“Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go...”
BORN IN THE USA may be BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’s most successful album – but it is also his most misunderstood. As this landmark record turns 40, Stephen Deusner investigates how The E Street Band spun stadium rock gold from Springsteen’s unflinching studies of alienation, self-doubt and the American dream gone sour. Meanwhile, long-term admirers KURT VILE, LUCINDA WILLIAMS, TOM MORELLO and ADAM GRANDUCIEL celebrate an album of relatable characters, surprisingly raw performances and “total Boss music”
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Bruce almighty: Springsteen in full leather’n’denim armour, LA, 1984
Photo by AARON RAPOPORT
A megastar is born: Springsteen atWembley Stadium, July 4, 1985
AARON RAPOPORT CORBISVIA GETTY IMAGES
WHEN Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band toured behind his seventh album Born In The USA in 1984 and 1985, they knew they had to open each show with the title track. Its opening fanfare was too loud, too massive, too new to fit anywhere else in the setlist. Roy Bittan had recorded those towering chords on his new Yamaha CS-80, which at the time was a state-of-the-art analogue synthesiser, and he had programmed it to sound strange and vaguely Asian: a new colour in the E Street palette. Weinberg smacked his snare drum as hard as he could, then boosted it in the final mix, so that it sounded like bombs dropped from an aeroplane. Those two sounds together were meant to evoke the Vietnam War, but they also serve as a fanfare for an impossibly rousing anthem, roughly the size of any American stadium. How could the song go anywhere else in the setlist but at the beginning?
NEALPRESTON
Especially if you were one of the thousands of new fans who discovered Springsteen on this album, you might hear that music and his boast of “I’m a cool rockin’ daddy in the USA!” without grasping the song’s darker implications. Buried under one of the E Street Band’s most inventive arrangements was a story of a Vietnam veteran coming to grips with his own PTSD while trying to find a job in a bad economy. It’s not the kind of story that gets fists pumping and lighters raised, while the sharp tension between the lyrics and the music has made “Born In The USA” Springsteen’s most misunderstood song, even 40 years later.