On its 30th anniversary, Brian Boyd hears from its co-producer how one of rock's greatest albums almost didn't come off.
DIFFICULT to believe it now, but, just before Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen was about to be dropped. He had released two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, that received great reviews but simply didn't sell. His record company, Columbia (now Sony) was going to radio stations, removing his records and replacing them with those of a new signing, Billy Joel.
Born to Run was Springsteen's make-or-break third album, and the initial sessions were a disaster.
Springsteen and producer/manager Mike Appel had spent six months working on the title track alone - with no joy. They tried organ, synth, glockenspiel, female backing vocalists; nothing worked. Two members of the E Street band walked out. In desperation, Springsteen turned to a sympathetic music journalist, Jon Landau.
"Like a lot of music journalists, I used to be in a band but I wasn't terribly good," says Landau. "I was a rock'n'roll fanatic, so I started writing reviews for magazines. I was picked up by Jan Wenner when he started Rolling Stone magazine in 1967 and I became their chief rock critic. Just after the Asbury Park album came out, I went to a Springsteen concert in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
Landau wrote of the show: "Springsteen is like a cross between Chuck Berry, early Bob Dylan and Marlon Brando. Every gesture, every syllable adds something to his ultimate goal - to liberate our spirit when he liberates his by baring his soul through his music. Many try, few succeed, none more than he today. He does it all, he is a rock'n'roll punk, a Latin street poet, a ballet dancer, an actor, a joker, a bar-band leader, hot-shit rhythm guitar player, extraordinary singer and a truly great rock'n'roll composer. Last Thursday at the Harvard Square Theatre, I saw my rock'n'roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock'n'roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen."
"I had no idea the quote would go on to become famous," says Landau. "There were still people at his label who were, despite everything, very supportive of Bruce, and they pulled out this quote and used it in advertising campaigns. It reinvigorated him. I met him at another concert after this and the next day he called me up. We talked for hours - about music, ideas, about everything. In fact, we've been having the same conversation for the last 30 years."
When Landau arrived at the Born to Run sessions, he didn't know what his role was supposed to be. Already in place was Appel, a longtime and fiercely loyal Springsteen associate, and although Landau had played in a few bands he knew nothing about production.
"The first thing I did was to move them out of the crappy studio they were in and relocate to the Record Plant studio in New York. As time went on, Bruce came to lean on me more than Mike Appel. It became apparent that I had been brought in to tighten up his writing and do something about the arrangements on the album - they were all over the place. Also, the E Street Band were very much a jam band. There would be long solos all over the place. I just got them to simplify everything, especially the arrangements.
"For all I did, though, you have to remember that without Bruce's songs and vision there would have been nothing."
Released in August 1975, Born to Run tapped into all of rock'n'roll's most potent myths. Replete with quasi-religious and beat generation imagery, it's a profoundly romantic paean to rock's idealised history. "Everything I knew and dreamed about was packed into those songs," Springsteen said of the album on its release.
From the opening Thunder Road to epic closing track Jungleland, the album features all the characters that still populate Springsteen's lyrics. While critics frothed about the "new Dylan", they missed the point that the album has nothing to do with Dylan and everything to do with Roy Orbison - who is even name-checked on one of the songs.
"Honestly, I knew it was going to be phenomenal," says Landau. "Not just because of the songs, but because of Bruce's determination. I knew there was no way Born to Run was going to miss in achieving its musical goals."
To mark its 30th anniversary, the album has been re-released with an accompanying live album and a fascinating 90-minute "making of" documentary, where all concerned talk about what Bruce's "determination" really meant. Apart from spending six months on one song, there were endless 18-hour sessions. The very last note on the album was recorded as the tour van was literally revving up outside the studio - the band finished at 8am and drove straight to New England for a gig that night.
To get some idea of how gruelling the recording was, engineer Jimmy Iovine recalls gnawing on the foil wrapper of chewing gum sticks just so the pain of the foil on his dental fillings would keep him awake. There's also a beautiful story of how Steve Van Zandt came to join the band. A friend of Springsteen's, Van Zandt had dropped by the studio when acclaimed session musicians Randy and Michael Brecker were wrestling with the horn parts on Tenth Avenue Freezeout.
Van Zandt, who knew nothing whatsoever about horn arrangements but was dressed in a zoot suit and fedora, improvised a few "do do do's" which the horn players played. On the DVD, Iovine notes that Van Zandt was taken seriously because "he dressed like a guy who knew how horn parts should be played". As a result, Van Zandt was asked to join the E Street Band, and he remains a member today.
As a result of his contributions, Landau was credited, alongside official producer Mike Appel, as co-producer. "I sort of made it up as I went along," he says of his production duties. "If you walk in and say things like 'let's try that again', people react to you like you're a producer, so you just take it from there. I certainly didn't have a George Martin type approach to production.
"What I remember most, though, about my contribution is how Steve Van Zandt referred to me as 'an educated man' and how this was a new thing for the E Street Band. Now, I'm not super-educated, but I think what he was referring to was how, at that age, I tried to have a bigger picture of the world."
Although the album was mixed safely enough, no one seemed to know what the term "mastering" actually meant.
"We had the finished, mastered album, but at this stage Bruce was on tour and in Milwaukee or somewhere and he still had to sign off on the album. We got a copy down to him, he listened to it and promptly threw it into the motel swimming pool. He said it was never going to be released and either we scrap the whole idea or go back and re-record everything. The same day, I had Columbia on the phone saying can we have the album please? and I'm trying to talk Bruce around.
"As it happened, he only had a crappy stereo system where he was so the album did sound bad. But also he had put absolutely everything in the record and maybe was just a bit too close to it. We finally got it out, with no one knowing about all this drama."
The album propelled Bruce to global stardom. But The Springsteen/Appel/Landau joint production/management arrangement didn't hold and there followed a series of nasty lawsuits between Appel and Springsteen before Landau was appointed his sole manager. Appel does crop up in the DVD, and Springsteen speaks very highly of him.
Landau remains Springsteen's main man, although he did also go on to produce Jackson Browne and manage Shania Twain. And no, in the intervening 30 years, he's never seen any other future of rock'n'roll types - "although I am really impressed by Bright Eyes".
Despite pressure from fans and label alike, Landau says there will never be a sequel to Born to Run (although you could reasonably argue that all of Springsteen's albums have been sequels). "The album was a culmination of something very special for Bruce," he says. "It can never be repeated."
The 30th anniversary edition of Born to Run is on the Sony label
