August 25 – Born To Run On Magazine Covers

One of the ’70s most iconic records came out this day in 1975 – Bruce Springsteen‘s Born To Run.

It was “The Boss’s” third album, and there was a real buzz about him, helped in no small part by marketing from Columbia Records, which labeled him “the future of rock & roll.”

“I would like to strangle the guy who thought that up,” he now laughs, but the tagline worked. And was perhaps prophetic! By October both Time and Newsweek would feature him on their cover, and the album far outsold his prior two. At the time it hit #3 on Billboard and was his first top 20 hit in the UK; by now it’s hit the charts twice more and is 6X platinum in the States. Of his studio albums, only Born In The USA has sold more. Of course, being a good record helped too.

He calls it “the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom.” the record gave us now-classic Classic Rock staples like “Jungle Land” ”10th Avenue Freeze-out” and “Thunder Road” not to mention the title track. “Born to Run” took him some 6 months to get right and a dozen different guitar over-dubs to produce the Phil Spector-like Wall of Sound.

At the time the Village Voice rated it “A” calling it “pseudo-tragic beautiful loser fatalism”- whatever that means. This decade, Rolling Stone has ranked it the 18th greatest album ever, applauding the “Attention to detail…a timeless record about the labors and glories of aspiring to greatness.” They also noted “Springsteen’s reputation as a perfectionist on record began here.”