In celebration of Bruce Springsteen turning 50, we revisit Dan Caffrey’s ranking of The Boss’ classic album Born to Run. This article was originally published in 2015.
Ranking the Album is a feature in which we take an iconic or beloved record and dare to play favorites. It’s a testament to the fact that classic album or not, there are still some tracks we root for more than others to pop up in our shuffles. Today, in honor of the 50th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, we rank the iconic LP from best to greatest.
Born to Run turns 50 today. If you’re interested in the arduous making of the album — a sort of last-ditch effort for Bruce Springsteen to reach the superstar status he craved (working-class roots be damned) — or how it represented the decline of the American dream, there’s no shortage of great retrospectives out there from many other reputable publications. While these chronicles are more than worthy in their own right, I’m also not interested in how many guitar overdubs were recorded for the title track, or regurgitating the “lyrics by Dylan, sung by Orbison, and produced by Spector” line (although I guess I just did). Both of these bits of lore — and many other stories surrounding the album — are true, but that’s just what they are this late in the game: lore. The Springsteen mythology has been endlessly picked over, reassembled, torn apart, then built up again over the years, usually into a bigger, stronger, more godlike statue.
So for this installment of Ranking the Album, I’d like to put the grown-up critic in me to sleep and let my inner nine-year-old stay up past his bedtime. That’s the age when I first heard Born to Run during a road trip or two to Cocoa Beach, Florida, on my dad’s stereo while he was lifting weights, and just playing around the house whenever my family was cleaning, eating, or doing nothing at all. I’m sure I heard it all in one sitting at some point, but when you’re a kid, you can only remember one or two songs at a time. As such, I recall Born to Run slowly revealing itself across several months. That’s how I remember it, so for all intents and purposes, that’s how it happened.
And don’t worry, I didn’t write this in the tone of a precocious elementary schooler with purposely bad grammar and the verbal cadence of a propeller beanie spinning around and round on his head. I tried instead to channel those thoughts that bloom when hearing an album you love for the first time — intangible and more akin to images and pangs and colors than a refined analytical vocabulary. Some analysis, cynicism, and hindsight still crept in there, naturally, and there are several leaps and backpedals into time (I’m a 31-year-old man these days), but for the most part, it’s hard for me to not still hear this album the way I first heard it. I know “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” has nothing to do with the show Taxi, and “She’s the One” has little association with the film Heavyweights, but, as you’ll soon read, those connections, silly as they are, will always exist for me.
So let’s do it together. Let’s take a stab at music-lover romance as we disappear down Flamingo Lane or Thunder Road or Tenth Avenue or whatever your preferred Springsteen may be. Thanks for joining me.
– Dan Caffrey
Senior Staff Writer
8. NIGHT
Max Weinberg’s driftwood-on-oil-drum snaps are always jarring after the fading boardwalk party of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”, and as a kid, this bothers you. As you get older, you learn that music critics call these sorts of dips “filler” and that they’re a necessary device. Every great album needs a a valley where you can come down from the mountain and take a breather. Born to Run just happens to be an album so anthemic that one of its valleys is a song like “Night” — still one of the fastest and most urgent tracks on the record.
As you get older yet again, you learn that great albums don’t actually have filler at all, and that “gems” or “deep cuts” are perhaps more accurate descriptors, even if The Boss did the guy-getting-off-work thing better on his next album, Darkness on the Edge of Town. Your mom and dad play this CD around the house, too, and even at nine, you could tell that the two works were markedly different, despite containing similar stories: Springsteen the idealist versus Springsteen the realist. And when it comes to getting-off-work songs, you’ll eventually prefer realism, especially once you start working yourself. For the record, this will always be at an office, not a factory.
7. SHE’S THE ONE
In 1995, a kids movie about a fat camp will come out. It’s called Heavyweights. You haven’t watched the film much since then because you remember it being great and are afraid you’ll feel otherwise if you revisit it. You remember there being a montage set to a song called “I Want Candy”. It sounds an awful lot like “She’s the One”, which, you’ll find out later, is because they both utilize the syncopated “Bo Diddley Beat”.
You don’t know any of this as a nine-year-old, so whenever you hear “She’s the One”, you have visions of chubby kids running around the woods, tying domineering counselors to trees, and pigging out on sweets they’ve stashed around their cabin. It doesn’t matter that the song has nothing to do with this. As an adult, you’ll tell fellow critics it’s one of your least favorite tracks on Born to Run because of its repetition (it’s the only song that feels long to you), and for the fact that Springsteen wasn’t yet old enough to accurately write about love (a stance you cribbed from both Robert Christgau and Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson).
But those are lies. The real reason “She’s the One” kind of irks you is because it reminds you of a camp counselor getting punched in the balls. That’s still pretty funny, but it breaks up Born to Run’s consistent imagery of muscle cars, motorcycles, factories, boardwalks, rumbles, and bank heists.
6. TENTH AVENUE FREEZE-OUT
This is the one your parents always sing along to, except for the one line sung-said by Clarence Clemons. “And kid you better get the picture,” he purrs soothingly and almost inaudibly. Out of all the songs on the album, it’s the one that reminds you most of the ’70s — Steven Van Zandt’s horned-out intro and bridge touched with just a sprinkling of desperation, aka a young Springsteen’s ceaseless quest to be a rock star, even if it means trudging through the snow to a gig after the band’s van breaks down.
That image of vehicular malfunction is a far cry from the other auto-related icon the intro and bridge remind you of: the theme from Taxi. This will become a less accurate comparison as you get older, but the footage of an automobile successfully making its way to and from New York becomes an apt metaphor for the career of Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band following the success of Born to Run.
