Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run At 40 (According To Those Who Made It)

8. “We got one last chance to make it real”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdhkaPZtQF4&list=RDYdhkaPZtQF4

In May 1974, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Bruce Springsteen sat down to start writing the album that would determine the future (or lack thereof) of his career. Aware of how much was at stake, he knew he had to take his time to get things just right.

He also had a very clear vision of how he wanted just about every single aspect of every song to sound. Before the album’s recording had started, Springsteen remembers thinking “oh I wanna make a record that’s got a sound like Phil Spector, and I wanna write words like Dylan, and I want my guitar to sound like Duane Eddy.”

When he finally sat down to start writing, he realised just how much work realising his vision would take. “The music was composed very meticulously, so were the words,” he later said. “The amount of time honing the lyrics was enormous”

Perhaps surprisingly for a man most noted for playing the guitar, Springsteen chose not to write the majority of the album using that instrument, as Roy Bittan remembers: “Bruce wrote most of those songs on the piano. When I first visited him in Long Branch, he sat down at the piano and played me some of those songs.”

Even from those early versions it was clear that for Springsteen’s third album, he was setting the bar almost impossibly high. "We were not in it do something average,” said album co-producer Jon Landau. “We were not in it to get any particular song on the radio. We were in it to do something great."

To achieve this greatness took time, and a lot of it. There would be session after recording session, sometimes going on all night long, as Springsteen strove for perfection on every beat and every note. Engineer Jimmy Iovine, who later co-founded Interscope Records, had to take drastic measures to last the pace: “I had a piece of Wrigley’s spearmint gum, took the gum out of the wrapper and I chewed on the aluminium foil. The pain was so severe that I knew it would wake me up!”

But despite the mammoth amount of work that was required, it was clear its maker had a vision, even if the people around him couldn’t see the full picture just yet. In later years Springsteen would recall imagining that he was “going to make the greatest rock 'n' roll record ever made."