You also had lost perspective on it at that point.I lost the ability to hear it clearly, certainly towards the end of the production. After the long period of time we spent on it, I could only hear what was wrong with it or what I thought was weak with it. And also, the way we listened to the master was, we went downtown in Richmond, Virginia to the local stereo outlet and we asked the guy if we could play something on a stereo in the store. The guy made a big fuss and finally he sent us to the back of the store and we just put it on a record player that was on the shelf. Then we stood there in the middle of the store listening to the whole thing, attempting to judge what we thought of it. It was just really me not wanting to let it go and not wanting to admit that it was the best that I could do and that I was finished. To accept that our fortunes were going to rest on whatever this was, for better or for worse. That was a big responsibility at the time, and we were putting everything we had on what we’d done. So it was just traumatic. And you’re young, 24 or 25, and you don’t have the stability or the history to be able to put it in any kind of perspective. It was just all that there is and all that there was gonna be. [It felt like] there were gonna be no more records after this record. We were all going off a cliff the next day, as far as my approach to it. It was just, “This was it.”This re-telling can always be eye-lollingly dramatic - is all of this true, or did you just go into a studio and make an album? Which is why I like to put up Bruce's cinematic sense for melodrama face-to-face with reality:
Jon Landau, as co-producer, helped persuade him to let go. According to writer Dave Marsh, Landau called Springsteen and said, ‘Look, you’re not supposed to like it. You think Chuck Berry sits around listening to ‘Maybelline’ and when he does hear it, don’t you think he wishes a few things could be changed.? C’mon, it’s time to put the record out.’
It's my favorite Springsteen record and it's the one that made his career, and it was a highlight in one of my earliest posts ever, from November 2005:
I've always said the title track is THE greatest single of the last 30 years - shambolic Phil Spector sounds falling down the stairwell, with words that should mean everything to a small town boy like me. Why every band in the world hasn't tried to reproduce this sound is a mystery to me, but fuck em. The piano echo on Backstreets, the anguished singing taking me back home, and Jungleland unfolding piece by piece until you're in the middle of the street in the middle of the night in the middle of who the fuck knows what. Overblown? Yes. Dramatic? Certainly. Over the top? Isn't fucking everything when you're young, when you're running free, when you've found something to believe in, like Bruce did with the actual power of rock n roll? And really, shouldn't it be? You got your whole fucking life to be bored to death; anyone can be boring at any moment. It'd sure be nice to reach for something so great and unattainable these days; its all we can seem to do to get thru the day while hoping we "get" the White Stripes coolness, or Modest Mouse's emo-ness, or Wilco's...well, whatever it is that makes people like Wilco. On Born to Run, Bruce threw it all the table - love, youth, hope, at least HOPING for excitement if nothing else. You can almost picture Bruce pickin you up in a '70 Chevelle and hittin the Dairy Queen, tryin to to talk to chicks, getting ignored, driving up and down the only road in town, no money, no friends, but fuck, there's gotta be something else out there better than this. I felt the same way back in high school, standing around in French's parking lot, sipping a Big Gulp while dudes 10 years older tried to get girls to take them to the prom. Yeesh. Christ, look at me blathering bout Bruce. I don’t want no lovefest here, but hey, sit in your room tonight, turn all the lights off, and put on Born to Run. Born to Run will never, ever let you down.
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