{"id":137722,"date":"2025-08-11T19:33:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T19:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/137722\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T19:33:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T19:33:10","slug":"the-making-of-born-to-run","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/137722\/","title":{"rendered":"The Making Of Born To Run"},"content":{"rendered":"

The point of Peter Ames Carlin\u2019s Tonight In Jungleland: The Making Of Born To Run<\/a> isn\u2019t to drop new, exclusive, never-before-reported behind-the-scenes reveals about the making of Bruce Springsteen\u2019s revolutionary third album. It would be almost impossible to come up with stories that are truly new, because Springsteen\u2019s career has been thoroughly documented by scores of music journalists (including Carlin, who wrote Springsteen\u2019s 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\u2018s eight tracks, Carlin crafts a narrative, meticulously breaking down how, in the words of his friend, the late Springsteen chronicler Charles M. Cross, \u201cit all [got] so great.\u201d It\u2019s a story of perseverance and wild self-belief; as Carlin writes about the time Mike Appel, Springsteen\u2019s then-manager, released \u201cBorn To Run\u201d as a single to radio stations without the record company\u2019s approval because the executives were dragging their feet, \u201cAppel wasn\u2019t just going to sit quietly while those dipshits smothered his baby in its crib.\u201d Here are the best insights from Tonight In Jungleland.<\/p>\n

Columbia execs thought \u201cBorn To Run\u201d was too busy<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the middling sales of Springsteen\u2019s first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., and The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, executives at Columbia Records weren\u2019t enthusiastic about the prospects of his still-in-the-works third album. When Appel finally heard back from them about \u201cBorn To Run,\u201d which he was convinced would restore their faith in Springsteen, the response wasn\u2019t ideal. Carlin writes, \u201cThey liked the song, they liked the guitar riff, they liked what they could hear of Bruce\u2019s 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\u2019s stage-steeled voice couldn\u2019t cut through the noise.\u201d It seems like an absurd thing to say about what has become one of the definitive rock \u2018n\u2019 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. \u201c\u2018I guess it wasn\u2019t an easy song to absorb when you first heard it,\u2019 Bruce says. \u2018Now people have heard it a thousand times, so it all sounds perfectly natural, right? But at first people said it sounded noisy.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Springsteen on \u201cJungleland\u201d: \u201cYou don\u2019t know how it came out of you, and you\u2019ll never do it again\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Carlin spends a good chunk of the book breaking down the arduous process of creating \u201cJungleland,\u201d Born To Run\u2018s 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 \u201cJungleland\u201d 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, \u201cI don\u2019t 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 \u2019n\u2019 roll images, outsider characters. I was just doing my own thing.\u201d He added, \u201cIt\u2019s just one of those things that come out of you. You don\u2019t know where it is, you don\u2019t know how it came out of you, and you\u2019ll never do it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born To Run sounds like such a leap forward because Springsteen finally had an editor: Jon Landau<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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, \u201cTo 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\u2019s Vietnam policies . . . well, no. Never. Not in a million goddamn years. That is lunatic thinking.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n