Larger Than Life, Bruce Springsteen Was Born to Run in the U.S.A.
Written: Jan 28 '09 (Updated Jul 09 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: Springsteen's commercial blockbuster is also one of the best in his catalog
Cons: none
The Bottom Line: Containing seven Top 10 hits, Born in the U.S.A.is practically a greatest hits album. But there's a loose concept album hidden in here, too.
Pantagruel's Full Review: Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen
I don't know if it is because Bruce will be playing at halftime of this year's Super Bowl or because I have become nostalgic for my high school senior year, but for some reason I have been playing this album a lot lately and, since this year marks its 25th anniversary, I decided to jot down a few things about one of my "comfort" albums.
With Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen became a superstar. Having the critically acclaimed Born to Run in his back pocket and showing he could both go commercial (the double-platinum The River contains Springsteen's first Top Ten hit, "Hungry Heart") and shun it when it seemed like career suicide to do so (the folksy and mostly acoustic Nebraska), his next move would determine if he were to remain comfortably as a critical darling and rock and roll hero, or if he would become something bigger. The finished product managed to do both. For not only is Born in the U.S.A. his biggest-selling album of all-time, moving over ten million copies, yielding a mind-boggling seven top-ten hits on the Billboard chart, and making Springsteen once and for all a household name, it is also one of his best albums.
Springsteen had originally written several of the songs on Born in the U.S.A. during the Nebraska sessions, but decided to wait to record them with his E Street Band. Mostly propelled by Max Weinberg's drums and Roy Bittan and Danny Federici's keyboards, including that precocious instrument of '80s pop, the synthesizer, the E Street Band crank up the amps on these songs to give them a tougher and muscular tone, much like its leader, who showed off his new body-building physique on Born in the U.S.A.'s subsequent tour. Call it Nebraska on steroids.
I was 17 the summer that Born in the U.S.A. came out. It was the beginning of my musical awakening and this proved to be Springsteen's gateway album for me (although my guitarist friend Daniel had been enthusiastically praising him to me for at least a couple of years). That year, Springsteen was all over pop radio and MTV, joining Prince, MichaelJackson, and Madonna as conquerors of the medium. It was one of those rare years, 1984, that what was played to death on the radio and sold by the truckload in record stores was also what was among the year's best.
1984 was noteworthy for being the year of Ronald Reagan's landslide re-election and the American-dominated Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles. Patriotism was running high and having an album entitled Born in the U.S.A. certainly was guaranteed to draw a sizable crowd. A cover shot of what appears to be Springsteen standing in front of what appears to be the American flag only cemented the notion that this new album would be rallying cry for all things American.
So, by calling the album Born in the U.S.A., expectations were high for Springsteen to continue spinning tales of Americana, which he had been doing his entire career. I also thought that the title was some sort of update on Born to Run. Indeed, the title track opens the album and the first line Springsteen sings is "Born down in a dead man's town." As if acknowledge the song "Born to Run," toward the end of "Born in the U.S.A." he sings "Ten years burning down the road/Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go." Was he offering commentary on his own creation, that the character who, a decade earlier, "had to get out while (he's) young" hasn't gone anywhere?
Delving into the album, I feel it plays out like a loose concept, where Springsteen takes what I like to call his "American Everyman" composite character and shows us the character's struggle in Ronald Reagan's world of trickle-down economics. All twelve songs are sung in the first person. In the opening track, he is a returning Vietnam vet with nothing to come home to ("Went down to see my V.A. man/He said, 'Son, don't you understand'?"). Factories in his hometown are closing or have closed, all forms of work seem to have dried up, and even though he admits right from the start that it's a dead-end town, it is the only home he knows. The thundering chorus of "Born in the U.S.A./I was born in the U.S.A." could easily be turned into a question "Why was I born in the U.S.A.?"
That some casual listeners latched onto this song as a patriotic anthem only goes to show that they were not paying attention to what Springsteen was singing. And when it slowly became apparent to the country at large that this song was not, in fact, a patriotic anthem but instead a critique of the nation, some twisted minds, in an effort to save face no doubt, suggested that what Springsteen was really doing on the album's cover was urinating on the flag.
A key line in "Born in the U.S.A." is how the protagonist went to Vietnam in the first place. "Got in a little hometown jam/So they put a rifle in my hands/Sent me off to a foreign land" indicates that he may have been facing either jail time or a shotgun wedding. For a young man with nowhere to run, he had little options.
That feeling of a lack of options runs through much of the album. The next song, "Cover Me," has the singer pleading "Promise me baby/You won't let them find us." It's a rough world out there and sometimes all you want to do is hide from it. The most guitar-driven track on the album hammers the point home.
None of the next three songs were released as singles. Perhaps it was felt that they did not have much hit potential, but I think they are crucial to the theme of the album, and that isolating them as singles would remove the unitary impact that they have.
Clocking in at just under five minutes, "Darlington County" is the longest running track on the album. The extra space provides the band to have a little fun especially on the "sha la la" chorus and toward the end when Springsteen beckons "Big Man, play that saxophone."
Yet that good-time cavorting masks a real interesting story. Two guys from New York (supposedly) drive down to South Carolina, looking for union work. Once there, they use a series of come-ons to proposition a pretty young thing and the lead singer manages to woo her. In the final verse, the singer is driving out of town (which may or may not be voluntarily since he's sings a line from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic") when he notices his buddy Wayne, who has been missing for a week, "handcuffed to a bumper of the state trooper's Ford."
So where has Wayne been for a week and why is he handcuffed to a police car? Was he involved in a "little hometown jam?" Maybe more importantly, was the police car in motion? Springsteen doesn't mention much about Wayne, other than his uncle has a union connection and the pick-up line about his pa owning one of the World Trade Centers, but an acute listener might go on to ask what Wayne's ethnicity is. Is this a case of Southern-style vigilante justice? Born in the U.S.A. but not born equally.
The song that follows, "Working on the Highway," is almost a sequel to "Darlington County." In it, the singer lights out to Florida with the young woman of an overly-protective family. His "little hometown jam" (probably violating the Mann act) lands him in jail. The arc of the story depicts him working for the union in the beginning, and working for the county warden at the end. The song is played up tempo, as a rockabilly shuffle.
Taken together, "Darlington County" and "Working on the Highway" have the American Everyman losing at the end. But the songs are so upbeat that you hardly recognize it. I am reminded of how novelist Bobby Jo Mason described rock and roll as "happy music about sad stuff" and how Born in the U.S.A. played a small role in her novel and subsequent movie, In Country.
The next song telegraphs the listener that sad stuff lies ahead. "Downbound Train" opens with the line "I had a job/I had a girl/I had something goin', mister, in this world" then kicks the legs out from under the singer. In a tragic-comic turn, he takes a job "down at the car wash/Where all it ever does is rain." Haunted by the false hope of reconciliation and tormented by thoughts of locomotives, he ends up working on a railroad gang. Was he, too, possibly caught in "a little hometown jam" of his own?
The album's first side concludes with "I'm on Fire," a simmering ode to unquenched lust. This is the dark side of the American Everyman--the stalker who cannot possess what he really wants, or thinks he wants. Quite opposite the song's title, the singer sounds cold and calculated. And continuing the train metaphor from the previous track, Springsteen, after singing about a "freight train running through the middle of (his) head," imitates a train's whistle as the song fades out.
Taking stock of Side 1, the American Everyman has returned home from Vietnam only to find no work, travels down South and lands in jail, and is unable to find a meaningful, long-lasting relationship. What is left to do but turn to friends, which is where Born in the U.S.A. picks up on the flip side.
On "No Surrender" and "Bobby Jean" Springsteen and the E Street Band regain their swagger. "I'm ready to feel young again," Springsteen sings on the first number. And while "No Surrender" is noted for the following truism--"We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school"--what ties the song to the rest of the album is the closing verse, a yearning for a simpler, better, and happier life:
I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover's bed With a wide open country in my eyes And these romantic dreams in my head
"Bobby Jean" is ostensibly Springsteen's farewell song to longtime E Street guitarist Little Steven and it plays like the bittersweet goodbye between two platonic friends as the female Bobby (in my interpretation of this song, Bobby is female) does what the American Everyman cannot and moves on with her life. That she leaves before the Everyman can say goodbye makes it an even harder pill for him to swallow.
But that seems to give the American Everyman some motivation, for he next takes the initiative to break up with his next romance on "I'm Goin' Down" before returning one last time to his old circle of friends in "Glory Days." More upbeat in tone than either "No Surrender" or "Bobby Jean," our Everyman (for that is what he seems to have become) reminisces about the old times when life seemed a hell of a lot less complicated. And, though I still don't know what a "speedball" is, I can picture a group of ex-jocks and ex-jock wanna-bes regaling themselves with tall tales of their school days.
But the Everyman catches himself at the end of "Glory Days," noting that too much reminiscing leaves you with nothing but "boring stories of glory days." And on it is to the next song, the groove infectious "Dancing in the Dark." Springsteen has said that this was as close to a pop song as he had wanted to write, and it rewarded him by being the biggest hit of his career.
More to the point of the album, "Dancing in the Dark" finds our Everyman taking an account of his life and not liking the tally.
I get up in the evening And I ain't got nothing to say I come home in the morning I go to bed feeling the same way I ain't nothing but tired Man I'm just tired and bored with myself
"There's something happening somewhere" he says, aiming to search it out. But first he needs to make some changes in his life. Major changes. He ticks off his hair, clothes, and face as things he is sick of, but he indirectly includes the dump he resides in, his job, and the futility of not being able to find someone with whom to share his life. "You can't start a fire without a spark/This gun's for hire/Even if we're just dancing in the dark" is more than a frustrated sexual metaphor. It is an offer at a life together. It may not be the romantic dream in his head, but a less than perfect match is better than no match at all. "Hey baby" screams Springsteen at the end of the song, as if to say "let's take that chance before it's too late for us."
A short epilogue follows. The forlorn ballad "My Hometown" opens with Springsteen's Everyman fondly recalls sitting on his father's lap as they drive through town, his father proudly saying "Son, take a good look around. This is your hometown." The narrative then moves to a not-so-Glory Day when racial tensions in high school nearly tore the town apart. (There's that little hometown jam again.) After recapitulating the closing of factories, scarcity of jobs, and facing the prospect of relocation, all themes that were mentioned throughout Side 1, we meet up with the present-day American Everyman. He's married now, or at least in a long-term relationship, and has a son. Driving with his son, passing by "Main street's whitewashed windows," he recalls the moment. "Last night I sat him up behind the wheel/And said 'Son take a good look around. This is your hometown." Not only does that last line neatly tie back to the beginning of the song, it circles back to the beginning of the album ("Born down in a dead man's town").
At the height of this record's success, Springsteen was 35 years old, the age he quotes in "My Hometown." Maybe the quest of the American Everyman was shared by Springsteen. After all, he got married in the middle of the Born in the U.S.A. tour. He became an international celebrity and the gossip rags were full of stories of his whirlwind fairytale romance with model/actress Julianne Moore. That it did not last might be due to a restless quality Springsteen also shared with his character, the idea that "there's something happening somewhere," if he just knew where to look. Springsteen would explore those personal restless searches on his next album, Tunnel of Love.
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