9. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen & E Street Band

The best thing I ever heard about New Jersey was when they made this the official State song. I don’t know if it still is, and I don’t think “the Boss” lives in Jersey anymore, but the grungy image of that state, deserved or not, is the perfect petri dish for the characters and sounds rising out of Springsteen’s world. It’s not a world most of us would admit to, and certainly not aspire to, but it’s a world we recognize and comes with emotions that are honest. (None of this passive-aggressive stuff!) First comes the urgency, with a drum machine pounding away in split time, a beat that keeps on going. Then a seven-note riff, maybe not as memorable as My Girl’s opener but just as totemic, stresses the importance of what’s to come. We’re pouring out our hearts in this one, baby, the music seems to say, and a xylophone(?) and all sorts of orchestral sounds add to the pounding. The lyrics are the quintessence of Springsteeniana. The first verse establishes the Tough Guy in a tougher world: “this town rips the bones from your back/ it’s a death trap, a suicide rap.” In the second, love, with its softening and hope, arrives in the guise of Wendy and double entendres: “Just wrap your legs ‘round these velvet rims and strap your hands ‘cross my engines.” The pounding slows, we move to a more universal perspective and the narrator switches to the third person, as “girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors/ and boys try to look so hard.” Clarence Clemons’s slightly flat sax solo restores the urgency, we wait for the Boss to return, then, always one bar after I expect it, comes “1-2-3-4” and we arrive at the crashing climax, and it’s a dream, a hopeful dream, echoing the elegiac ending of West Side Story’s “Somewhere.”  “There’s a place for us” becomes “Someday girl I don’t know when/ We’re gonna get to that place…and we’ll walk in the sun.” But never forget who you are, who we are: “tramps like us, Baby we were born to run.”

B Side: The Boss’s Magic

How to write about Bruce Springsteen, the subject of far greater minds than mine; and how not to get lost in the crowd when crying, I loved him at Greetings from Asbury Park, long before the rest of the world awoke to find him on the cover of Time and Newsweek the very same week! He was hailed as the “new Dylan” – one of many in those years – largely because they were on the same label and Asbury Park was, maybe, over-lyricked. “Madman drummers, bummers, Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat” did sort of recall the words Dylan threw together in Rolling Stone, or Positively Fourth Street. But by the time of Born to Run, it was clear that Springsteen was something more than a wordsmith: his best songs had a power, a drive, the ability to rock your soul, that Dylan wasn’t interested in. The Boss was just as much the voice of a generation, but it was a different generation. The hippy, arty, change-the-world hopefulness of the ‘60s was gone. Nixon-Watergate-Vietnam had produced an air of defeat, of desperation, and this is where Springsteen went for his powerful stories: Jungleland, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Hungry Heart. By celebrating the gritty, the real, Springsteen connected his words, his world, to the listener; but at the same time the anthemic chords, the pulsing beat gave an uplift. Instead of making you depressed, his music made you feel stronger. It’s no coincidence that Born in the USA was used as a political theme song by Republicans who didn’t notice the anti-war, downer lyrics. It’s that combination of “life is tough,” but “you don’t have to feel bad about it” that is the Springsteen miracle, that makes his music such a touchstone to so many people, including me.