Between What’s Flesh and What’s Fantasy: 'Born to Run' Turns 50

In the swales of my clanky, forsaken soul, the phrase “nothing left but time” knocks. It’s a covenant shared between generations—foolish people who’ve bought in on the promise of hope reaching them before the clock stops. And those words tumble out of Bruce Springsteen’s mouth during a song called “Lonely Night In the Park,” which he recorded at the same time he recorded “Thunder Road,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and “Night.” Unless you’re a card-carrying member of one of Bruce’s planet-spanning fan clubs and have a stack of bootleg tapes tucked away somewhere, “Lonely Night In the Park” and its siblings do not share the same cultural currency. Plus the song, which came together across two nights at the Record Plant on West 44th Street, between Hell’s Kitchen and Midtown and a few blocks left of Times Square, did not meet the same fate as the aforementioned three. It was, under Mike Appel’s bullheadedness, shelved from Born to Run in 1975 in favor of the crime-spree ballad “Meeting Across the River.”

But a few days ago, Bruce shuttled “Lonely Night In the Park” to streaming services for the first time, in its highest fidelity yet. After pressing play, you’re hit with “Positively 4th Street” organ blows and a sweeping Telecaster sound that hundreds, if not thousands of eager musicians have tried to replicate in the years since. Bruce’s strumming—barking, pier-dappled phrases culled from the bedrock of Link Wray and Duane Eddy—and Roy Bittan’s piano—which quarrels through the “Lonely Night In the Park” bridge like he’s a Badfinger expat—are a tango remarkably woven into the fabric of art as we know it. And then, Bruce hocks a line from Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie”: “If she can dance, you can make it.” Vaulted for a half-century, “Lonely Night In the Park” is not only the work of a madman, thief, and prophet, but a reminder that rock and roll is a symphony for the living.

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Born to Run turns 50 years old today, August 25th. Of course we’re still learning about it and its making—there’s even a new book out, written by Peter Ames Carlin, that very greatly digs into all of that—but I am less interested in how Bruce and his bandmates did all of that now. Every bedroom I’ve called my own has been dark yet aflame, not by a moonlight leaking through window shades but by Born to Run’s Wikipedia page. All these years later and there is simply not enough language or proof or recollection available to correctly interpret what happened at 914 and the Record Plant for those 18 months. Magic, not as an excuse but as an inevitability, gets close. But still, I am wary of that closeness. As a child, I would leaf through my grandmother’s black-and-white family photobooks and, in my innocent delusions, believe that the world did not always know color—that decades ago, maybe five or six, history finally turned on. And when I listen to Born to Run in 2025, having recently eclipsed the age Bruce was when he finished it, I age back into that unfathomable, to when the folklore of reds, blues, and yellows finally became fact.

The first two Springsteen albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, set the stage as a verbose introduction to Bruce before he was really “The Boss,” when he was Frank O’Hara in a sleeveless shirt. The songs were humorous, if not brash (and poorly sold) memoirs of a well-read punk making dense observations on youthful naiveté decaying beneath city lights. He teetered on genius but wasn’t marketable like Billy Joel, his music not yet dominant on FM stations in radio meccas like Cleveland and Los Angeles. But the eight songs that make up Born to Run’s runtime create an atlas, roads to places I recognize but could never claim, like an “amusement park ris[ing] bold and stark and kids are huddled on the beach in the mist,” or “soul engines running through a night so tender in a bedroom locked.”

And delivering those images is this scruffy and handsome player draped in leather, whose singing voice is messy and cloaked in an unorthodox, oft-mumbly rasp. By 1975, Bruce’s greatest hero, Roy Orbison, was playing empty rooms and his greatest predecessor, Bob Dylan, was 34 years old and effectively “dated” to the kids, drunks, and poets courting the E Street Band’s pageantry—an anachronism of girl-group pop panache immortalized by sweaty boardwalk goons and jazz club beatniks. Every minute hints at escape, the filmic kind, which has been worshipped at the altar of rock and roll boundlessly. And it all begins in the only way it ever could, with an image that has sat within me like a prayer: “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways. Like a vision, she dances across the porch as the radio plays.”

There are many things to say about Born to Run, and many have. There is Bruce’s rampant perfectionism and grabs at Spector’s Wagnerian, Wall of Sound production, which led to over a year of recording sessions. There is the title track, which took more than six months alone to complete, and its “pseudotragic beautiful loser fatalism,” as Christgau once described it. There are the legal disputes between Bruce and Appel, which led to the E Street Band going on tour for two years. There is the harmony of Bruce and saxophonist Clarence Clemons, whose addition to the band in 1972 is documented in “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”’s block party and whose presence can be felt in the vibrations of the swanky, swooning “Meeting Across the River.”

There, too, is Clemons’ solo in “Jungleland,” which cuts through the 9-minute dirge like a humid, swaggering siren. There are the two boys full of “a love so hard and filled with defeat” during the “one soft, infested summer” turmoil of “Backstreets,” and there are the bookends of highway-exit freedom that envelop songs of betrayal, daytime labor exploits, running, driving, hiding, meeting, and loving. There are the horn parts in “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” which Steven Van Zandt composed on the spot at the Record Plant and earned a place in the band with. There are the comparisons of the album’s “one day/one night” concept to the Bible’s story about the life of Christ, which Springsteen confirmed to Carlin a year ago. Born to Run, with its songs that could still the clatter of the George Washington Bridge, as it rises out of the Jersey palisades and falls onto the shores of Manhattan, is an album that every generation deserves to love.

As a teenager infatuated with the concept of New York City, I found sanctuary in the Broadway of Bruce’s work (“Jungleland” does end in a West Side Story-meets-Warriors type of dramatic, musical combat, after all). Now, when I return to the streets of Manhattan and early-hour noise slips through the windows above my hotel beds, I hear “the whole damn city crying”—voices that, by the next dusk, will be replaced with brand new ones. 50 years on and Born to Run is still revered for its uncanny way of speaking directly to the so-called “lost and lonely,” whose curiosities are liberated by its inexhaustible vocabulary. In-between fist-pumping sweeps of unbridled rock and roll noir, Bruce navigates the consequences of Vietnam by rewriting the collapse of nostalgia. In 2005, Mark Richardson wrote, “Every young person should be so lucky, to have a time in his or her life when the inflated romanticism of Born to Run makes perfect sense.” I do not know if I am still a young person, or if the romances of Bruce’s songs no longer decorate the romances of my living. But I do hope they remain, if only because I choose to remember them even when they don’t make sense. I hope that I am always welcome to yap at the entrance of tomorrow even when there is no war to be won.

Bruce writes in present-tense, sings about “soul engines running through a night so tender, in a bedroom locked in whispers of soft refusal and then surrender,” and likens an alley fight to a ballet or a turnpike to an opera. The streets are alive until the cops come, when their cherry tops whirl through the nearby feeble dusk. And gangs the shade of midnight “carry a friend” in their pocket while “chromed invaders” carry you through the spectacle. But all of that is just scaffolding. The real treasure, Bruce argues, is the possibility of love. Out of the tramping doldrums of Born to Run’s story, a boy reckons, “I want to know if love is wild, babe, I want to know if love is real,” and then, as “hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard” and highways jam with “broken heroes,” that boy finds a serenade: “I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.”

Born to Run commands joy but does not surrender to it. Lines like “a barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge,” or “every muscle in your body sings as the highway ignites,” or “the night is dark but the sidewalk’s bright and lined with the light of the living,” or “we’re gonna get to that place where we really want to go, and we’ll walk in the sun” are pretty dreams that scare me to death, because the record combats placelessness while surrounded by the contrary. You call out the names—Wendy, Terry, Eddie, Cherry, Mary, Bad Scooter and Big Man, Rat—and jot down the noticeable details—a giant Exxon sign, a guitar that talks, skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets, transistor blasts, suicide machines sprung from Highway 9’s cages. But Hanif Abdurraqib once wrote that “children are made to believe miracles happen in the night.” On Born to Run, renewal is best found before the street lamps turn off. A kiss is worth dying inside of, but when the ambulance drives away, no one watches.

Yet the myth of “Thunder Road” always yanks me out of fear, every time the record begins again. The common heaviness of my hurt—a town tackled by collapse, fatherly affection punished by tragedy, highways growing overcrowded with people chasing the same dream—dims under the banner of Bruce’s ineffable faith in getting away and getting loved. There is somebody, somewhere, yelling our names at the sky, against the attack of a cresting, jingling piano. There’s a girl with dice-white teeth twirling in our shadows, making just enough room for us. Again, “nothing left but time” knocks. But maybe there is truth to that, as wide-eyed boardwalk aliens scam on death in rotten-hot traffic-jam sagas and sweaty lovers grab each other in abandoned cars. You see, the magic of Born to Run is, inextricably, ever-present in the cost of waking up again and having to draft a new roadmap for your own survival. But if you can dance, you can make it. Perhaps that is why we have not yet returned to the moon, songs about nowhere can take us anywhere.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Listen to Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band perform songs from Born to Run at the Capitol Theatre on New Year’s Eve 1977 below.

Between What’s Flesh and What’s Fantasy: Born to Run Turns 50

Bruce Springsteen’s magnum opus begins in the only way it ever could, with an image that has sat within me like a prayer: “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways. Like a vision, she dances across the porch as the radio plays.”