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The following notes, written by Bruce, are taken from the book "Songs".
In 1974, though struggling through the aftermath of the riots and economic depression, Asbury Park still managed to come to life on Friday and Saturday nights. Down by the boardwalk, Kingsley and Ocean avenues formed a sort of racetrack oval that locals called the Circuit. It surrounded all the bars and nightclubs, including the Stone Pony, the new hub of the city's rock music scene.
In '70s New Jersey, the car was still a powerful image. That summer I bought my first set of wheels for two thousand dollars. It was a '57 Chevy with dual, four-barrel cards, a Hurst on the floor, and orange flames spread across the hook. I was living in a small house in West Long Branch, up the coast from Asbury. I had a record player by the side of my bed. At night I'd lie back and listen to records by Roy Orbison, the Ronettes, the Beach Boys, and other great '60s artists. These were records whose full depth I'd missed the first time around. But now I was appreciating their craft and power.
One day I was playing my guitar on the edge of my bed, working on some song ideas, and the words "born to run" came into my head. At first I thought it was the name of a movie or something I'd seen on a car spinning around the Circuit, but I couldn't be certain. I liked the phrase because it suggested a cinematic drama I thought would work with the music I was hearing in my head.
Before we had a chance to record it, "Born to Run" developed as a song that the E Street Band and I played live on the road. That gave me an opportunity to feel out the arrangement. But live, the limitations of a seven piece band were never going to provide me with the range of sound I needed to realize to song's potential. It was the first piece of music I wrote and conceived as a studio production. It was connected to the long, live pieces I'd written previously by the twists and turns of the arrangement.
But "Born to Run" was more condensed; it maintained the excitement of "Rosalita" while delivering its message in less time and with a shorter burst of energy. This was a turning point, and it allowed me to open up my music to a far larger audience. "Born to Run" was a long time coming; it took me six months to write. But it proved to be the key to my songwriting for the rest of the record. Lyrically, I was entrenched in classic rock and roll images, and I wanted to find a way to use those images without their feeling anachronistic.
Born to Run was released into post-Vietnam America. There was a coming gas crises ... no gas ... no cars. People were contemplating a country that was finite, where resources and life had limits. Slowly, the dread that I managed to keep out of "Rosalita" squeezed its way into the lives of the people on Born to Run.
It was during this time that I began my friendship with Jon Landau, a Boston music writer. I sent him a tape of Born to Run while he was in the hospital recuperating from an illness. He later moved to New York City. There we struck up a relationship-hanging out, talking music, and listening to records. When I ran into trouble recording the rest of the album, he stepped in and helped me get the job done. We moved onto the Record Plant in New York City and hired Jimmy Iovine to engineer. We stripped down the songs and streamlined the arrangements. We developed a more direct sound with cleaner lines.
"Thunder Road" opens the album, introducing its characters and its central proposition: Do you want to take a chance? On us? On life? You're then led through the band bio and block party of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-out," the broken friendships of "Backstreets," out into the open with "Born to Run," and into the dark city and spiritual battleground of "Jungleland."
Few of the album's songs were written on guitar. The orchestral sound of Born to Run came from most of the songs being written on piano. It was on the keyboard that I could find the arrangements needed to accompany the stories I was writing. "Born to Run," which began on the guitar with the riff that opens the song, was finished on the piano.
The characters on Born to Run were less eccentric and less local than on Greetings and The Wild, the Innocent. They could have been anybody and everybody. When the screen door slams on "Thunder Road," you're not necessarily on the Jersey Shore anymore. You could be anywhere in America. These were the beginnings of the characters whose lives I would trace in my work for the next two decades.
As a songwriter I always felt one of my jobs was to face the questions that evolve out of my music and search for the answers as best as I could. For me, the primary questions I'd be writing about for the rest of my work life first took form in the songs on Born to Run ("I want to know if love is real".). It was the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom.
Born to Run was the dividing line.