteen, the response wasn’t ideal. Carlin writes, “They liked the song, they liked the guitar riff, they liked what they could hear of Bruce’s vocals. But there was so much music on the thing. It sounded so dense: the acoustic piano, the electric piano, the organ, the synthesizer, the glockenspiel, the saxophone, the electric and acoustic guitars, the strings and backing vocals layered so thickly atop the bass and drums that even Bruce’s stage-steeled voice couldn’t cut through the noise.” It seems like an absurd thing to say about what has become one of the definitive rock ‘n’ roll songs of all time, but as Springsteen told Carlin, we only have that reaction now because of the additional perspective time and history have afforded us. “‘I guess it wasn’t an easy song to absorb when you first heard it,’ Bruce says. ‘Now people have heard it a thousand times, so it all sounds perfectly natural, right? But at first people said it sounded noisy.’”

Springsteen on “Jungleland”: “You don’t know how it came out of you, and you’ll never do it again”

Carlin spends a good chunk of the book breaking down the arduous process of creating “Jungleland,” Born To Run‘s nine-minute magnum opus finale. It came down to the wire: The recording sessions for the album needed to wrap by the morning of July 20, 1975, and Springsteen pushed saxophonist Clarence Clemons to work all through the night of July 19, recording the sax solo in “Jungleland” over and over for hours. Fifty years later, engineer Jimmy Iovine still remembers that night as being particularly grueling. But Springsteen was so fixated on getting it right because he knew it was one of the most important songs of his career. As Springsteen told Carlin, “I don’t know where the lyrics came from, except that was the style I was writing in those days. The Rangers had a homecoming in Harlem . . . , I was just writing in this operatic, somewhat Broadway-esque style. Rock ’n’ roll images, outsider characters. I was just doing my own thing.” He added, “It’s just one of those things that come out of you. You don’t know where it is, you don’t know how it came out of you, and you’ll never do it again.”

Born To Run sounds like such a leap forward because Springsteen finally had an editor: Jon Landau

During the recording of Born To Run, Springsteen was buoyed by two ardent supporters: his manager, Appel, and Rolling Stone critic Jon Landau, who would go on to co-produce the album. However, the two men had very different approaches. Appel was a bulldog cheerleader, aggressively hyping his client to anyone who would listen. He told reporters he wouldn’t make Springsteen available for interviews unless it was a cover story. He pitched Springsteen as the opening act for the Super Bowl in 1973, long before the halftime show became the spectacle it is today, and long before Springsteen was even particularly popular. As Carlin writes, “To imagine the biggest, most conservative television network of all would cede five minutes of broadcast time, let alone Super Bowl time, to a skinny, bearded, decidedly unpopular folk singer from New Jersey and his metaphorical song about the wickedness of President Nixon’s Vietnam policies . . . well, no. Never. Not in a million goddamn years. That is lunatic thinking.” 

Appel never said “no” to Springsteen, and neither did anyone else during the process of recording his first two albums. But when Landau became part of Springsteen’s inner circle after he wrote a live performance review in 1974 for the Boston alternative paper The Real Paper that read, in part, “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” there was finally someone who could help guide Springsteen’s wild creativity. Carlin writes, “But while Jon Landau shared Appel’s awe for Bruce’s abilities, the critic had no trouble telling his friend when he thought a song fell short and what he might want to do to bring it up to a higher standard. Bruce took his thoughts seriously. ‘I don’t trust anybody, you know, but Jon and I struck up a relationship and I said, ‘Well, this guy is theoretically going to be our producer,’’ Bruce says, fifty years later.” Landau continued to offer advice throughout the recording of the album, leading Springsteen to move to a more professional studio and placing an emphasis on overdubbing instead of recording songs with the whole band playing at the same time.

Landau offered Springsteen some salient advice when he wanted to scrap the whole album

Everyone was in awe of Born To Run when they heard the final mix—except Springsteen. (Walter Yetnikoff, the president of all of CBS’ recording companies, even told Landau after he heard the album for the first time, “It sounds like fucking.”) Less than a month before its release, Springsteen wanted to scrap the whole album and start over. According to Carlin, Landau talked Springsteen down: “‘Do you think Chuck Berry likes to listen to his own records? he asked. Seeing into his friend’s deepest anxiety, he addressed it full-on: ‘You can’t and will not be able to put every thought, every idea, and every creative impulse onto one record,’ he said. ‘My feeling is it’s a great record, we accomplished great things, and any ideas you have from this point on, they go on the next record.’”

Springsteen’s ambition had a profound impact on Jimmy Iovine

Iovine was only 22 during the recording of Born To Run, but he’d already worked with legends like John Lennon and Harry Nilsson. Still, Iovine was struck by Springsteen’s ambition. As Iovine told Carlin, “…I could tell from my initial impression of him that he didn’t want anything else. He didn’t want anything that you had, he didn’t want anything anybody had. He just wanted to be great. And it was so powerful that he made me think like that. I was a kid from Brooklyn, right? I never knew anyone who thought like that. So I’m like, ‘Ohhhhh, shit.’ ‘” Fifty years later, even with the benefit of hindsight about the impact Born To Run had, Springsteen’s attitude is still pretty awe-inspiring.