In celebration of Bruce Springsteen turning 50, we revisit Dan Caffrey\u2019s ranking of The Boss\u2019 classic album Born to Run. This article was originally published in 2015.<\/p>\n
Ranking the Album<\/a> is a feature in which we take an iconic or beloved record and dare to play favorites.\u00a0It\u2019s a testament to the fact that classic album or not, there are still some tracks we root for more than others to pop up in our shuffles. Today, in honor of the 50th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen<\/a>\u2019s Born to Run, we rank the iconic LP from best to greatest.<\/p>\n Born to Run turns 50 today. If you\u2019re interested in the arduous making of the album<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a sort of last-ditch effort for Bruce Springsteen to reach the superstar status he craved (working-class roots be damned) \u2014 or how it represented the decline of the American dream<\/a>, there\u2019s no shortage of great retrospectives out there from many other reputable publications. While these chronicles are more than worthy in their own right, I\u2019m also not interested in how many guitar overdubs were recorded for the title track, or regurgitating the \u201clyrics by Dylan, sung by Orbison, and produced by Spector\u201d line (although I guess I just did). Both of these bits of lore \u2014 and many other stories surrounding the album \u2014 are true, but that\u2019s just what they are this late in the game: lore. The Springsteen mythology has been endlessly picked over, reassembled, torn apart, then built up again over the years, usually into a bigger, stronger, more godlike statue.<\/p>\n So for this installment of Ranking the Album, I\u2019d like to put the grown-up critic in me to sleep and let my inner nine-year-old stay up past his bedtime. That\u2019s the age when I first heard Born to Run during a road trip or two to Cocoa Beach, Florida, on my dad\u2019s stereo while he was lifting weights, and just playing around the house whenever my family was cleaning, eating, or doing nothing at all. I\u2019m sure I heard it all in one sitting at some point, but when you\u2019re a kid, you can only remember one or two songs at a time. As such, I recall Born to Run slowly revealing itself across several months. That\u2019s how I remember it, so for all intents and purposes, that\u2019s how it happened.<\/p>\n And don\u2019t worry, I didn\u2019t write this in the tone of a precocious elementary schooler with purposely bad grammar and the verbal cadence of a propeller beanie spinning around and round on his head. I tried instead to channel those thoughts that bloom when hearing an album you love for the first time \u2014 intangible and more akin to images and pangs and colors than a refined analytical vocabulary. Some analysis, cynicism, and hindsight still crept in there, naturally, and there are several leaps and backpedals into time (I\u2019m a 41-year-old man these days), but for the most part, it\u2019s hard for me to not still hear this album the way I first heard it. I know \u201cTenth Avenue Freeze-Out\u201d has nothing to do with the show Taxi,\u00a0and \u201cShe\u2019s the One\u201d has little association with the film Heavyweights, but, as you\u2019ll soon read, those connections, silly as they are, will always exist for me.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s do it together. Let\u2019s take a stab at music-lover romance as we disappear down Flamingo Lane or Thunder Road or Tenth Avenue or whatever your preferred Springsteen may be. Thanks for joining me.<\/p>\n \u2013 Dan Caffrey 8. NIGHT<\/p>\n Max Weinberg<\/a>\u2019s driftwood-on-oil-drum snaps are always jarring after the fading boardwalk party of \u201cTenth Avenue Freeze-Out\u201d, and as a kid, this bothers you. As you get older, you learn that music critics call these sorts of dips \u201cfiller\u201d and that they\u2019re a necessary device. Every great album needs a a valley where you can come down from the mountain and take a breather. Born to Run just happens to be an album so anthemic that one of its valleys is a song like \u201cNight\u201d \u2014 still one of the fastest and most urgent tracks on the record.<\/p>\n As you get older yet again, you learn that great albums don\u2019t actually have filler at all, and that \u201cgems\u201d or \u201cdeep cuts\u201d are perhaps more accurate descriptors, even if The Boss did the guy-getting-off-work thing better on his next album, Darkness on the Edge of Town. Your mom and dad play this CD around the house, too, and even at nine, you could tell that the two works were markedly different, despite containing similar stories: Springsteen the idealist versus Springsteen the realist. And when it comes to getting-off-work songs, you\u2019ll eventually prefer realism, especially once you start working yourself. For the record, this will always be at an office, not a factory.<\/p>\n 7. SHE\u2019S THE ONE<\/p>\n In 1995, a kids movie about a fat camp will come out. It\u2019s called Heavyweights. You haven\u2019t watched the film much since then because you remember it being great and are afraid you\u2019ll feel otherwise if you revisit it. You remember there being a montage set to a song called \u201cI Want Candy\u201d<\/a>. It sounds an awful lot like \u201cShe\u2019s the One\u201d, which, you\u2019ll find out later, is because they both utilize the syncopated \u201cBo Diddley Beat\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t know any of this as a nine-year-old, so whenever you hear \u201cShe\u2019s the One\u201d, you have visions of chubby kids running around the woods, tying domineering counselors to trees, and pigging out on sweets they\u2019ve stashed around their cabin. It doesn\u2019t matter that the song has nothing to do with this. As an adult, you\u2019ll tell fellow critics it\u2019s one of your least favorite tracks on Born to Run because of its repetition (it\u2019s the only song that feels long to you), and for the fact that Springsteen wasn\u2019t yet old enough to accurately write about love (a stance you cribbed from both Robert Christgau and Pitchfork\u2019s Mark Richardson).<\/p>\n But those are lies. The real reason \u201cShe\u2019s the One\u201d kind of irks you is because it reminds you of a camp counselor getting punched in the balls. That\u2019s still pretty funny, but it breaks up Born to Run\u2019s consistent imagery of muscle cars, motorcycles, factories, boardwalks, rumbles, and bank heists.<\/p>\n 6. TENTH AVENUE FREEZE-OUT<\/p>\n This is the one your parents always sing along to, except for the one line sung-said by Clarence Clemons<\/a>. \u201cAnd kid you better get the picture,\u201d he purrs soothingly and almost inaudibly. Out of all the songs on the album, it\u2019s the one that reminds you most of the \u201970s \u2014\u00a0Steven Van Zandt<\/a>\u2019s horned-out intro and bridge touched with just a sprinkling of desperation, aka a young Springsteen\u2019s ceaseless quest to be a rock star, even if it means trudging through the snow to a gig after the band\u2019s van breaks down.<\/p>\n That image of vehicular malfunction is a far cry from the other auto-related icon the intro and bridge remind you of: the theme from\u00a0Taxi<\/a>. This will become a less accurate comparison as you get older, but the footage of an automobile successfully making its way to and from New York becomes an apt metaphor for the career of Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band<\/a> following the success of Born to Run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In celebration of Bruce Springsteen turning 50, we revisit Dan Caffrey\u2019s ranking of The Boss\u2019 classic album Born…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94819,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136],"class_list":["post-94818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Senior Staff Writer<\/p>\n