Tramps Like Marley

Great article at Slate today on the making of BORN TO RUN.

First of all, I never really knew the words had changed so much...which is odd, you'd think Bruce woulda brought it up when, you know, I met him (I'm sorry, is that a big deal? I didn't know that - hey, he's a nice guy! Very normal!)

It took him six months during the spring and summer of 1974 to record the title track. Van Zandt now laughs at the thought of it. "Anytime you spend six months on a song, there's something not exactly going right," he says. "A song should take about three hours." But Bruce was working with classic-rock motifs and images, searching for the right balance musically and lyrically. Born To Run marked a change in Springsteen's writing style. Whereas previously it seemed as if he had a rhyming dictionary open beside him, now his lyrics became simultaneously more compact and explosive. What mattered to him was to sound spontaneous, not to be spontaneous. "Spontaneity," he said, in 1981, "is not made by fastness. Elvis, I believe, did like 30 takes of 'Hound Dog,' and you put that thing on, and it just explodes."

There's another quote I've read from Bruce (this isn't something he told me when we met, I read this) about the label (and everybody else) pressuring him to put out the record:

"the release date is just one day - the record lasts forever."

Mukluks: MARLEY!