In 1987, his album Tunnel of Love reflected frankly on his (brief, unwise) first marriage, to Julianne Phillips, and in his 1992 song “Better Days” he drops a reference to being “a rich man in a poor man’s shirt,” but for the most part what Springsteen has been doing his whole career is speak through fictional characters - gangsters and losers and Tom Joad. This would have been obvious to anyone paying attention, but should you doubt it, I refer you to Springsteen on Broadway, in which Springsteen admits he made it all up, using the following words: “I made it all up.” He went to the movies and borrowed from features such as Thunder Road (1958) and Badlands (1973). For Springsteen it was the reverse the darkness in his songs is strictly make-believe. His image forever adhered to the unfortunate tastes of the American masses in the Nixon era, when his hokey, meretricious, down-home cornball variety show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour was a top-20 television hit.Ĭampbell’s songs (which he didn’t write) were not about desperation and woe, but his life was. Springsteen is an emperor of the stage who sells out stadiums and caused a frenzy when he took up residency in a Broadway theater for a year Campbell, when he died a couple of years back, was semi-forgotten. Rock radio stations have been playing all eight for decades. We’re all glad he cut out that interlude and made something that didn’t get stuck in 1975.īorn to Run turned out to be one of the greatest rock albums ever made, a deathless slate of eight spellbinding, essential songs. In the documentary on the making of Born to Run the album, there’s a priceless scene in which Springsteen is listening to one of the early mixes of “Born to Run,” and just for a few seconds it sounds like the Seventies.
Springsteen looked beyond the moment and created timeless art. That’s one reason it’s an enduring classic, it still gets played on the radio, and is always a highlight of Springsteen’s fabled concerts. It doesn’t sound like the Sixties, Eighties, or Nineties either. “Rhinestone Cowboy” sounds very much like 1975, and “Born to Run” doesn’t it’s difficult to place.