Born to Run fused the street-level detail of Dylan with the operatic grandeur of Phil Spector. Its opening track, “Thunder Road,” is a summons: the singer beckons Mary into his car, a chance to flee “a town full of losers” for a better life. “Jungleland,” the nine-minute finale, stages the saga of the Magic Rat and the barefoot girl, who slip across Jersey into Harlem only to see their dreams collapse. Critics hailed Born to Run as a crowning achievement, something both sui generis and revitalizing. The counterculture had curdled, Vietnam was over but unsettled, and the economy sagged into stagflation. Into that drift came a wiry kid from Freehold, N.J., who made the ordinary seem mythic. “It was a magical group of things and circumstances that helped deliver this guy and deliver Columbia’s dream,” says Springsteen’s first manager Mike Appel.
On Oct. 20, 1975, Springsteen appeared on the covers of TIME and Newsweek—a feat once reserved for Presidents, Popes, or astronauts. For Springsteen, holed up at the Sunset Marquis for a four-night stand at the Roxy, it felt like a curse. “It’s making you very, very different than all the people you grew up with,” he says. Success was both exhilarating and terrifying; his sister Pam recalls paparazzi peering into their parents’ kitchen. Springsteen and his circle worried about the “hype,” a toxic word that suggested the deflators weren’t far behind. What haunted him even more was how fame might change him. “It’s a very distorted lens to live your life through,” he says. “You have to be very protective of yourself, of what matters dearly to you.”
