While everyone was zoning out in front of the TV this scruffy dude saw an opera out on the turnpike and a ballet being fought in the alley.

The way Springsteen sang it in 1974, it wasn't a dorky diary confessional it was unhinged expressionism, Kerouac with a bottle of red wine in his stomach. The next phrase ups the ante: 'I want to die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss.' From one angle it's the kind of line that can make you wince, at best a silly emo cliché. Picture the depressed state of the Jersey Shore in the early 70s, the dull sense of an era gone, and then check Springsteen's description in the title track: 'The amusement park rises bold and stark and kids are huddled on the beach in the mist.' This could have been a couple of bored teenagers sitting on a bench bullshitting, but with Springsteen's imagery, some glockenspiel, and a deep sax drone, it's transformed into filmic splendor. Its world is one of impossibly romantic hyperrealism, where the mundane easily becomes fantastic, and it all happens line by line. His naïve but inspiring outlook found its purist expression in Born to Run, which Columbia has now reissued in a deluxe 30th Anniversary Edition packaged with two feature films- one documentary and one concert- on DVD.īorn to Run is a distinctive record, even in the Springsteen canon. Springsteen believed like no one else in the power and possibility of rock, which led him to places that seem strange and maybe even awkward to those who grew up with MTV and everything punk came to symbolize. He had talent and ambition in equal measure but the thing that would put him over was his vision. In this environment Springsteen was just 24, still a kid he'd been hailed as the New Dylan and had recorded two quirky albums but he wasn't a star.

Born to run album cover