Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run turned 40 years old Aug. 25.
Great albums, like that one, are time machines.
As soon as I hear the intro to Thunder Road – it never fails – I am instantly transported back to September 1975, back to my beat-up stuffed armchair in a shabby living room of a fleabag dump on Third Street in north St. Cloud. I can even smell that room – that dusty, musty odor with cigarette smoke and stale beer fumes hanging in the air as the late afternoon sun squints through the battered blinds.
That’s where I lived, along with three buddies, from spring to spring for 12 months 40 years ago. It was a time of high unemployment, and so we buddies without work, all in our 20s, pooled what little we had and hunkered down in that crackerjack dive. There had once been a liquor store in that old two-story brick building right across from a corner Catholic church. The store owner, when he retired, slapped some rooms together with cheap paneling and decided to call it an apartment. We called it Party House.
Being unemployed, it’s as if we were kids again on a carefree vacation, with friends and strangers popping over every hour of day and night to party, play hijinx, talk smart, with good music playing all the while. The albums we played over and over, the ones I remember best, were Willie Nelson’s Red-Headed Stranger, Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man.
One blue-sky September afternoon, I bought a just-released Springsteen album at a St. Cloud record shop. He was virtually unknown, but I was familiar with two of his earlier albums, which I loved, so I was eager to see if this new one, called Born to Run, would measure up.
Back home, nobody was around, probably partying somewhere else. I cracked a beer, then put the needle on the revolving vinyl and what a rush! My hair – my long hair – tingled as if standing on end. I got goosebumps, a surge of joy. It was the same visceral awe I felt when I first heard Like a Rolling Stone on a car radio in the summer of ’65 while on the way home from swimming at Dodd Quarry by the St. Cloud prison.
The afternoon I bought it, I played Born to Run for a few hours with no one home but me. Then I went to visit my parents. Late that night, I walked back home, so eager to put the Springsteen record on again. Until nearly dawn, I listened to it in a state of ecstasy, enraptured by its big bold sound, as if all the instruments in creation were playing over-time, evoking a desperado’s bid to embrace life and all of its promises at any cost. It was a kind of histrionic angst romanticism like nothing else I’d ever heard. It was almost punk operatic, crescendos within crescendos, like a storm at sea. What manic energy! Springsteen seemed like a desperate snake trying to shed its skin, trying to burst his bonds into a higher realm of being, of feeling, of living. A rebel’s heroic transcendence.
As I played those songs, loudly, into the wee hours, I kept wondering when Gus would burst out of his room, next to the living room, shouting “Turn that damned thing down! I can’t sleep!”
Next day, Gus – bleary-eyed – said, “Denny, do you realize that music you were playing kept me awake half the night?”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I couldn’t help it.”
Then he said, “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“That album you were playing? And what’s the band? Play it now.”
“It’s Bruce Springsteen. Called Born to Run. But I thought you hated it.”
“Well, yeah, it kept me awake,” he said. “I was kind of pissed about you playing it so loud. But I love those songs! This guy’s great!”
So I put the album back on. Gus and I and everybody else listened to it happily all day long and all the rest of that fall and winter and all the decades since. Later that month, Springsteen was on the cover of TIME magazine and Newsweek magazine, the same week. That musical wizard had weaseled his way into our lives.
The old brick building is still standing. It’s been through oddball reincarnations, as a fire-extinguisher sales shop, later as a karate studio. Every time I drive by it, I get a rush of haunting happy memories as I hear in my head a tinkling piano, a sad harmonica and then a defiant voice choking back a sob:
“The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves.
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays . . . ”
