Tramps Like Us, Baby

We were Born To Run. Thirty years ago today, Bruce's breakthrough album was released and what a weird piece of music it is. This is the album that most people discover Bruce, as it was mine. While knowing the title cut and not being that impressed for years, I heard this album backwards and thankfully found all of the songs that stand the test of time and not the corporate dj thrashing. These songs and this album are weird and I'll discuss that below. But first, the track listings:

1. Thunder Road
2. Tenth Avenue Freeze Out
3. Night
4. Backstreets
5. Born To Run
6. She's the One
7. Meeting Across the River
8. Jungleland

I heard the last song first and was immediately hit with the West Side Story 70s theatricality of the song but also the killer guitar break into the bridge. Hearing this song for the first time in my cousin's 67 Camero (how's that for cliche?) ten years ago, I went out and purchased the lp. That's right, vinyl. Celluloid. Wax. Taking the tracks in order, I heard songs that bounced all over from sentimental ballads to Philly soul to straight ahead rockers. I won't pontificate upon the fourth and favorite track as I've done many times in the past, though I will say that I never tire of the pain the protagonist experiences in the process of growing up and losing his naivete. Bruce's first album contained a song, Growin' Up though he didn't really sing it until Backstreets.
BTR is a transitional album in all sense of the word. It's nothing like his first two records which were wild exercises in funky r&b with Dylanesque lyric runs that only ended after every word in the English language was used to rhyme. Even Bruce says that Blinded By the Light caused his rhyming dictionary to burst into flames. No more familiar characters from the first two albums nor any of the epic grandeur of the second album. Rosie didn't come out because she wasn't asked, Janey, Sandy, the romantic young boys, they're all relegated to a single song. Here, Bruce begins singing, not about the characters, but AS the characters, which is what he'll be most successful at throughout his career. However, he's still fixated on "the city" and it's most likely New York. We're still very geography-driven and only with knowing where Bruce was up to 1975 does the listener understand Bruce's obsession with NYC. However, the girl, the boy and the car become monolithic symbols that become first defined here. The three are doing nothing but trying to get out, something they will spend albums still trying to do. Only in 1987 do the boy and the girl make it home and into adulthood with the Tunnel of Love album. Here, the boy and the girl are running to maintain their youth and innocence (however defined they may be) but starting in 1978, Bruce's characters run to maintain their pride and self-worth, even when they're looking for it. Born To Run is the last of the youthful albums and yet just a hint of what was to come with Darkness and The River. Nebraska will drive home the values and meanings of Bruce's successful years but Born To run seems to cling to that last glimmer of hope that by running now, the young will never get caught or caught up. Naive as he was thirty years ago, it is Bruce's desire to break out one last time before life catches up that makes me fall in love with Mary every time. Some days she's a girl, some times she's a lonely woman. Others, she's beautiful and sometimes the song sings from her mouth and perspective. Tenth Avenue is silly backslapping boy machismo that I only wish I had. Night is the first Darkness song as its themes are only beginning to be defined. Backstreets; enough said. She's the One is Buddy Holly if he lived. Meeting is strictly the prelude to the final cut which is Bruce's final magnum opus of rock opera. The title cut, which hangs occasionally like the albatross, when listened to with fresh ears, is the accumulation of twenty years of rock history and the trumpet blast declaration of independence for those still with hope throughout the years. Overblown, over-sung and yet dripping with a passionate zeal for truth, it's the last verse that has come to define the genius of Bruce Springsteen:

Someday, baby, I don't know when
we're gonna get to that place
where we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun
But 'til then, tramps like us, baby,
We were born to run.