(SOUNDBITE OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN SONG, "BORN TO RUN")
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
"Born To Run," the album that made Bruce Springsteen into the star we know today as The Boss, it turns 50 this year. To celebrate that milestone, the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music in New Jersey held six days of events. NPR's Frank Langfitt decided to go recently and got a surprise. Hey, Frank.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: So it sounds like a very interesting assignment. It sounds like an interesting event to go to. You have a lot of things to cover right now. What made you think, this is worth going to?
LANGFITT: I wanted to do something that would also just be fun for our audience. And the reason I really wanted to go was there were a bunch of academics who were going to be talking about the album and analyzing it. But then I noticed that there was an entire day devoted to the creation of "Born To Run," but they wouldn't say who was going to speak. So I had my suspicions. And I just jumped in my car, and I drove four hours towards the Jersey Shore.
DETROW: So you're like a Bruce Springsteen character. You're on the open highway yourself with hopes in your heart, headed north.
LANGFITT: (Laughter).
DETROW: What did you find when you got there?
LANGFITT: So I show up, and there's this line out the door to the theater at Monmouth University. This is the home of the archives. And everybody in the audience is told they have to put their cellphones in a locked bag. And inside on stage, I'm looking up there, and I can make out there are instruments under tarps. And then...
(APPLAUSE)
LANGFITT: ...Springsteen himself comes on with the E Street Band, along with the producers and the studio engineer. Now, there's this guy, Bob Santelli. He runs the archives. He told me this is the first time everybody who had created "Born To Run" had talked about it together on the same stage. And Scott, it was a little like a time machine. And remember, the bulk of this album was recorded in 1975.
DETROW: Yeah.
LANGFITT: Back then, Springsteen is just a regional artist. He's not known beyond the East Coast. He put out two earlier albums. They had not sold. And Springsteen told the audience he felt like "Born To Run" was kind of like a last chance.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: I was a serious young man...
(LAUGHTER)
SPRINGSTEEN: And it was all or nothing because in the rest of my life at that time, I had nothing. Every night, that's how I went into the studio.
LANGFITT: Now, you know the album. The songs kind of blended this cars-and-girls teenage spirit from the Beach Boys with, you know, at the time was a much darker mood following Vietnam here in the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THUNDER ROAD")
SPRINGSTEEN: (Singing) The screen door slams. Mary's dress sways. Like a vision, she dances across the...
LANGFITT: Helping to put it all together was a 22-year-old studio engineer from Brooklyn.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED EMCEE: Jimmy Iovine.
(CHEERING)
LANGFITT: Now, Iovine explains how Springsteen - he's an infamous perfectionist - kept pushing everyone.
JIMMY IOVINE: None of you have had the pleasure or the dread of this guy standing behind you for that many hours, saying no...
(LAUGHTER)
IOVINE: ...No...
(LAUGHTER)
IOVINE: ...No. I never heard - I never met a person before or after that can say the same word over and over and over and over and over.
(LAUGHTER)
IOVINE: Two words - no and again.
(LAUGHTER)
DETROW: I mean, Frank, that doesn't sound in the moment too pleasant.
LANGFITT: No, no. I mean, there was unanimity that these sessions were long and tedious. Here's how Garry Tallent - he's the bassist - described it.
SPRINGSTEEN: Garry, what do you - do you have any memories of us cutting those tracks in the studio at the time?
GARRY TALLENT: I just remember it taking forever.
(LAUGHTER)
LANGFITT: Now, Tallent said he brought his wife to the studio once.
TALLENT: And she heard the same eight bars over and over again for about four hours. She never asked to see another session.
(LAUGHTER)
LANGFITT: Now, producer and manager Jon Landau, he said the sessions went so long, people would just nod off.
JON LANDAU: Jimmy, he would be sitting in the engineer's chair, and his eyes would glaze over. And he'd fall asleep, and I would get to say, Bruce, the engineer's asleep. I think it's time to go. You know, come on.
(LAUGHTER)
LANGFITT: Now, Iovine, you know, he went on to become a record mogul. He said everybody there in the studio was just trying to divine the sound that Springsteen wanted.
IOVINE: What was going on was like "The Wizard Of Oz." It was, like, in black and white, and what - his head was color. And everybody just did everything they possibly could to make it color.
LANGFITT: And even Springsteen said he was kind of mystified by the process.
SPRINGSTEEN: Our demos that we would go home with, you know, always sounded a little flat because of the, you know, the nature of the studio. But when we went to mix it is when everything really - the reverbs, the echoes, the size of the thing - all came alive. How did you do that?
(LAUGHTER)
IOVINE: I had never mixed a record before on my own.
(LAUGHTER)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Amazing.
IOVINE: So the first thing you do is method act.
(LAUGHTER)
IOVINE: It's called I look like I know what I'm doing.
(APPLAUSE)
SPRINGSTEEN: I had a feeling that Jimmy simply twisted the dials until it sounded the way that I heard it.
LANGFITT: Scott, this is another thing that was really interesting, is that Springsteen himself had listened to "Born To Run" so many times, he could no longer hear some of the notes as they actually sounded. Guitarist Steve Van Zandt - he explained. He picked up a guitar, and he played the opening riff to the song as Springsteen had actually recorded it.
STEVE VAN ZANDT: He's doing, like...
(SOUNDBITE OF ELECTRIC GUITAR RIFF)
VAN ZANDT: Right?
LANGFITT: So you can hear that kind of...
DETROW: Yeah.
LANGFITT: ...Roy Orbison twang?
DETROW: The country western.
LANGFITT: That - right. That's not what Springsteen thought he'd played or what he wanted. Springsteen thought it sounded like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN SONG, "BORN TO RUN")
LANGFITT: And when he realized how it really sounded, he kind of freaked out.
SPRINGSTEEN: That's all I can hear now.
(LAUGHTER)
SPRINGSTEEN: (Imitating guitar riff).
(APPLAUSE)
VAN ZANDT: And that's how I saved Bruce Springsteen's career.
(CHEERING)
LANGFITT: Now, after "Born To Run" was released, it peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart. A couple weeks later, Springsteen ends up on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Recording the album, as you can hear, was an ordeal. But Springsteen says it never would have become a rock classic without the people who were on that stage.
(APPLAUSE)
SPRINGSTEEN: You know, when you had nothing and were no one, these are the guys that gave you everything. So I thank all of you.
(APPLAUSE)
DETROW: I love this moment of creation where something could go either way, and...
LANGFITT: Yes.
DETROW: ...They're making tweaks, and the end result is something that, when they play 50 years later, entire football stadiums go nuts for. You know, these songs have such a lasting impact for so many people, but it could have been a different song. It might not have worked. And there's a lot to think about there. And I'm just wondering what the audience was like to hear these stories up close - he's such a faraway figure now - to hear them recreate this moment of 50 years earlier.
LANGFITT: Here's what I understand, and this is when I've ever looked at a creative process, as all of us, when you get inside it, you realize that it's incredibly collective. None of it is inevitable, and things could have gone very differently. And we would not be sitting here talking about this guy, and that really is what comes across listening to several hours. I mean, they're as surprised as we are that this worked out.
DETROW: Why do you think he did this event?
LANGFITT: He's building his legacy, Scott. Springsteen has been talking about his music a lot in the last decade. You know, he had that one-man show on Broadway. There's a new book out on the making of "Born To Run." And in a few weeks, a biopic is coming out, "Deliver Me From Nowhere." And this event - the first time, again, all these guys had been on stage talking about that - this is a part of the oral history for the archives, and it may not happen again. Springsteen just turned 76.
DETROW: NPR's Frank Langfitt, thank you for bringing up this story. I really enjoyed it.
LANGFITT: Thanks, Scott. Happy to do it.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN SONG, "BORN TO RUN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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