One Springsteen song took six months to record
After two acclaimed albums that barely sold, Bruce Springsteen gambled everything on a record built like Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. The title track alone took six months in the studio, he spent 13 hours on the guitar parts for another song, and the whole album consumed a year and a half.
By 1974 Springsteen's audience barely stretched beyond the East Coast. His two 1973 albums, starting with Greetings from Asbury Park, had won praise but few buyers, and Columbia's new management was more excited about Billy Joel. The phrase born to run came to him one night in bed at home in West Long Branch, New Jersey, and suggested a cinematic drama to match the music in his head.
Sessions began in January 1974 at 914 Sound Studios with his manager Mike Appel co-producing. Springsteen agonised over every syllable and texture, and piling instruments onto each channel of a 16-track desk made each overdub harder. Pianist David Sancious and drummer Ernest Carter left to form a jazz-fusion group and were replaced by Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, whose relaxed personalities eased the tension. When Appel mailed the title song to radio stations that November, CBS executives were angry, but the stunt built anticipation. Even so, by January 1975 the band had one finished track after more than a year.
Help came from Jon Landau, a critic who had faulted the production of the second album. In March 1975 he moved the sessions to the better-equipped Record Plant in Manhattan and urged a simple goal: make a rock and roll record. A song called Wings for Wheels became Thunder Road, and when the hired horn players arrived for Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out with nothing written, Steven Van Zandt invented their parts on the spot and soon joined the band.
Released on August 25, 1975, with a famous cover showing Springsteen leaning on saxophonist Clarence Clemons, the album reached number three in the United States. The hype provoked sceptical critics, but its songs of people longing to escape via highway and summer night caught a generation's mood. In 2003 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.
Source: Born to Run
