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

Other than Springsteen himself, perhaps the strongest presence on Born To Run is saxophonist Clarence Clemons. ‘The Big Man’ as the band affectionately called him is the only other performer to be featured in the cover photo alongside Springsteen, and it was meant to signify friendship, one of the album’s most important themes.

Springsteen: “That cover said it all. I always thought it was one of those records where you didn’t have to hear it. When you saw the cover you’d say ‘I want that one’.” 

Clemons’ huge influence on the band is a common thread throughout the record. On Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out Springsteen even sings that everything changed when “the Big Man joined the band”.

But nowhere is his influence more obvious than on album closer, the nine and a half minute epic Jungleland. The most ambitious song on the album, Roy Bittan described its recording as "like trying to drive a Grand Prix course: Every time you go around one turn, there's another."

The song’s writing had benefitted from Springsteen’s decision to choose piano as his main compositional tool. “It’s a very particular kind of thing you just wouldn’t put together on guitar,” he later said. 

It was also another song that took its time to finally fall into place. Clemons himself remembers the rest of the band “packing the truck up [to go on tour] and I was upstairs playing the last notes of the Jungleland solo.” 

He spent 16 hours recording that solo, with almost every single note of it plotted and directed by Springsteen himself. This huge attention to detail would pay off. For Clemons, the song “has a spiritual connotation”, while Weinberg described the saxophone as sounding “like a religious call, it’s got fervour in it. It is the true gospel of the E Street Band.”