Freedom is not a metaphor

Classic albums are like girls you had a crush on in, say, sixth grade, forgot about a year later, then watched bloom again after the summer break. You want to forget “Hotel California,” or “Raw Power,” or “Dark Side of the Moon” or “Never Mind the Bollocks” and just get on with your life, but the classics are always there. Reminding you. Taunting you.

I’ve been thinking about Bruce Springsteen lately. Not his recent work, but the 1975 classic “Born to Run.” This is an album I fell for at age 15, forsook at 17, and recently sat down to listen to again after decades of punk, techno, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga have forced us all to reappraise what music still has to offer us.

The sins of Springsteen are well known, and laid out in spades on “Born to Run.” This was his “big production” album, where he mimicked Phil Spector’s lush walls of sound — in this case, tons of guitar from Steve Van Zandt, splashy rolls from pianist Roy Bittan, big beat bashing by Max Weinberg and thick saxophone wails from Clarence Clemmons. It’s an album of calculated, polished grandeur and sweep. It’s an over-the-top experience from finish to end, much in the way Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is over the top.

But it’s also a classic. And listening to it now, 35 years after its release, it also seems like a few strands of Bruce DNA have filtered down into the dozens of Americana (and Canadian) bands that are so popular nowadays. It’s conventional wisdom to think that groups like, say, The National, Band of Horses, The Decembrists or Arcade Fire are channeling The Band, that old ‘70s icon of Americana. But look beyond the scruffy beards and there’s more than a little Bruce Springsteen in the collective plaintive sound of, say, Broken Social Scene. I used to think Kevin Drew’s vocals were cod-Bono; now it seems he’s echoing the exuberant bellow of Springsteen.

The opening cut of “Born to Run” builds from Dylan beginnings — the honking harmonica, the light piano, the legato lyric line — and transforms into a thumping “rock” anthem with ‘60s-style outro straight out of the Phil Spector songbook: a Be My Baby drum line, sax lines, even a tinkling glockenspiel.

But it’s the words that rouse my interest. Springsteen was vaunted, at the time, as a photogenic mash-up of Dylan, Elvis and Van Morrison: someone who delivered “poetry” along with E-Street Blues. I won’t deny that, decades later, Bruce’s opening lines exert a familiar tug: “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways/like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays…”

Springsteen taking a snapshot, full of blue-collar American details. Then he has this line, which rings true: “Don’t turn me on again, I just can’t face myself alone again…” And this one: “So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we aren’t that young anymore...”

You can see why Springsteen got hosannas from critics: he’s like Studs Terkel with a guitar, peering into the working class. But then he goes too far. Thunder Road is about hopping in a car, feeling free for the brief time that the gas is in the tank, driving nowhere. It should be a rock classic. But it always felt forced to me.

Let’s not blame the music. The band rises to the occasion on this album, coming up with a joyful sound. Whether they’re copping Bo Diddley riffs or Chicago blues piano rolls, the E-Street Band map out the dream sequence unfurling in Springsteen’s head. Thunder Road is followed by Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, a kind of jaunty sketch of the band’s hungry days. It’s followed by Night, which too closely echoes the metaphor of Thunder Road: the road as freedom, the night as escape. Strip away the production, though, and you realize that most of Springsteen’s songs teeter back and forth between two chords, usually a first and fifth, like A and E. Sure, they’re decorated with piano ripples and sub-themes and fancy chord shifts; but you almost get the sense that Springsteen knew where the core of each anthem lie: in that two-chord ping-pong which would get crowds swaying in their seats. (Backstreets, which follows, similarly moves between C and G during the lengthy chorus.)

Amazingly, Springsteen abandoned the carefully overblown sound that he had mastered on “Born to Run” and which led critics to proclaim “I have seen the future of rock and roll — and it’s Bruce Springsteen.” Not content with the “New Dylan” tag, Springsteen stripped away everything for his follow-up, “Darkness On the Edge of Town.” Apparently wanting to go “punk,” he decorated songs like Badlands with little pomp and fanfare. The songs are less memorable.

The centerpiece of “Born to Run” is the title track, a blasting anthem that, again, takes up the theme of running away from your town, finding freedom on the open road. Listening again years later, I realize it’s not the message that gets through to me: it’s the production, the infectious roar of vocals and instrumentation. It’s the way the bass rumbles in sympathy with the sax during the intro, the stabs of tremolo guitar. There’s the crazy middle section that breaks down into an epic Spector production, like You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling has wandered into the room. Even the glockenspiel makes sense here. And the words? “Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run…” Sorry, but it just sounds like decoration to me, like fins on an old Cadillac Eldorado.

Why is this? Millions of Bruce fans would claim the opposite — say it’s the Boss’s words that helped lift them out of their 9-to-5 worlds and made them believe in rock and roll, in being young and having possibilities. Yet somehow, “the highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive” just doesn’t mean much to me, particularly. It sounds like Bruce trying to be Dylan, jamming in colorful syllables to fit (and sometimes overstuff) the meter.

Meeting Across the River follows, with its pretty cocktail piano arpeggio, its mumbled lyrics, its storyline lifted from Scorsese’s Mean Streets: melodramatic, it’s saved from bathos by Clarence Clemmons’ intuitive sax coloring. (In fact, Clemmons is the unsung hero of this album: imagine “Born to Run” without his Greek chorus counterpoint on just about every song.)

The 39-minute album closes with Jungleland, another Dylanesque epic. Concrete details, colorful names (“The Magic Rat”) and a stunning middle section that practically swoons: this is how Jungleland transcends its poetic limitations.

And maybe this is why the album remains a classic. Springsteen went on to become a regular pulse taker of American mood, according to fans, with “Nebraska,” “Born in the U.S.A.” and “The Rising” (after 9/11). But the music was never as thrilling, to me, as “Born to Run.” And when you come down to it, that’s what we seek in rock ‘n’ roll: not dispatches, not careful imagery, but a feeling of release. The problems of “Born to Run” remain: freedom is not something captured in a lyrical conceit. Freedom is not a metaphor. It’s there, instead, in the furious drum roll with which Weinberg kicks off Born to Run. It’s in the crazed, fake-Dylan organ trills that open Backstreets. It’s in the clanging tambourine of the Velvet Underground’s All Tomorrow’s Parties for that matter, or the ricocheting vocals of Iggy Pop on Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, the lazy slacker propulsion of Blur’s Beetlebum, the out-of-control spazz of Jack White’s Seven Nation Army. Freedom, I must have decided on some level when I first outgrew “Born to Run,” resides not in the proclamation of freedom, but in its exercise. Rock (and punk, a few years after “Born to Run” came out) was the very vehicle to exercise such freedom, but the moments where it actually does this — unexpectedly, without hesitation, calculation or self-consciousness — are few and far between.

So is “Born to Run” still a classic? Yes. Almost despite itself.