Special Collection Expands Again
Microfilming Our Oldest, Rarest Documents
Special Colllection Expands
5,000th Document Enters the Collection
A Request to Help Us Document The
Seeger Sessions
4,000th Donation Fills a Historic Gap
Leibovitz Magazine Cover Wins Voting By Springsteen
Fans
The Born To Run Reviewers In Their
Own Words, 30 Years Ago
Third Rare Pre-E Street Band Document Enters
the Collection
See also:
Previous Collection News stories
Donor News Stories
The Fans' Favorite Covers
The Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection have initiated a major expansion of the Special Collection, accepting donations of newspaper articles which focus primarily on concerts, interviews, album reviews and personal milestones of both Springsteen and members of his bands. The expansion is the largest in the history of the Special Collection and features articles from newspapers around the world.
Among the first 2,718 items in the new category is Springsteen's birth notice from The Asbury Park Evening Press of Sept. 24, 1949 with an incorrect spelling of Springsteen's last name. Also included are reviews of Child and Steel Mills concerts, along with articles from some of the E Street Band's underdocumented performances on college and university campuses.
These holdings will be listed on a new page, "Newspaper Articles" and will be available for public review once preservation details have been finalized. For more information, or to discuss potential donations, please write to pbjcrane@erols.com.
Thanks to a grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, many of the oldest and rarest documents in the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection are being microfilmed in order to ensure their preservation and ultimately make them significantly more accessible to the Library's visitors.
The project involves over one-fourth of the Collection--some 1,390 documents. Effective immediately, and through most of the rest of 2007, these documents will be away from the Asbury Park Public Library and unavailable for public examination.
The Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection said in a statement that microfilm will allow users to read documents such as yearbooks from Springsteen's four years at Freehold Regional High School, the collegiate literary magazine containing his first published writings, and the original Steel Mill tour book without making an appointment, as is required to view original documents.
The Friends expressed appreciation to the New Jersey Historical Commission for its ongoing support of the Special Collection. Microfilming work is being done at the OCLC Preservation Center in Bethlehem, PA.
All items removed from the Library for microfilming are identified on the Special Collection's website, and on the Collection's printed locator guide held at the Library's circulation desk, by underlining. All other documents in the Collection remain available for publication examination, in accordance with the Collection's access rules.
Effective immediately, the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection is accepting donations of printed items documenting aspects of Springsteen history above and beyond those currently in the Special Collection. The expansion is the result of suggestions from Springsteen fans that a wider variety of printed items, including official press releases, merchandise catalogs, and price lists, should be added to the Collection.
Among the first 28 items in the new category is the text of a 1996 speech in which then-Vice President Al Gore referenced "Dancing In The Dark," and a menu from the Washington D.C. restaurant Childe Harold, where Springsteen performed in 1973 and where diners can order the "Bruce Springsteen," a homemade crab cake sandwich on an English muffin.
These holdings will be listed on a new page, "Selected Printed Items." For more information, or to discuss potential donations, please write to pbjcrane@erols.com.
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| The 5,000th issue in the Springsteen Collection is the April 13-19, 1985 issue of TV & FM from Japan |
A 1985 Japanese magazine from a large private collection in Germany is the 5,000th document to enter the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection at the Asbury Park Public Library.
Featuring a classic Born In The U.S.A. cover photograph over an ecstatic headline reading "Springsteen Has Come," the April 13-19, 1985 issue of TV & FM magazine reflects the frenzy in the Japanese media when Springsteen arrived for his first tour of the island nation.
The issue, in pristine condition, was sent to the Collection along with more than a hundred others by Margrit Roepke of Hamburg, Germany who built a huge personal collection during the 1980s through trades with fans around the world.
"It was a pleasure that I could help the Collection," she said. "During my wildest Bruce years, we had great fun. Now that we all have personal lives, we unfortunately lose sight of each other. But what still is in our hearts is Bruce's music."
Christopher Phillips, president of The Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Collection, said the Roepke donation "further solidifies the Special Collection as the world's largest publicly accessible collection of printed documents detailing the lives and times of Bruce Springsteen and members of his bands. We're grateful to Margrit, and to all of our donors, who have helped the Collection grow both in quantity and amazing quality." The Collection, with publications dating from 1964, contains books, magazines and other documents published in 40 countries.
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| Margrit Roepke and Dan French |
A native of Hamburg, Margrit became a Springsteen fan late in 1980 with the release of The River, the singer's fifth album, and before long had discovered Darkness on the Edge of Town, released in 1978. "This album is still best for me, especially the songs "Something in the Night" and "Racing in the Street," which are my all-time favorites." She also fell in love with Springsteen's legendary live performances, and during the '80s and early '90s, traveled to shows in Frankfurt, Munich, the Meadowland of New Jersey, London, Birmingham, Rotterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Basel, Munich, back to the Meadowlands, back to Paris, and Los Angeles. "Afterwards, only the shows in Germany."
She also became friends with Dan French, publisher of the early UK fanzine Point Blank, who introduced her to potential trading partners in the fan community. In 1989, French, Roepke, Dave Percival (publisher of the The Fever fanzine), Chris Hunt and dozens of contributors pooled their knowledge of Bruce books and magazines to publish Have You Heard The News, a landmark publication listing all known Bruce cover magazines, books and specials from the early 1970s through 1989.
With the release of Bruce Springsteen's 21st album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, the Springsteen Special Collection is asking fans to assist in documenting the way magazines, fanzines, and the internet cover the album and tour which follows the April 25 release.
There are three ways you can help, according to The Friends of the Springsteen Special Collection, who manage the Collection in cooperation with Library staff.
(1) Donate magazines and fanzines which cover The Seeger Sessions. We're especially interested in album and tour reviews, critical commentaries and analysis, editorials, and interviews.
(2) Alert us to insightful Seeger Session articles on the internet. Printed copies of major internet articles comprise a rapidly growing segment of the Special Collection, and we're expecting to see many new articles in the coming weeks.
(3) Someday, in the not too distant future, we plan to begin accepting newspaper articles into the Special Collection. We're not quite ready, but it would be great if you could save Seeger Session newspaper articles for the day when we can begin accepting them.
When you find Seeger Session articles in magazines and fanzines, please email us the name and date of the publication to us at at pbjcrane@erols.com. We'll let you know if the publication has already been donated, or if it is still needed, and where to send the publication. When you find interesting internet articles, send the link to pbjcrane@erols.com and we'll take it from there. Any first time donor of materials will be added to the Donors List on our Donors and Supporters page.
In September of 1975, a month after the release of Born To Run and a month before the simultaneous Time and Newsweek covers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band found themselves in the American heartland--Iowa, to be precise; the Hawkeye state where, as the state song has it, "fields of tasseled corn" and "wondrous prairies shine/To yonder sunset's purpling line."
One barnstorming stop in particular might never have been happened, especially on the Born To Run tour, except for two facts. Grinnell, the 25th largest city (population 8,400) in the nation's 20th smallest state, had a college. And in March of 1974, 20 months prior to the tour, a Grinnell College official had been persuaded to book the band--despite the fact that Springsteen's first two albums had been commercial flops.
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| Photo: Grinnell College, Jonathan Daen |
Down through the years, very little has been written about the Sept. 20, 1975 show in tiny Darby Gym on the Grinnell campus. But that changed in a major way recently when The Grinnell Magazine, a quarterly for alumni, faculty, students and friends of the College, published "The East Street Shuffle, 30 Years After the 'Springsteen Invasion'" as the cover story for its Fall 2005 issue. The issue, donated to the Springsteen Special Collection by editor Jacqueline Hartling Stolze, who also wrote the cover article, is the 4,000th publication to join the Springsteen Special Collection.
Stolze's article, told through the eyes of people who were lucky enough to be there, documents a fascinating day replete with fears, tensions, and exhilarating rock and roll.
The fears started early. In Iowa, fanatical rock travelers are not an every day occurrence and as the concert approached, college administrators were worried about rumors that the concert would be overrun by crazed fans "from the East." Students, Stolze wrote, "were advised to be particularly cautious, and to carry their IDs and lock their doors and windows. It was practically a Red Alert for this small Iowa town." Pinkerton guards were hired to put down rioting in case things got out of hand once the 200 tickets set aside for the invading hordes had been snapped up.
For Bruce and the band, the day began quietly enough with breakfast at the Silhouette Restaurant (Bruce had oatmeal, eggs and a milkshake, according to a waitress), and ended late with an after-show party where, according to the calculations of a Grinnell student, Bruce went broke buying pizza. In between:
Thirty years later, during a visit to Grinnell, Max Weinberg looked back fondly on the experience. "It was wild," Weinberg told The Grinnell Magazine recently. "I only spent one Saturday night in Grinnell, but it was wild." And while there may be more tasseled corn in Iowa than there is in New Jersey, Max said the heartland "was an area of the country that really responded to [Bruce's music] early and hard ... We were thankful for the support we got from our Midwest fans."
Annie Leibovitz's famous photograph of Bruce Springsteen virtually airborne against the backdrop of an American flag won top honors in fan voting for the 25 all-time favorite Springsteen magazine covers.
The finalists were announced by The Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection after a month long online election. Christopher Phillips, editor of the Springsteen quarterly Backstreets and president of the Friends organization, said the winning covers were published in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Japan, Greece, France and the United States and cover virtually all phases of Springsteen's Hall of Fame career. Leibovitz' photo, on the cover of the Nov. 15, 1990 Rolling Stone, was one of three by the celebrated photographer to finish in the top 25.
Colleen Sheehy, curator of Springsteen: Troubadour of the Highway, the first ever museum exhibition devoted to Springsteen's career, said Leibovitz's photo captured Springsteen "as a rock 'n' roll super hero, mythological, appearing almost like the Greek god Mercury, with wings on his feet," while "his ripped, worn jeans, white t-shirt, baseball cap, and beat up guitar convey an everyman quality." This duality, Sheehy said, embodies both the energy and buoyancy of Springsteen's music and "cemented his connection with deep seated American themes, principles, and dreams," although the juxtaposition with the flag would at times prove troublesome for Springsteen during the mid 1980s when social conservatives used the flag to depict values which were at odds with his own.
Newsweek's Oct. 27, 1975 cover of Springsteen as a rising star, photographed by Mary Alfieri, finished second. In very close balloting, Time's Aug. 5, 2002 cover, with a somber portrait photographed in the post 9-11 era by Gregory Heisler, narrowly edged out Time's illustrated cover by Kim Whitesides from Oct. 27, 1975 for third place.
Director of education at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Sheehy described Springsteen on the Newsweek cover as "something to behold: his eagerness, his energy, his beauty, his big heart, his big dreams-and that shaggy hair and beard. He's looking into the light, as though anticipating what lies ahead, which turned out to be a career that even he could not have imagined in 1975. At the same time, the title 'the making of a rock star' now seems pale and somehow doesn't do justice to what has unfolded since then."
The Heisler photo, Sheehy said, was taken at a time when Springsteen had become "our folk philosopher, our public poet, our citizen leader," expressing the deep and confused emotions that many Americans felt and the political questions that many Americans were pondering. "He did this with a plainspoken, poetic language and forthrightness that eluded politicians, who bumbled and sputtered and seemed to fake courage and conviction." In the Time photograph, Sheehy said, "with Springsteen never looking more serious, his eyes pierce right through the phoniness and distance of mass media to speak right to our souls, something that few leaders were doing at the time."
Rounding out the top five was an exuberant dual portrait of Springsteen and long-time E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt shot during the band's Reunion Tour and published in the June 2000 issue of the Spanish publication Ruta 66.
Along with Leibovitz, other repeat photographers on the top 25 list were Alfieri and Neal Preston, both with two winning photographs.
The election followed an extensive selection process during which more than 750 Springsteen magazine covers in the Springsteen Special Collection were narrowed down to a group of 50 prior to the voting. The election did not include covers of fan magazines, tour books, song books, other books, or comic books, all of which are included in the Collection's holdings of over 4,000 publications.
In total, seven of the winners were published in the 1970s, six in the 1980s, nine in the 1990s, and three in the 2000s. The covers were almost equally divided between photographs of Springsteen's epic live performance and images posed by renowned photographers, including Leibovitz' Feb. 5, 1981 Rolling Stone cover of a bundled up Springsteen ice skating on a deserted pond.
During 1973 and 1974, fans who had been to Bruce Springsteen's shows in the clubs and theaters, where he was building a solid cult following, snatched up Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. To the rest of the record buying world, he was largely unknown, and with Dark Side of the Moon, Houses of the Holy, and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ruling the charts, Bruce's first two albums were commercial flops.
In the rock press, critics gave both albums a passing grade, some warily, others finding much to like. Creem critics Robert Christgau and Dave Marsh, for instance, thought enough of Greetings to publish favorable reviews in back-to-back issues. Rolling Stone called The Wild, The Innocent "gritty and serious." If none of this translated into significant sales, it did at least start a buzz that would resonate through the long months of 1974 and early 1975 as Springsteen struggled under intense pressure from his record label to produce his third album.
When Born to Run was finally released in late summer of 1975, the buzz transmuted into a firestorm of critical acclamation. "If I seem to OD on superlatives," wrote Lester Bangs in Creem, "it's only because Born to Run demands them." Famed Philadelphia DJ Ed Sciaky wrote in Phonograph that Born to Run was "a magnificent album, lyrically and musically." From the French journal Extra Nouvelle: "This record is fabulous – let us not be afraid of the word." There were doubters then, as now, but as the following reviews excerpted from publications in The Bruce Springsteen Special Collection amply demonstrate, Born to Run simultaneously hit the most of the critical press and public consciousness with supernova megawatts that continue to illuminate the way, 30 years down the road.
THE REVIEWS
"[His] lyrical approach is perfectly relayed through music that is, to say the least, stunning. The eight songs on Born To Run are all striking with Springsteen's powerful, expressive voice providing a punch unlike that of any other singer ... It's useless to say that one song is better than the next, as each is potent in some way. After several listenings, the subtle beauty of the vocals, the instrumentation and the arrangements, combined as a unit, become profound ."
– Bill Scott, NOW, Sept. 5, 1975
"Born To Run is aimed right. It just doesn't go off ... Though considerable attention has been paid to the arrangements, many of the tracks amount to an attempt to evolve an impression of artificial verite as Springsteen sweats through his urban rock-renewal programme ... Many of the melodies, riffs, rhythms, and hooks sound as if they floated straight off the car-radio and into Springsteen's subconscious ... The title cut is a distillation of Spector without the charisma, 'She's The One' is Bo Diddley, 'Jungleland' starts off by sounding like The Who ('Baba O'Riley'), cops a few licks from Reed and Rundgren, and finished off keeping the listener entertained until the next Laura Lyro album."
– Roy Carr, NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS (UK), Sept. 6, 1975
"Three tracks, 'Night,' 'Jungleland' and the beautiful reflective 'Meeting Across The River' are a model of structure composition. But elsewhere the band fails to convey the variation of mood that Springsteen's songs demand ... This is not an essential album to have in the way that the previous two were, and yet my initial mixed feelings of surprise and slight disappointment have abated. Springsteen's new musicians have got the chops alright while his own brilliance is now contained rather than allowed to run free. But the point is that it's still there and it's the distinction from the two previous efforts that makes this album so interesting. I have grown to love it but newcomers to Bruce's music would be better advised to check out what the critics have been raving about in the past. Old fans will need to persevere."
– Jerry Gilbert, SOUNDS, Sept. 13, 1975
"Springsteen's new songs are no longer rooted solely in images from his scuffling boardwalk youth: he's now taken the emotional gruel of those narratives and put them into overdrive by adding his overwhelming fear of entrapment. Literally every song is touched with that drive to escape, from the desperately romantic 'Thunder Road' to the screaming realizations of 'Backstreets.' The more I listen the more I think that Born To Run is Springsteen's most intensely personal album, with the musical components from his favorite period, early sixties Spector-sound power-drive, and the emotional meat from both his struggling days and the here-and-now."
– John Milward, CHICAGO READER, Sept. 19, 1975
"Born To Run is a magnificent album, lyrically and musically. If it seems enigmatically produced, give it time. Springsteen's visions combined simple elements into an intrinsically complex blend of sounds, producing rich and most powerful rewards. While this is not live Springsteen, it is Bruce's effort at letting us hear these songs as he hears them, at recreating on record what's in his head...Springsteen deals primarily in emotions, using his story-songs not so much to tell a story as create, piece by piece, character by character, a fantasy world, an opera of images rich in feeling. The songs hold-up individually and totaled become a vision of the violence and tenderness, of life on the street."
– Ed Sciaky, PHONOGRAPH, October 1975
"The biggest American revelation of 1975 will without doubt be Bruce Springsteen, whose shows at the Bottom Line in New York in August triggered a veritable glowing hysteria in the press and in the public. Bluntly called "the savior of rock" etc etc, for the last two years, he was immediately labeled as 'the new Dylan,' (but) has presently freed himself up from this heavy load and offers a rock alloy that is very funky and extremely poetic which captivates both small and large. One will quickly be able to judge with his third album, Born to Run, recently released amid the highest honors on the charts. It's a beautiful collective hysteria."
– BEST (France), October 1975
"Musically, the album is built around the rhythm section, the piano, and varying lead instruments. Each performs a function, both in the sound and the development of the lyric themes. A number of the songs begin in the same way as 'Backstreets,' building slowly around an intensifying piano rhythm, above which Springsteen first speaks, second sings, and third howls the words of a world without escape. Through the first verses the lead instrument cuts across the rhythm, then takes off in a mid-song solo, finally returning to echo the words on the run-in. It's the oldest trick in the book – counterpointing an endless piano with sharp cutting leads – but it's rarely been done better, and it's essential to the overall vision ... The two main lead instruments are Clarence Clemons' saxophone, which adds a touch of sleaziness to the images, and Bruce's guitar. As is apparent from the cover, he wears it low on the hip, and he uses it throughout like a weapon: a Bo Diddleyish hammer in 'She's The One', a B-movie 'strangler-in-the-fog' in 'Backstreets'', a scythe slashing Who riffs across fast-flowing piano in 'Jungleland'. If there's one criticism of this album it's that he doesn't use the guitar often enough. Whenever it appears it's mesmerizingly violent, the perfect foil to Roy Bittan's rolling keyboard work."
– Dave Downing, LET IT ROCK (UK), October 1975
"Bruce Springsteen, at the time wrongly launched as another Dylan-imitator, is finally going to make it, in spite of the 'CBS sales talk' and the, after all, very unprofessional sounding Greetings from Asbury Park record ...[H]is third record should be seen as a new beginning. Springsteen is making very grown-up music nowadays. He's no longer trying to sing about his frustrations like some mediaeval minstrel, but he's busy creating his own sound, which goes further than Dylan's electronic inventions by the time of Blonde on Blonde ... It's a new episode in the great American tradition from Seeds, Dylan and Doors. All that aggression, which was temporarily put into the Vietnam war, is now being put into music again."
– VERONICA (The Netherlands) Oct. 4, 1975
"It is a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on him — a '57 Chevy running on melted down Crystals records that shuts down every claim that has been made. And it should crack his future wide open ...'Born to Run' is the motto that speaks for the album's tales, just as the guitar figure that runs through the title song — the finest compression of rock & roll thrill since the opening riffs of 'Layla' — speaks for its music ... The songs, the best of them, are adventures in the dark, incidents of wasted fury. Tales of kids born to run who lose anyway, the songs can, as with 'Backstreets,' hit so hard and fast that it is almost impossible to sit through them without weeping. And yet the music is exhilarating. You may find yourself shaking your head in wonder, smiling through tears at the beauty of it all ... It is a measure of Springsteen's ability to make his music bleed that 'Backstreets,' which is about friendship and betrayal between a boy and a girl, is far more deathly than 'Jungleland,' which is about a gang war. The music isn't 'better,' nor is the singing — but it is more passionate, more deathly and, necessarily, more alive. That, if anything, might be the key to this music: As a ride through terror, it resolves itself finally as a ride into delight."
– Greil Marcus, ROLLING STONE, Oct. 9, 1975
"Springsteen joined the pantheon with the release of Born To Run. The music is urgent, full of abrupt stops and startling changes of tempo; the lyrics tell powerful stories of characters on the edge, living out rock and roll dreams ... Springsteen's characters are 'tramps ... born to run' whose glory lies in a moment, not in a lifetime. Their dream is to flash just once; to chance everything in hopes of grabbing some onto something they can call their own. These are the dreams that dissolve into lives of quiet desperation."
– David McGee, RECORD WORLD, Oct. 25, 1975
"Born To Run is a bridge between Springsteen the raffish rocker and the more ragged, introverted street poet of the first two albums. Although he maintains that he 'hit the right spot' on Born To Run, it is the second album, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, that seems to go deepest. A sort of free-association autobiography, it comes closest to the wild fun-house refractions of Springsteen's imagination."
– Jay Cocks, TIME, Oct. 27, 1975
"This record is fabulous – let us not be afraid of the word. Lyrics and composer are remarkable, and Bruce also has a personality that will not leave his listener indifferent ...One thinks a bit of Roger McGuinn, of the Band and of Dylan but always from now on we'll have to get used to thinking of Bruce Springsteen as a personality and an original creator because this is one of the best records of all time."
– EXTRA NOUVELLE (France), November 1975
"'Thunder Road' opens with harmonica; then the first sounds of the voice grab you throughout the body. As if Dylan had a son who sings harder than he, but not Dylan, there will never be another Dylan, the old Bob did nicely, and Springsteen is well there, [with his] infuriating words, sentences and phrases to place himself abruptly bitching toward the black sky ... The band sounds ruthlessly fat, but the organ and piano parts alternate with subtlety, and the magnificent chorus of black sax knows how to gush so truly, at the precise instant, just when one needs the haughty splendor of a saxophone ... Springsteen croaks out his images or his passions in a terrifying manner, like a tightrope walker too drunk and then a little too amorous, but so strong that he can outdo you with a monstrous riff and prop you up with his grin ... .[F]or all those who climb the walls at night, be happy, Bruce Springsteen is for you. The rest [i.e. the rock and roll alternatives] is nothing but junk made of shit."
– François Ducray, ROCK & FOLK (France), November 1975
"Springsteen's landscapes of urban desolation are all heightened, on fire, alive. His characters act in symbolic gestures, bigger than life. Furthermore, there's absolutely nothing in his music that's null, detached, or perverse and even his occasional world-weariness carries a redemptive sense of lost battles passionately fought. Boredom appears to be a foreign concept to him – he reminds us what it's like to love rock 'n' roll like you just discovered it, and then seize it and make it your own with certainty and precision ... If I seem to OD on superlatives, it's only because Born To Run demands them; the music races in a flurry of Dylan and Morrison and Phil Spector and a little of both Lou Reed and Roy Orbison, luxuriating in them and an American moment caught at last, again, and bursting with pride ... In a time of squalor and belittled desire, Springsteen's music is majestic and passionate with no apologies."
– Lester Bangs, CREEM, November 1975
"What we have is high quality, tense, often tearing, thriving, sometimes irritating to the point of flipping-out, heavy but not physical, sensual and mind-blowing, skillful, and with each note, each line, a new feeling. Born To Run is a mature record from a hyper-sensible poet and musician ... The American rock magazine, 'Crawdaddy'still refers to Bruce Springsteen as "Bruce Dylan", but since the release of his second album Springsteen has proved his worth over his idols to the people who didn't believe in him. His own material is far away from the folk-rock concept of Dylan and compared to him, Bruce deals better with foreign influences ... If anything, Born To Run is a little like Astral Weeks was for Van Morrison, the final and logical step for a musical past ... where comparisons don't work anymore, where he would simply be someone who sings his own songs ... Sometimes Springsteen is just a little over the top, his energy is just out of control, but it's this energy, the continuous pulsation, that makes this record alive and compelling."
– Van Jiirgen Legath, SOUNDS (Germany) November 1975
"The forced internal rhymes of the earlier song lyrics have given way to a brash, long-lined lyricism in which focal images of cars and motorcycles, thunder, neon signs, clashing gangs, and the throbbing, sexy beat of Jersey Shore, honky-tonk fleshpots merge into as powerful a metaphor for urban America as any rock poet has yet supplied ... [W]hat is finally most impressive about Born To Run are the song lyrics, which communicate a street-life experience that is both personal and mythic. With this accomplishment, Springsteen embodies the myth of rock & roll as an urban, proletarian outburst. By personifying the poet-hoot, boy-man, rebel-hero of American mass culture from Brando, Dean, and Presley through Dylan, Springsteen reminds us that rock & roll came from the streets as a cultural necessity, an instinctual urge toward self-transcendence and self-definition."
– Stephen Holden, CIRCUS RAVES, December 1975
"This was one of those LPs awaited in Spain ... (because of) the entire range of commentary which we have read in the American press about the Springsteen "boom" ... Born To Run is one of the best albums which I have seen this year, of absolute quality, extraordinary rhythms and a series of fantastic themes, all dominated by Bruce's talent and primarily his voice. There is nothing wasted in the album in any sense. The central theme is a display of energy, but 'Night', 'Jungleland', 'Backstreets', and 'Thunder Road' don't take a back seat. And it is not only Bruce, but his group, the production, the depth of all the work put together by a great artist at this time ... Springsteen is a 'boom' in flesh and blood, an authentic hero of the rock scene of 1975 and the 1970s."
– DISCO EXPRESS (Spain) Dec. 5, 1975
TRACK BY TRACK
Thunder Road
"The images ... touch us down in our core. In 'Thunder Road,' there is the line 'Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet'; given the symbolic importance attached to the graduation gown, it is one of rock's most powerful images. 'What else can we do now,' Springsteen asks, 'except to roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair.' In essence, your future's nil, but at least you're free, so ... take a chance."
– David McGee, RECORD WORLD, Oct. 25, 1975
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
" ... a delighted R&B song about how Springsteen formed his band, introduced by the type of prologue that rings up the curtain on Shakespearean productions."
– Stephen Holden, CIRCUS RAVES, December 1975
Night
"The title cut, a rock standard by any definition, builds an incredible energy with wall-to-wall sound. I can't remember a more thrilling song of the road. 'Night,' a less ambitious number, suffers only by comparison."
– Stephen Holden, CIRCUS RAVES, December 1975
Backstreets
"... begins with music so stately, so heartbreaking, that it might be the prelude to a rock & roll version of The Iliad."
– Greil Marcus, ROLLING STONE, Oct. 9, 1975
Born To Run
"Springsteen's characters 'sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream,' skating for a longshot in automobiles and beds with the omnipresent roar of the radio driving them on to connect anew, as even in the failure of their striving they are redeemed by Springsteen's vision: 'Tramps like us – baby, we was born to run.'"
– Lester Bangs, CREEM, November 1975
She's The One
"... an extraordinary song where all the gestures are of suffering."
– François Ducray, ROCK & FOLK (France), November 1975
Meeting Across The River
" ... a real surprise, a dramatic monologue/song, featuring the sultry trumpet of Randy Brecker."
– Ed Sciaky, PHONOGRAPH, October 1975
Jungleland
"A great hooligan tide washing through New York dusky nights, playing guitars and clawing their way toward love."
– Dave Downing, LET IT ROCK (UK) October 1975
(Special thanks to Maggie Powell, Ed Toskaner, Roy van Rees, Klaus Boettger and Deborah Robinson for translations; Dan Toskaner and the staff of the Asbury Park Public Library for research assistance; and Christopher Phillips of Backstreets for editing and encouragement. Compiled by Bob Crane.)
Note: as part of their Born To Run Anniversary coverage, The New York Times produced an online video about the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection, entitled "The Archive." The video was produced by Craig Duff and Erik Olsen, and linked from the Arts section of The Times's website.
A 1964 yearbook from Freehold Regional High School, containing the only known photo of Bruce Springsteen as a freshman, has been donated to the Springsteen Special Collection where it joins two other rare documents which predate by many years the release of Springsteen's first album.
"The Log" shows the young Springsteen seated at a classroom desk in a group of 11 Freehold freshmen. Springsteen, then 15, already had concert experience as a member of his first band, the Rogues, and was within months of joining The Castiles as a guitar player and vocalist.
Other rarities in the Collection include the 1966 issue of MOD, a New Jersey-based magazine, with the first published photo of Springsteen as a member of a band, and Seascape, the 1969 edition of the Ocean County College literary magazine, which gave Springsteen his first publication as a writer.
Acquisition of "The Log" was made possible by members of The Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection, a fan organization that supports acquisitions, management and preservation of the Special Collection.
[Older Collection News stories are available on our Previous News page.]