THE SPIRIT OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN ALIGHT IN THE GROOVES OF BORN TO RUN

Profonde Musique

Dec 30, 2025

Peter Ames Carlin, best known for his biographies on Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and Bruce Springsteen, has created the ultimate look into the chaos, pressure and eventual brilliance during the making of Springsteen’s 1975 epic album, Born to Run, Tonight in Jungleland. Carlin expertly uses previous and new interviews with Springsteen, and a bevy of voices present for the album’s composing and production that would not only come to define the Boss’s oeuvre but place the record into the pantheon of his growing legend.

This is Bruce Springsteen faced with the very real possibility of being dropped from his label, Columbia, due to the middling sales of his previous two albums. He is also embroiled in management issues, which will usher in the era (still going strong today) of Jon Landau as his friend, confessor and champion. The album would also mark the entrance of two E Street Band stalwarts, pianist, Roy Bittan on piano and drummer, Max Weinberg that would calcify the “Jersey Sound” of Springsteen’s music henceforth.

With Born to Run, Springsteen transformed from a Dylan-cloned folk-soul balladeer into the living embodiment of The Boss, and Tonight in Jungleland takes us on that journey, visiting pertinent sideroads, as any story of this magnitude must. Carlin delivers both the harrowing and heartwarming with equal measure.

Placed in the context of Springsteen’s long and celebrated career, Born to Run was indeed a turning point and Tonight in Jungleland drops us in the middle of the songwriting, rehearsing and final recordings of a classic American musical statement. It is joyous tale of rock and roll primacy presented in an entertaining way that leaves readers with a new and essential understanding of not only the artist but his art.

I sat down with Carlin for a lengthy and insightful discussion before the book’s release in August. Here it is in its entirely.

jc: Before we begin on the book, you’ve written a biography of Bruce Springsteen and now this in-depth account of arguably his most important if not his finest album, how do you find him as a person?

PC: I like Bruce, personally, a lot. I think he’s really a cool guy. Even before I met him, I liked how he carried himself – his generosity with people, and I liked his progressive values. He seemed, for somebody who was clearly, by his own admission, heavily self-involved and into his own thing, as most artists are, that he was very empathetic. He really understood what people who met him needed from him, who he needed to be for them. And that was a huge deal because so many musicians and celebrities don’t have that bandwidth. But he came away from his own childhood and his own connection or projection of Elvis (Presley) and the musicians, the idols, he had growing up, that he remembered what it felt like to be that kid. And so, when he encounters people and they come up to him, he knows how to be, to make them feel seen and appreciated and not dismissed or made to feel foolish for being engaged with him and his work. I admire that in him.

Yeah, it’s a real art form for sure, because I’ve known a lot of rock stars who are not good at that. And they will tell you it’s awkward. It’s not natural for one person to know everything about you, yet you know nothing about them, and have a “normal” conversation. One of these people are on a pedestal. It’s just hard to live up to that, but he does. That’s an excellent point; he does live up to the iconic status that he has earned.

Yeah, he’ll have a drink with you if you catch him in the right moment. But I think it’s rough to be someone who people know that intimately through their music because you can’t have a bad day, you know?

He carries with him a great deal of the hope and the passions that people have for his music, which gets me to Tonight in Jungleland. First of all, as a fellow author who’s written a book about one album and one song, bravo on this, my friend, you killed it. It took me a mere two days to read this. I couldn’t put it down. It’s fantastic and gripping storytelling.

Oh, thank you.

You’re very welcome. That is the best compliment I could ever give a writer. Telling the story, that’s the whole ballgame. There was never a time you feel lost in this epic and serpentine tale with a lot of moving parts. The whole flow of the book works as a story, a story I knew to some extent – and I’m not a huge fan of this record, as I discussed before we started recording. Nebraska is where I land with Springsteen. For me, Born to Run has too much of that Phil Spector-y, large sound, but it didn’t matter for me, because your writing took me in there. I found myself rooting for Bruce throughout. It is fine work.

Thank you, very much.

You’re very welcome. All right, one of the things you told me, which is a little inside baseball, when I interviewed you for my Hey Jude book, Take a Sad Song – The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude, and when you addressed Paul McCartney, you said, “In my experience, I’ve done work on Brian Wilson, Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen, and they all possess this amazing drive because there was an emptiness in them that could not be filled.” And that is clearly abundant in this book. And I want to specifically cite those little snippets you put in when you’re talking to Bruce at his New Jersey home recently, as he casually throws logs on the fire. Fantastic job with that. He talks candidly about his drive to perfection as a young man. What did you glean from that as a window into the man?

Well, first and foremost, it goes without saying that he’s miraculously talented on a variety of fronts – almost too many fronts! He’s a great guitar player, a great singer, an electric performer, and he writes great songs. It turns out he’s a great prose writer, as well. He can produce; he can do all the stuff. So, you have this “God given” talent, for lack of a better expression, but on the other hand, he has this incredible drive and work ethic. From the time he started playing guitar, he wanted to be a musician so intensely that he spent his entire teen years on it. Other people had friends and other interests. He would be in his room just playing the guitar, looking at himself in the mirror, trying to master his moves while he’s doing it. And then when he started working his bands hard, it was that same thing, and a lot of that I think stems from having parents who had strong work ethics and having a deep need for both mastery and control.

A great deal of lot of that seemed to flow from his response to growing up with a dad who was an upstanding and terrific person on a lot of levels but also struggling with bipolar disorder. So, there was a lot of chaos happening around the house because of his dad’s moods and the fact that he was undiagnosed and untreated. So, as a result, there was very little comprehension of what his problem was and no solution for it other than him basically putting his head down and fighting through his days as best as he could. And then at night sitting in the kitchen and drinking beers and smoking cigarettes, ‘till it was time to go to sleep.

His father was a very difficult person for Bruce to reach, for anyone, really, but especially for Bruce. And Bruce felt severely diminished by his dad’s inability to connect with him. And this set up this overwhelming desire to connect with people and to communicate. And also, he was strung between two very different senses of himself that he got from his family, his grandparents, who, as you know, his mom and dad and Bruce came to live with his dad’s parents when he was a baby, and they had lost a child when Bruce’s dad was young, and the girl was very young, she was five, and there was a terrible accident with an oil truck on the street outside. And that loss completely devastated the family, and, of course, devastated the parents whose grasp may have been a little shaky to start out with. So, they were very odd, outcast-types, and to some degree, very poor. Their house was crumbled down and everything. But when Bruce was born and came into the home, they greeted him like the sun god, because in their eyes, he was the reborn iteration of the child they had lost.

So, Bruce is caught between this idea of almost infinite grace and glory. He was “the golden boy,” he says. But also, that was bracketed by his dad and his sense that his dad thought of him as a loser and a waste of space because that was what he heard his dad telling him, even though really what his dad was telling him that he was desperately trying to get his son to toughen up and prepare for a brutal world that had done him in, in a lot of ways. He didn’t know how to deal with his mental illness, but despite his terrible actions, Doug (Springsteen’s father) did his best.

What you’re saying, in a sense, and you do a good job covering that in the book, is that Springsteen already had built into his DNA, this idea that you just forge ahead and you find the thing you want, which is what made him a star. And that brings me to the record at hand. In the book, you go through the first two records – on the first one, Greetings from Asbury Park, he’s Dylan, or he’s being at the very least Dylan-esque, and they’re telling him he’s “the new Dylan.” Then Columbia wants a hit, so he tries to write the “hits,” like “Blinded by the Light,” but it still rings of Dylan. Then The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, the second record, which I found very fascinating, because I never knew this, and I probably should have, I had no idea they recorded all of it live, where they would go onto to piecemeal and build Born to Run.

So, when he gets to Born to Run, I have two questions specifically about the song and the record. Firstly, in essence, this record is his building the myth of Springsteen and doing it on purpose. The reason why I bring that up in the song “Born to Run,” he becomes F. Scott Fitzgerald saying, “I’m going to write the great American novel” and he writes The Great Gatsby and Springsteen, with a great deal of bravado, announces, “I’m going to write the greatest rock and roll song ever. I need to hear it, so I’ll write it!” That is a fascinating aspect of him in this book and on this record and how you depict him.

Well, I think having such a powerful early connection to Elvis (Presley) and seeing Elvis and how Elvis presented himself, particularly in the early days, before the movies and Hollywood and the degeneration of him as an artist, Bruce understood how important Elvis’s clothes were and how important the way he carried himself was. And, you know, when you follow the Beatles career, you see how crucial their image and the way that they presented themselves was and how that evolved in a matter of weeks or months. They would go from one look to a very different look, and when you see the difference between the Beatles – you know the famous photos on the cover of Please Please Me, the first album where they’re at EMI house peering over the balcony – they’re these sweet-faced young kids in suits. Then seven years later, they’re back there to do the cover of what was going to be called Get Back, (later Let It Be) and they’re these shaggy hippies with beards and long hair and hippie clothes and they don’t look anything like those cheeky kids, and it’s only been a handful of years!

For Bruce, even when he began his recording career, you look at the difference of who he is on the cover of the first album, where he’s got the work shirt on and the beard and the long hair, but he’s looking very kind of urban folky and that’s the idea, you know? I don’t think it was his mission to be “the new Dylan.” People called him that. He was obviously inspired by Dylan, but just as much by Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen, like all the great singer-songwriters of the late sixties and into the seventies – that neo-folk singer-songwriter movement. He was the next step along that path. Eight months later with Wild and the Innocent he becomes the boardwalk rat poet with his buddies, the whole band, around him. And they look like a bunch of guys that just went surfing all day, which I think was true. (laughs)

They’re in swimsuits and flip flops, no shoes, and they’re looking sandy in the sun, and it’s a lovely photograph. And then when you get to Born to Run, he’s got the leather jacket and the torn t-shirt and the Elvis button on the guitar strap, which is prominently featured. And in nineteen seventy-five that was a big deal.

He was taking that original rock and roll iconography and updating it for the seventies, as opposed to the whole Woodstock generation, the hippie generation, who were previously like “to hell with all that.” They had lost interest in Elvis. He was the opposite of hip by the seventies – it was mom’s music or grandma’s music; it was for people that wanted to go to Las Vegas and go to a showroom, and that was not rock and roll. But what Bruce understood was, well, wait a minute, there’s the earlier Elvis and I want in! He’s gonna do the cold fusion merging of the visceral impact of an excitement of Elvis with the intellectual heft and excitement of Bob Dylan.

look at Springsteen from this period as a guy that’s effected by the Beats – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road thing. We all read On the Road when we were teenagers, and you could clearly see that Bruce understood it. The first record seems more Allen Ginsberg, very wordy, all this imagery flushing out. The second record has got that Kerouacian one or two lines that jump off the page, even though there’s still a ton of lyrics on Wild and Innocent. For Born to Run, he strips that away and now he’s writing rock and roll songs with big choruses and he’s bringing a little of that Elvis aesthetic in, but I believe after Born to Run, he sets a template for the rest of his career. I think that template is cemented with Nebraska, wherein he becomes more of the Midwestern working class character. He plays with that in Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, (both records follow Born to Run) as well, but really goes for it on Nebraska. But it all begins with Born to Run for me. It is the beginning of the Bruce Springsteen we would come to know forever.

Yeah, well, I think he spent those first couple of years trying to figure out exactly what his creative identity should be and what his voice should be. Let’s begin with the eruption of words in the first album. In some ways that’s the sound of a kid who’s been pent up for twenty-two years and suddenly you get this shot to say anything you want to say and it’s like, “Okay, everything I want to say it’s going to come exploding out!” But eventually what you learn is, “Well, I got to control this a little bit.” Less-is-more becomes part of the progress from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. through The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and then into Born to Run. He was learning and figuring out that he had to simplify the structure of his songs and simplify his language and make his lyrics and his songs much more direct, and as a result he became a better songwriter to a degree, not that the songs on Greetings are terrible songs. I mean, there’s some fantastic songs on that album, but it’s a little like anything, you know, you’re looking for the connection, and it’s a little spotty here and there. But, you know, the thing about Bruce, what’s amazing about him, is that even at twenty-two, twenty-three years old, even his lesser songs are really interesting.

Now, I think part of the value of the shock of realizing that he was on the edge of being dropped by Columbia before Born to Run motivated him to find that song that could be “played on the radio” and maybe become a hit single. This leads to “I’ve got to edit myself a little better! I got to reconcile my vision and what’s important to me and the stories I want to tell to what the audience.” Making Born to Run there are those conversations he had with Mike Appel (his manager at the time), “You got to write a song that could theoretically get played on the radio.”

And Bruce is like, “Well, I love those types of songs too!” And Mike is coaching him to leave room for the melody and not clog everything up with a hundred words. And so, it was a little bit of a learning process. Who doesn’t learn in their early twenties, figuring out how to do their jobs?

To your other point about his “working class” evolution, I do feel that there is a lot of working-class consciousness on Born to Run, mainly due to the backdrop to these places – these characters he writes about, who are living and working and being, and somehow surviving until the night falls and they can be free.

The song for me when I was a kid that really pulled me into him was “The Promised Land” (from Born to Run’s follow-up, Darkness at the Edge of Town). I remember the first time I really heard and connected with that verse that begins, “I do my best to live the right way / I get up every morning and go to work each day.” I was the son of a college professor and it’s not like I didn’t have respect for work, I just didn’t see what the satisfaction of it could possibly be. My experience of work was “This fucking sucks and I want to go hang out with my friends!” But “The Promised Land” revealed an honor and dignity and satisfaction in a job well done.

There’s lots of unpack there. Born to Run is a depiction of kids of working-class parents who are going nowhere, so they want to get the hell out. Literally. in “Born to Run,” this is the mission statement. This is also true of “Jungleland,” and certainly “Thunder Road.” And when you get to Darkness, it’s like, okay, you’re accepting your fate that you can’t run away from who you are, but you’re still young enough that you could get out of this. By the time we get to The River, these are stories of real desperate people, many of whom had to marry the girl ’cause he got her pregnant in high school and blah blah blah. There are references to suicide on that record, criminalities on that record.

On The River?

Yeah.

No, well… maybe! That could be it, but that’s never been my reading of the song, “The River” itself. I’ve never been a hundred percent sure, to be honest. What the river symbolized is a place of escape as well. A great deal of characters in Bruce’s songs are forever going down to the river or some iconic place to do this or that. It’s funny you bring this up, because writing about these songs, I’ve been trying to work this out and then I felt like I was spinning in circles. Just when I think I have the ideas, it escapes me. I don’t even know if Bruce knows the motivation or even the outcome of these characters. This is the brilliance of his songwriting. We all see ourselves or people we know in them. They are like a connection to the earth or a connection to the inevitability of life.

Very biblical, yeah.

Yeah, it’s like the river keeps flowing and flowing and if you jump in the river and you end up in the sea then that’s the end of it all, right? I didn’t get the sense that the narrator is killing himself. Although, it is not hard to sense he wasn’t pleased with how things had worked out.

Right, right. Well, that’s where my mind went. So, yeah, it just goes to show you, I’m a glass-half-empty guy.

So, you’re just gonna hurl the fucking glass against the wall and get over it with,  right? I got you. (laughs)

(laughs) I want to get back to the trimming aspect of Bruce’s songwriting you cover in the book. This starts with “Thunder Road.” You quote from the original longform lyrics that he started to cut down to make the song that we know.

It seemed like you were privy to a lot of early takes and demos and things like that. Talk to me about the process of going through that and is this the first time you heard these unreleased tracks, or had you heard them way back when you wrote your Springsteen biography?

There were some things that had been on bootlegs that were out there, so I had heard a bunch of that stuff over the years. But then in terms of all the takes and the recording stuff, I discovered Sony had all that stuff in their archives. And if I asked very nicely, they would let me listen to it, (laughs), which they did. So, I got to go into a recording studio in Midtown last June and listen to everything Bruce recorded for the album between April and July of seventy-five when they did the sessions. So that’s where all that insight comes from. It was just listening to take after take after take.

It was like four or five days, most of which were spent in the studio with an engineer who was rolling tape for me. I have both Bruce and Jon for their cooperation. They were like, “Yes, please let him do this.” It wasn’t cheap, I’ll tell you that. I had to pay for the studio time and the engineer’s time, but it was still worth it.

Absolutely. And it really adds to the book, as do your discussions with Bruce I mentioned. Take me back to this time with Springsteen at his place. Was it Long Branch or Lakewood?

It was a little bit south of Asbury Park. I can’t remember exactly where it is at this point. You know, the Jersey Shore goes on and on – I was staying in Neptune at the time, I had to do a few interviews. I had been back east earlier in the summer and spent a couple weeks in New York. I interviewed a lot of people there and did some archival digging and that’s when I listened to the studio stuff and rewatched a lot of the video that Barry Rebo had shot in the seventies. And then I came back and saw the See.Hear.Now Festival (annual Asbury Park music fest) performance and then just hung out for two weeks because I knew I still needed to talk to Bruce and Landau and a few other people in the band on their break from touring after the See.Hear.Now Festival. That was my moment to slot into their schedules. I stayed in an Air-B-B in Neptune. When I wasn’t interviewing, I was just writing, writing, writing, because I was kind of under the gun.

Your descriptions of those outtakes are precious. I love how Bruce motivates the band, or he motivates himself in the studio, jokes around. Marty Appel is yelling shit at him. I love that, it’s intimate. And then the interview with Bruce at his place…

Well, I had talked to Bruce and Jon in San Francisco in March of last year,

’cause I had had plans to go see a show. I only really had the idea to do the book in March of last year and I was catching up with Jon Landau and he said, “Hey, what are you going to do next?” And I was like, “Funny, you should mention that… I’ve been kicking some ideas around, but the one thing I’m most excited about is possibly doing something for the 50th anniversary of Born to Run.” And he was like, “Oh, I think we’d be into that.” Great!

So, then I pitched it to my people at Double Day, who I had just done a book with and they were like, “Terrific, let’s do it! But you have to have it done by the fall because publishing being what it is, it takes a year.” This was already cuttin’ a few months out of the publication thing, but they could get it in under the wire if I turned it in come October or November.       

So, I just hunkered down and there was a lot of high-speed work. I assumed I had a bunch of leftover Born to Run stuff in my archive from writing the biography, but I was wrong about that. I really didn’t have much I hadn’t already used. I still had a big head start in that I knew all these guys and had written about them and knew how to get in touch with them all. But, again, having Jon and Bruce wanting to cooperate meant that all the doors kind of cracked open and so that made a lot of things easier.

Am I answering the question? I got lost. (laughs)

Yeah, no that’s okay…

So, I told Jon, “Look, I obviously have to talk to you guys. So, I went to the performance in Asbury, and then Bruce asked me to come to the after-show party and we reconnected there and I chatted with him for a little bit and eventually he said, “Okay, I’ve got a few things to do over the next few days, but let’s stay in touch and we’ll figure out a time for you to come and we’ll talk.”

On Bruce’s birthday, which was nine days after the See.Hear.Now thing, I just sent him a birthday text. It was his seventy-fifth, so it was kind of a big one. And he wrote back asked, “Peter, where are you?” I was like, “Well, I’m in Neptune.” And he asked what I was doing, “Why don’t you come on over? We’ll do it today.” And I go, “Dude, it’s your birthday!” And he goes, “Ah, it’s okay. The party was a couple of days ago.” So, I went down to see him, and we just hung out and talked for the afternoon. And then what you read in the book is the source of those conversations and a lot of that talk. Although, through the summer when I was researching stuff, if something came up that struck me as super surprising or something I didn’t understand I would send him a text like, “What’s up with this?” and he would write back relatively quickly and clarify it for me.

I love how during the course of this birthday discussion, he reminisces about his younger self, “Man, I wish I can go back there and tell that guy to calm down.” (laughs) I love that all the years of therapy, writing his memoir, growing older, having kids, seeing what it’s like to be a dad, going through all the stuff he had to go through with his therapy for his father and understanding that he battled depression, and then to look back to this guy who’s in the middle of this maelstrom and having sympathy for him was really great. And the way you described him during it with his flannel shirt and he’s throwing logs on the fire, and he’s real mellow sipping a drink – that juxtaposition of a guy towards the latter stages of his life looking at back to his younger self creating that life.

Yeah, well, you know, it’s interesting ’cause he’s very fond of younger Bruce, you know? He’s very…

He forgives him.

I think he just understands what his trials were and where he was and what he needed to do and how important it was to him, and also, I think, how much fun he was having, because those months and years of hard touring they did before

they really made it when they’re struggling, you know, and there are certain corners

of the nation where they do really well, and there’s big chunks of the U.S. where no one’s ever heard of them, and they end up “playing to the walls.” Everything was so local or regional that it depended on if they were on the radio.

For instance, they get to Austin, and the place is jammed. And they play like two shows a night for five nights. And, except for the first show, it’s completely sold out because they had been on the radio there. They go to Houston, same story. People fucking love them because they’ve been on the progressive radio station and the place is jammed. They get to Dallas, however, and there is no progressive radio, and so, no one’s at the show. And they’re like, “Ah, okay… huh.” Then they go as far west as they had ever been, except for playin’ LA and a couple of California towns, to Phoenix. And they’re thinking it’s going to be like Dallas – this is the start of a long process of winning people over, building that fan base, but they get there and they’ve been booked into this huge auditorium and it’s jammed because they’ve been on the radio there and people knew “Spirit in the Night” and “Blinded by the Light” and “Rosalita” and they’re like, “We have no fucking idea what’s happening here, but it’s great!”

It was that moment of hope in all the struggle that you’d think he couldn’t appreciate when he was younger. But he told me, “No, all I knew is that my dream was kind of funkily coming true. I was making a living as a musician. It wasn’t that great a living, but I was twenty-two, so how bad could it have been? I’ve stayed in hotels that are nicer than my actual apartment and I get to play music with my friends every night and it’s kind of great and I never had a problem with that!”

Right, right. Well, there’s the optimism, which is probably why the guy doesn’t jump in the river. (laughs) Bruce is a glass half-full guy.

Very true.

I have a couple of more.

I wanted to ask you about the Mike Appel and Jon Landau dynamic in your book. You did a very fair job in depicting that Mike might not have been treated well, but it was right for Springsteen to go with Landau as his manager eventually. I mean, clearly, in retrospect. Your thoughts about that whole thing… did you, I believe you talked to Mike for this book, did you not?

Oh, yeah.

And so, after all the lawsuits and everything else, how do you find his memory of it?

Mike is a very, very complex guy. And the thing that happened between him and Bruce was extraordinarily complex. And I don’t know that anyone necessarily thinks that Mike was really, you know, hard-done by Bruce, because Mike, in a weird way, in that sort of Shakeseparian characters digging their own grave and make it all the more tragic, was befallen by circumstance. It wasn’t necessarily his fault. By this I mean the contracts he had Bruce sign when they first teamed up were old-school contracts. They were way more tilted toward his end then they were towards the artist. So, he ended up owning a lot more of Bruce’s work and had more authority over Bruce’s ability to work than was ordinarily the case by the early nineteen-seventies. But the weird thing was his behavior and his commitment to Bruce was completely divorced from the actual contracts. The amount that Mike sacrificed, his willingness to dig into his kids’ college funds to keep the band on the road, his belief in Bruce, his willingness to do anything Bruce wanted, whenever Bruce wanted him to do it, those speak of an extraordinary amount of dedication and also his insane behavior with people when he felt that they weren’t adequately taking Bruce into account. You know, he was a screamer. He grabbed people and shouted at them on his behalf. Bruce kind of needed that.

But the problem was when Jon came in and was Bruce’s friend, then also the co-producer, he didn’t have eyes on becoming a manager, that wasn’t his thing, he didn’t want to do that. He was interested in the music and producing the music. But he also knew enough about the music industry to know that “you might want to take a harder look at those contracts” because Bruce notoriously did not read his contracts before he signed them. He was a kid from Freehold, he didn’t know from contracts. He knew from the look in Mike’s eye and Mike’s dedication. This guy is my guy. And they were like this for all that time. But Bruce grew up a little bit and got a little savvier. Then he had this connection with Jon, who was really smart and understood things from a different angle than Bruce did, just in terms of his background, his education, and his knowledge of how the industry worked. And Bruce eventually realized, “Oh, these contracts are actually a little bit fucking me over!” Plus, these deals are all about to expire, so now’s the time to figure out how we’re going to go on. And what he really wanted to do was to continue working with Mike, to continue having Mike as his manager and possibly co-producer, but on a handshake deal.

So, it’s “We shake hands, we look each other in the eye, and if either one of us ever wants to walk, we can walk, because that’s what a good relationship should be.” And Mike’s initial impulse was to accept that, that sounded fine to him because he knew and loved and trusted Bruce. But the problem was Mike’s dad was this kickass insurance executive and a real hard-ass and not always nice to him, unfortunately, when he was growing up. But Mike had one of those relationships with his dad. And so, when he told his dad that he was thinking of doing this handshake deal, his dad was like, “No, you cannot do that. The one thing you have on this guy is this paper. And if you throw that away, you’re screwed.” And so, Mike took his dad’s advice and that was the beginning of the end.

That was, ironically, one of the things that Bruce and Mike had in common, these hard-ass relationships with their dads, and it was interesting and tragic that essentially by taking his father’s advice, Mike screwed himself over.

Right. And in essence, Bruce loses a father figure that he had in Mike. It is Shakespearean or biblical in that way. The second part of the Mike story was Jon Landau. He comes into Bruce’s orbit by writing the famous quote, “I’ve seen the future of rock and roll…” And Bruce has always been coy about that, like, “Oh, that was too much pressure,” like the Time and Newsweek covers. But he was also fascinated by how Landau saw him when he was a rock critic. Jon understood Bruce and what he was after – moving rock and roll into another realm while, as you said, hanging onto its origins.

I love when you describe in the making of the record how Mike and Jon each form these different alliances on song composition and production. Mike and Bruce like this one song, but Jon’s like, “No, I don’t think that works,” or some part of a song. And then there’s another time where Jon and Bruce are into something and Mike’s like, “No, you got to try this!” There’s even a point where Mike and Jon are talking Bruce out of something. I loved how they keep trading alliances. Jon wasn’t like, “Oh, I’m going to stay close to Bruce” or Mike didn’t side with Bruce just to refute Jon’s ideas. All three wanted Born to Run to be the best it could be. I found that so charming and so inspirational because these people did not let their egos or their insecurities, which they were there ’cause you describe them in the book, let them affect this mission.

I remember when I was working on Bruce’s biography, he mentioned “the rule of three.” He repeatedly went through his life building this ecosystem where it’s him in the middle and it’s his grandmother on one side and his mother on the other or it’s Mike and it’s Jon Landau and Bruce in the middle, or then it’s Steve Van Zandt and Mike and Jon, and Bruce in the middle. He goes, “It totally works for me! I set them in opposition to one another!” And essentially what he said, this isn’t a direct quote, but he said, “I know that kind of sucks for them, but it’s totally great for me, because I can watch them fight and figure out which advice that they have I want to follow.” It’s clearly worked for him, if not for everybody else. (laughs) I mean, I don’t think it’s always fun to be in that position, but it’s part of the gig.

Is this your favorite Springsteen record? And is there a song on this record that defines the album? And, finally, do you think Born to Run is his finest album?

I don’t know. (laughs) I mean, how can you tell? It’s like so many of the records are different from others. Is it one of the best ones? Is it up there on the top rank? Easily. Yeah, sure. But you connect with records for a variety of reasons. The record I came in on was Darkness in nineteen-seventy-eight. I love the vibe of that record, the stories he’s telling, the perspective there. That’s the one that I connected with first and most powerfully. But, of course, I already knew like half of Born to Run just by listening to the radio. I already knew and loved “Thunder Road,” and knew and loved “Born to Run” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” I mean, these things are on the radio all the time. And so, yes, it’s a great album. It’s a spectacular record. It’s probably in my top three or four of Springsteen records. But the thing is, his stuff is pretty diverse.

When you think about the distance from Greetings to Wild the Innocent and the distance from there to Born to Run, and then you go even further – you’ve got the folk records – the raw, dark Nebraska you’ve got Tunnel of Love, that was a record I really connected with when it came out, and I love a lot of those songs. There are elements of some of those songs that sound a little dated here and there just because, you know, he did it in the 80s. But his voice and his work had really evolved and grown with him as he grew and changed as a person. And so, that record was a really important step.

You know, you were talking earlier about his overarching idea that is captured first on Born to Run, this need for escape that you get from On the Road and you drive to that place that we really wanna go and “we’ll walk in the sun.” That’s a lot, right? And all those characters are hell bent on getting out of dodge. And then, and one of the things Steve Van Zant said to me was that he thought it was incredibly impressive that Bruce, having finally established himself in the minds of listeners and the culture as the guy who leaves on Born to Run, who hits the road and finds the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, at the far end of the highway, then became on Darkness ever-after the guy who stays because it’s his town. 

He becomes one of the small handful of artists in rock and roll that the audience understands and knows where to find out there searching and then you instantly do a one-eighty and change everything about who you are to become the guy who stays. That’s huge, and really gutsy. Nobody does that.

People figure out who they’re supposed to be and who people want them to be and they stay that guy, Bruce said, “No I’m gonna change.” Because I think he realized that having found in his own way the pot of gold at the end of Born to Run – he got there in the fall of seventy-five – it was like, “Wow, this is equally fantastic and excruciatingly awful.” And so, he figured out a way to stay home, I guess, or he realized how important it was to maintain his connection to home and family and where he had come from. And that’s what I call “the credits roll” thing. He doesn’t talk about the end game in “Born to Run.” It’s just like, “We gotta go, it’s the travel, it’s the journey.” So, the end game. to me, and this is my half-assed attempt to connect Born to Darkness, the very title of the thing is that you make that travel and then you realize, “Oh, shit, I’m still me. No matter where I go – I’m still there.”

And so that’s why, even though I’m not as big as Springsteen fans as others, I get the arc. There is a definite arc to those records. He grows up in them. You don’t see this a lot in youth-oriented rock and roll. You know, there are shapeshifters like Bowie and people who obviously get older, and they change, but Springsteen grows. All those people who grew up with Springsteen, of course, people came in later with the spectacular popularity of Born in the USA, and that is an entirely different animal. But that whole early seventies fanbase who came with him, he grew with them. He’s telling their story. And that explains his fans zealousness about his music.

That make sense to me.

And again, just to wrap it up, you depict that idea really well in Tonight in Jungleland, because this album became his Rubicon. He had to cross this to get there. And that’s why I said before that he’s inventing Springsteen with Born to Run, the whole image of Springsteen, but he is in a way inventing the template for making records of where his characters will go, which I think is just as important for Bruce Springsteen as a man as it is for Bruce Springsteen’s music. His characters are so vivid, listeners end up relating so deeply to him.

Yeah, Before I met him, when I was working on the biography, and it wasn’t clear that I was ever going to know who he truly was as a person, beyond the person he invented, as you say, one person said to me, and it was very cool, he goes, “He’s exactly who you think he is.” And my sense was, “Okay, I bet he’s really thoughtful. I bet he’s really cool. I bet he’s really self-involved. And I bet he’s really complicated.” And all those things are true. And I don’t think anything I just said would be a surprise to him. I think that’s probably how he sees himself as well.

So, all those years of therapy and everything, I think he’s very comfortable with his own complexity and his own foibles because nobody’s free of those. He knows why he’s here and what he’s up to and what his work is and what his obligations are to his family and friends and his art. So, he’s very acquainted with all that stuff. He doesn’t have a lot of illusions about himself.

Very well said. And it comes through in your book. Good way to end our conversation. And, again, thanks to your publisher for sending it. Thanks for this hour talking with me. Best of luck with it.

All right, buddy. I really appreciate it.