Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run - Hardcover

Carlin, Peter Ames

 
9780385551533: Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385551533 ISBN 13: 9780385551533
Verlag: Doubleday, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the making of Bruce Springsteen’s ground-breaking album, Born to Run – one of the most iconic records in rock history – Tonight in Jungleland combines lush music writing with unprecedented inside access to Springsteen, his bandmates, and the full story behind every song… and coincides with the album’s 50th anniversary in August 2025.

“Absorbing. . . A fascinating portrait of a talented, ambitious and stubborn young man with strong creative instincts.”—Los Angeles Times

From the opening piano notes of “Thunder Road,” to the final outro of “Jungleland” – with American anthems like “Born to Run” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” in between – Bruce Springsteen’s seminal album, Born to Run, established Springsteen as a creative force in rock and roll. With his back against the wall, he wrote what has been hailed as a perfect album, a defining moment, and a roadmap for what would become a legendary career.

Peter Ames Carlin, whose bestselling biography, Bruce, gave him rare access to Springsteen’s inner circle, now returns with the full story of the making of this epic album. Released in August, 1975, Born to Run now celebrates its 50th anniversary. Carlin reveals a treasure trove of untold stories, detailing the writing and recording of every song, as well as the intense and at times tortuous process that mimicked the fault lines in Springsteen’s psyche and career, even as it revealed the depth of his vision. A must-read for any music fan, Tonight in Jungleland takes us inside a hallowed creative process and lets us experience history.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PETER AMES CARLIN is the author of several books, including Sonic Boom: The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records, published in 2021, and Bruce, the  biography of Bruce Springsteen published in 2012. Carlin has also been a freelance journalist, a senior writer at People in New York City, and a television columnist and feature writer at The Oregonian in Portland. A regular speaker on music, writing, and popular culture, Carlin lives in Seattle.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Watch the World Explode

On a page in his notebook, the song was coming together. It was the fall of 1973 and Bruce Springsteen was in Asbury Park, watching the street racers in their souped-up cars orbiting the Ocean Avenue/Kingsley Street circuit on a Saturday night. The parade of muscular, lovingly detailed automobiles stirred something in him—the way the cars animated their owners’ spirits. The candy shades of red, purple, and blue, the racing stripes and hand-painted eagles, the dazzling chrome and shimmering glass. And the power of their engines: the low rumble as they idled, the jet roar of takeoff. On the circuit the drivers moved slowly, steering wheels trembling in their hands, fully alive in their vehicles’ power and beauty.

Like animals pacing in a black, dark cage, senses on overload . . . / They’re gonna end this night in a senseless fight / And then watch the world explode.

Circling and revving, drifting slowly and then blasting off. Where were they going? It was an interesting question, just as compelling as where they came from and what brought them out into the night, to circle with their friends and rivals, to put it all on the line. One car had words running down its flank, a chain of cursive letters canted forward as if pulled by the finish line off in the distance. A dare, a philosophy, an explanation. Or maybe the title of a movie. Did he actually see it on a passing racer? Or did it simply pop into his head? Something that ought to be on a car, or maybe on his own tour van. Bruce wrote it in his notebook, in case he forgot it. He’d never forget it.

Born to run.

By the end of 1973 Bruce Springsteen was in a tough spot. His first album on Columbia Records, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, had been released that January. Critics and a small cadre of fans had loved it, and his second album, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, released that November, won the same acclaim, but also the same weak sales. That hard fact, along with a shift in Columbia Records’ upper management, meant that Bruce had fallen increasingly out of step with his record company. It was taking longer and longer for his manager, Mike Appel, to get his calls returned. Especially now that he was trying to figure out when they’d be getting the money they’d need to fund recording sessions for Bruce’s next album. We need to think about it, Mike, he kept hearing from the executives.

When he finally got an answer in the early weeks of 1974 the news was frustrating, at best. Go make a single, they said. If it sounds like it could be on the radio we’ll pay for the rest of the album. Appel tried to protest: Bruce isn’t a singles act, he argued. It’s all about albums, that’s been the plan all along. But that hadn’t worked, the executives said. So this is your chance. Go make a single.

Appel took the news to Bruce, who absorbed it, nodded, picked up his notebook. He had a new song that felt different from what they’d done before. Maybe that’s what they should work on. He wasn’t done with it yet, but the bones, and the essential feelings, were there.



The chords for the song, and the melody of the verses, found their shape nearly immediately. Focused on directness, if not simplicity, the central part of the tune revolved around three basic chords, the I-IV-V progression heard in so many rock songs: “Louie Louie,” “Twist and Shout,” the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby,” and at least a dozen of Chuck Berry’s most classic hits, while the guitar riff in the verses combined “Telstar” with Duane Eddy’s guitar twang. The descending chords in the second part of the verses, along with the I-vi-IV-V resolution of the chorus, traced their lineage to another corner of rock history (think “Duke of Earl,” “This Boy,” “Surfer Girl,” et al.), while the ascending modulations in the bridge and the fast tumble back down to the root chord at the start of the next verse are the only traces of the elaborate constructions on Bruce’s first two albums. The bones of this song came from rock ’n’ roll’s most fundamental musical archetypes.

One early draft of the lyrics was called “Wild Angels.” Scrawled on a sheet of lined notebook paper, the verses describe a litany of modern urban catastrophes. Murderous junkies turn shotguns on soldiers on leave from Fort Dix. Them wild boys did it just for the noise / Not even for the kicks. Roads crumble, drivers are crushed beneath their own cars. The game is so rigged, it’s murderous. This town’ll rip the bones from your back / It’s a death trap / You’re dead unless you get out when you’re young.

He wrote more drafts, filling notebook pages in hotel rooms in the wee hours after shows, or while lounging on the musty sofa in the little bungalow he’d recently rented in a working-class section of Long Branch, north of Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore. The lyrics evolved, but the darkness persisted. Baby, tonight I saw the fast rebel / Crushed beneath the wheels of his own hemi began one verse. By the end we see the rebel breathing his last, clutched in the arms of his “beautiful surfer girl.” In another version the narrator witnesses the death of all his heroes, crushed beneath the weight of / Their own Chevy Six. And what of the beautiful surfer girl? . . . Dead on a beach in an / Everlasting fix.

It feels unexpected, nothing like the songs on his first two albums and even less like the work he’d do over the next few decades. But in the moment, as he was watching the world and absorbing the culture that reflected how it felt to be alive in that moment, it had the ring of truth. “I was naturally close to a sort of rock ’n’ roll gothicness,” he says. “That was just where I was coming from, from all the B movies I saw, and from growing up in Asbury Park with the hot rods, you know, spinning around the circuit on a nightly basis.”

Bruce kept working, filling his notebook. Taking out lines, adding new ones, revising what he had, pulling it apart, crafting new verses and weaving those in. Eventually the words began to clarify and lose their hysterical edge. The gloom, and the sense of danger, persisted. Still, by the start of the spring Bruce’s words identified something glimmering on the horizon. A vision, at least, of somewhere else. A potential end point for the one phrase that could be found in every draft of the lyric: Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

It’s the early fall of 2024, the morning of Bruce Springsteen’s seventy-fifth birthday. We’re in the living room of a house on the New Jersey shore a few miles south of the town Bruce’s songs have made famous. It’s a nice, if not extravagant, beach house, the sort of new construction that feels like it could have been here a century ago. But the enormous seaside windows and unexpected angles of the living room describe a more recent history. Sitting in an armchair that faces a large fireplace, Bruce is remembering what it was like to be a twenty-four-year-old kid. His dark eyes are sparkling. Just a week ago he played a weekend-capping show at the Sea.Hear.Now festival in Asbury Park. The festival’s main stage was on the beach where the younger Bruce used to surf, swim, and, when he didn’t have anywhere else to go, sleep. To mark the occasion he dispensed with the set list he’d built for the shows he’d been playing on tour over the last two years and dug deep into his earliest albums with rarely-played-these-days songs, including “Blinded by the Light,” “Does This Bus Stop at...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385551533
ISBN 13 
9780385551533
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Doubleday
https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland