THUNDER ROAD vs. BORN TO RUN

Just passed by the restaurant I had brunch at and talked to one of the owners. The plot thickens...

"Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair" is one of the most magical moments . . . well, ever.

^OTM

...the owner told me that he in fact put BTR on that playlist ("because I wouldn't normally play that song") in honor of that incident.

Ran up the block to get brunch and now BTR is playing over the sound system. Last time I heard it here was when I walking by the night AOC won. Her opponent Joe Crowley had rented out the place for his victory party but then ended up played “Born to Run” with his band as part of his concession. I ran into Outlaw Country Jeremy and his wife Laura outside as they were going in to offer condolences. I was kind of shocked when I looked up from my phone to see them since I had them in the front of my mind because I was at that instance reading an article by a mutual acquaintance in the neighborhood. I had come across this article whilst looking up information on the song “Bessie the Heifer” sung by Wayne Newton to an array of barnyard animals on an episode of The Lucy Show.
https://www.cmt.com/news/2s5nce/oxford-american-excerpt-felice-and-boudleaux-bryant

This sounds like the plot of a new Bruce song if he was still writing in his verbose early '70s style.

Ha, yes, exactly! This story was all jumbled up in my mind until I was finally able to channel Bruce himself to try to tell it.

"Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair" is one of the most magical moments . . . well, ever.

This is one of those posts very much in character, but Kipling liked to put the line "What else could I have done?" at key moments in his stories because he called it "the plinth of all structures." So it always pleases me that in TR "What else can we do now?" marks the moment where the band surges in and the whole song just takes off, like this line is Bruce finding solid ground from which to launch himself into space.

There was a period during the reunion tour when Bruce seemed visibly bored (or as bored as he ever lets himself look) singing "Thunder Road," all but happy to cede it to the sing-alongers, but "Born to Run" was never less than fully engaged and exultant.

Looking at this Josh in Chicago post from ten years ago, I wonder if Thunder Road needs Bruce less than Born to Run does? Like, Thunder Road works great as a song, it works great on Born to Run, but it also works if you're reading it on the page, or - like I did half an hour ago - standing in your kitchen giving a dramatic recitation of it to your scrambled eggs. It's not that the impact of it is all in the lyrics - it's not a poem, it's a song - but it has this kind of doubled effect where everything the music and singing do, the lyrics also do, in parallel. So maybe there's a slight feeling of "This song will do just fine without me" with Thunder Road, whereas BTR is more of a feedback loop of Bruce pouring energy into the song and the song giving energy back to Bruce?

Narratively, "Thunder Road" is kind of like the perfect start of something great. A book, a story, a movie, and of course an album (I think it's in the documentary how most of the songs on the eecord start with cinematic scene-setting piano preambles). But "Born to Run" is pure climax.

I think of it almost as the opposite: Born to Run feels like pure beginning to me; there's a "now," that we start out in, but everything in the song is pure forward momentum. Whereas Thunder Road has got all this weight of past tries and failures behind it; it's Bruce summoning up the ghosts of the past so that he can casually sweep them all away at the end and start fresh. An ending and a beginning at the same time.

Loving everybody's posts on this thread.

Born to Run is the closest anyone else got to the "when you got nothing, you got nothing left to lose" feeling of Like a Rolling Stone.

One thing BTR has that TR doesn’t is Ernest “Boom” Carter.

Did we ever poll the songs on Born to Run?

otmfm re: Ernest “Boom” Carter. Are there any boots of shows with him in the band?

I think this one features him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axzlT92TgwE

Sounds like him, thanks!

And OMG at Richard Neer and the disgraced Dave Herman. The latter sounds a lot more like Lou Reed when talking than I remembered.

This image is bad enough.

(Don’t worry it’s SFW, just didn’t want to have to look at it in the thread)

I think this one features him:

📹

Ha, whoops, yeah, he also played at the Bottom Line a year earlier, August 1974. There must be recordings out there.

Supposedly the earliest available performance of BtR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJEmPVFAvM8

I found a few early "Born to Run" cuts from '74. Here's a '74 "Jungleland"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICJr6lSGS3c

And then there's this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeosMlRCoUI

I think they all feature Carter, but I could be wrong

I’m not gonna take the bait again!

Scott Miller had some interesting things to say about "Thunder Road":

I have a serious love/hate relationship with this song. For the most part, I think the album is overrated; there's just not enough there there in the composition. "Thunder Road" is the one that stretches out the most, and it's the one I like the most, but from the first sung lyric it stays a little aimless. The final always gives me chills, and makes the road straighten behind it as it were- but I'm not sure I'm proud of that reaction. Really the singer is feeding this poor girl such a banquet of self-mythologizing nonsense as to make one weep. The message is: "Trade in these wings on some wheels...It's a town full of losers/I'm pulling out of here to win." Quiet good deeds and unheralded personal sanctity are for suckers; it's all about cobbling together an elitist worldview from whole cloth and putting it over for material advantage. So, this is good wild-oatsy stuff, but I'll say it again: if you want world-class lyrics with a reasonable ethical grounding, go try that joke of a flitty chimera David Bowie.

For me, I'd be satisfied with this album if it were a single of "Night" b/w "Meeting Across the River". Gets straight to the point.

Half of rock is singers feeding self-mythologizing nonsense to poor girls. Kind of a dumb take.

Maybe Bruce didn't flirt with fascist iconography enough for Scott Miller.

"go try" this other guy who sucks? what lol

Did we ever poll the songs on Born to Run?

I don't think so!

Really the singer is feeding this poor girl such a banquet of self-mythologizing nonsense as to make one weep. The message is: "Trade in these wings on some wheels...It's a town full of losers/I'm pulling out of here to win." Quiet good deeds and unheralded personal sanctity are for suckers

I suppose this is a helpful warning for anyone who had "Thunder Road" confused with Middlemarch.

Supposedly the earliest available performance of BtR:

That sounds like it might be Carter, based on the bit at 2:45 -- Weinberg sometimes attempted it, but soon gave up. Doesn't sound like Max.

And that's DEFINITELY Carter on the '74 "Jungleland."

Quiet good deeds and unheralded personal sanctity

we should do a pox songs about quiet good deeds and unheralded personal sanctity

Miller's got an unconventional take on Springsteen; the other two songs he writes about in his book are "Candy's Room" and "Girls in Their Summer Clothes", probably not general top three fan favourites.

*raises hand*

Meaning I’m a huge fan of “Candy’s Room.”

I’m not minding Scott Miller’s contrarian take tbh.

"Candy's Room" is one of those songs even people I know that don't like Springsteen like. He doesn't have many songs like it.

The funny thing is that blurb is from a playlist of the best songs of 1975 (fitted between "Better Off Dead" by Elton John and "Poker" by Electric Light Orchestra)! Although occasionally he'll include a song less out of musical excellence than to make a point about the historical context.

"Better Off Dead" from Captain Fantastic? Haven't thought about that one in ages.

Thunder Road come on

You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright