50 years ago, Springsteen resisted the hype around his seminal album, Born to Run

The hard-charging, kinetic album lifted The Boss to the echelons of rock.

By Frederic J. Frommer

By the mid-1970s, some fans and critics saw rock music as bloated and overly commercial—“an excess of showmanship, too much din substituting for true power,” as Time magazine put in a 1975 story. Rock was losing fans to punk and disco.

Into that void stepped young Bruce Springsteen with his hard-charging, kinetic album Born to Run.

“Springsteen has taken rock forward by taking it back, keeping it young,” that same Time story marveled, adding, “right now Springsteen represents a regeneration, a renewal of rock.”

Born to Run, the third album by Springsteen and his E-Street band but their first breakthrough record, was released in August 1975—50 years ago this week.

“We were considered not a success at that particular moment, and so Born to Run was pretty critical,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone in 2005.

Time wasn’t alone in its praise for the new record. Many critics raved about the album and compared Springsteen with Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and Pete Townshend.

Fans lined up to see him at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village, leading New York Times critic John Rockwell to write, “The cause of all the turmoil was a man who might just be the next Mr. Jagger, a 25-year‐old rock ‘n’ roll poet from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen.” A Washington Post story headlined “Bruce Springsteen: Justifying the Hype” praised the album for establishing “Springsteen once and for all as an artist whose gifts are almost unlimited.”

The media frenzy included Springsteen gracing the cover of both Newsweek (“Making Of A Rock Star”) and Time (“Rock’s New Sensation”), back when the newsmagazines had huge cultural cachet.

The Village Voice, an alternative newsweekly in Greenwich Village, poked fun at the marketing monsoon.

“Hope of the future. Big star. Gold record. The works. Across the land, corporate drums are making sure everybody gets the message,” the paper wrote that summer. “A new savior is at hand. The ’70s are being primed for a media killing to the nth degree. Pressing plants work long into the night. The time, as they say in the business, is right.”

A lot of the praise was a bit too much for the singer/songwriter known as The Boss.

“I don’t understand what all the commotion is about,” Springsteen said at the time. “I feel like I’m on the outside of all this, even though I know I’m on the inside. It’s like you want attention, but sometimes you can’t relate to it.”

In his autobiography, also called “Born to Run,” Springsteen recalled touring in Europe after the album’s release, where a brightly lit marquee at the Hammersmith Odeon greeted him with the words, “FINALLY!! LONDON IS READY FOR BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN.”

“Reflecting, this is not exactly the tone I’d have preferred been struck,” he wrote. “It feels, perhaps, a little too … presumptuous? Once inside, I am greeted by a sea of posters on every available flat surface and in every seat proclaiming me the NEXT FUCKING BIG THING! The kiss of death! It's usually better to let the audience decide that. I'm frightened, and I’m pissed, really pissed. I am embarrassed for myself and offended for my fans. This is not the way it works. I know how it works. I've done it. Play and shut up. My business is SHOW business, and that is the business of SHOWING … not TELLING.

“You don't TELL people anything. You SHOW them and let them decide. That's how I got here, by SHOWING people. You try to tell people what to think and you end up a little Madison Avenue mind fascist. Hey mister rock star, get the fuck out of my mind and into my feet, into my heart. That’s how the job gets done. That’s how you introduce yourself.”

Springsteen tore down all the posters and flyers he could get his hands on.

During the production of the album, he subjected members of his E-Street Band to those exacting standards, driving them crazy. Springsteen’s road manager, Stephen Appel, who helped coordinate things in the studio, recently recalled how the band loved the music during the recording sessions.

“We’re saying, ‘Let’s get this great record down on vinyl!’” Appel said in “Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run,” a new book by Peter Ames Carlin. “You’re working and it sounds great and so you start to think you have it right, but Bruce says, ‘Nope, it’s shit.’ Okay, where do we go from here? And then you work for hours to change it. And then that’s done, and Bruce says, ‘You know what? Maybe it was better before, because now this sounds like shit.’ And you would do that for ten to fifteen hours a day.”

The end result was an album that Springsteen later admired, despite his earlier doubts. “It was just structured and built like a tank,” he said. “It was indestructible, and that came from an enormous amount of time that we put in, an unhealthy amount of obsessive-compulsiveness.”

Today, Born to Run is recognized as one of the best records of all time; Rolling Stone, for example, ranks it No. 21 on its list of 500 Greatest Albums.

And no wonder. From the title track’s universal escapism (“We gotta get out while we're young / 'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run”) to Clarence Clemons’s mesmerizing sax solo in the middle of the beautiful finale, “Jungleland”—and the haunting trumpet in “Meeting Across the River”—Born to Run has an enduring quality that justifies the hype. Even a half-century later.

Frederic J. Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications. A former Associated Press reporter, Frommer is the author of several books, including “You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals." Follow him on X.

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