![]() “I didn’t even make it to class clown,” Bruce later remarked. At Freehold Regional High School, he played no sports, participated in no extracurricular activities, and barely passed his classes, according to the biographer Dave Marsh. A loner by nature, he coasted anonymously without leaving much of a mark. Home wasn’t a happy place for Springsteen, and neither was school. There wasn’t much, you know there wasn’t that much.” There were some factories, some farms and stuff, that if you didn’t go to college you ended up in. It was just the kind of area where it was real conservative. “Freehold was just a … small, narrow-minded town,” Springsteen told the English radio interviewer Roger Scott in 1984, “no different than probably any other provincial town. Reflecting on his formative years in Freehold, New Jersey, Springsteen once described the home he grew up in as a “dumpy, two-story, two-family house, next door to the gas station.” Several companies had manufacturing plants there-3M, Nescafé, the odd rug mill or paper plant-but by the post-war era, the city, like so many other middling urban areas, was dying. Others, like feminism, abortion, gay rights, busing, the tax revolt, and Christian Right politics, seemed altogether new.Ĭonsidered in this context, Bruce Springsteen’s phenomenal breakthrough in 1975 can only be understood against a backdrop of profound dislocation and urgent activism, particularly in the working-class communities that absorbed so many of the decade’s economic and cultural shocks. Some issues, like civil rights, the sexual revolution, and Vietnam, belonged as much to the ‘70s as to the ‘60s. ![]() Far from being an era of complacency and narcissism, the decade gave rise to social, political, and cultural debates that built on and even surpassed the era of Kennedy and King. Standing in sharp contrast with the turbulent ‘60s, the ‘70s seem to have given rise to a popular repudiation of the high-minded spirit evident in the civil-rights, student, and anti-war movements.īut the story of the ‘70s is much more complicated. Since 1976, when Tom Wolfe branded the seventies as “the Me Decade,” Americans have tended to write off the era as a socially and politically barren time during which millions of people descended into mindless self-absorption. The rise of Bruce Springsteen is in many ways a typical rock success story, but it also reveals a great deal about one of America’s most contested eras. each Friday afternoon on WMMS, to “officially launch the weekend.” Set against the E Street Band’s energetic blend of horns, keyboards, guitars, and percussion, “Born to Run” was a rollicking ballad of escape, packed full of cultural references that working-class listeners recognized immediately. In working-class Cleveland, the DJ Kid Leo played the song religiously at 5:55 p.m. In Philadelphia, demand for the title track was so strong that WFIL, the city’s top-40 AM station, aired it multiple times each day. Young people flooded record stores seeking copies of the new single, which didn’t yet exist, and radio stations that hadn’t been on Appel’s small distribution list bombarded him with requests for the new album, which also didn’t exist. Within weeks, it became an underground hit. Sensing the need for a smash, in late 1974 Mike Appel, Bruce’s manager, distributed a rough cut of “Born to Run” to select disc jockeys. Though his band spent virtually every waking hour either in the recording studio or on tour, their road earnings were barely enough to live on. and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, had been commercial flops. ![]() Despite vigorous promotion by Columbia Records, his first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Forty years ago, on the eve of its official release, “Born to Run”-the song that propelled Bruce Springsteen into the rock-and-roll stratosphere-had already attracted a small cult following in the American rust belt.Īt the time, Springsteen desperately needed a break.
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