Song of the Day: Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road

It was almost fifty years ago now, in August of 1975, when Springsteen released his epochal breakthrough album Born to Run. A couple of months later, on October 27, he was simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek, a very, very big deal back in the day, and all of us immediately sat up and took notice. The hype, soon fully borne out, was that a fresh American voice, a tremendous new talent, had come to pull pop music out of its mid-Seventies doldrums and perhaps even save American rock ‘n roll. Well, I don’t know if Bruce actually saved rock, end of the day – a lot of the time it’s seemed beyond salvation – but he sure as hell tried, and indeed he’s still trying.

Over a long career he’s been consistently great, consistently thoughtful, spinning out archetypal American vignettes, often using autos, the quintessentially totemistic American machines that used to come out of Detroit, as metaphor, in songs by turns monumental and quietly, mournfully intimate. He’s certainly produced a mountain of estimable output since 1975, yet this listener, at least, finds himself drawn back repeatedly to Born to Run, the songs of which certainly weren’t like anything else being played on AM radio at the time, featuring compositions typified by almost cinematic storytelling, infused with an unusual street-level brand of eloquence. The best of them weren’t necessarily even that radio-friendly; they demanded undivided attention, particularly to the lyrics, and came that close to being bombastic and off-puttingly over the top. Yet coming from Bruce, they weren’t off-putting, but instead felt as authentic as they were passionate, focused as they were upon the hopes and often broken dreams of decidedly regular people slogging their way through the rocky terrain of a world that wasn’t at all like the vision of the American Dream that had long been sold to the common folk. These songs were gritty, urban, disillusioned, and sometimes angry, or at least bitterly aware of the realities facing those born into no particular privilege. They were often almost the sonic equivalent of film noir, and so frigging dramatic as to verge on operatic, as perhaps best exemplified by Born to Run’s title track, and the album opener, Thunder Road, my own favourite, and a powerful distillation of themes he’d be pursuing for the rest of his artistic life. I swear, from the opening lines what you’re hearing isn’t so much a song as the soundtrack to an old-school black-and-white movie that begins playing in your head, you can see it, like something shot in retro style by Spielberg, or maybe decades earlier by Elia Kazan:

The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways
Like a vision, she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey, that’s me, and I want you only
Don’t turn me home again
I just can’t face myself alone again

That could have been Brando talking to Eva Marie Saint. This guy wants to be somebody.

The lyrical nod to Roy Orbison’s Only the Lonely is, one can rest assured, more than just a convenient way to craft rhyming verse with the proper meter. Orbison was plainly a key influence on Springsteen’s early compositional style, not just in his embrace of intense emotionalism – an Orbison hallmark – but in the way his songs are structured. Thunder Road doesn’t hew to the convention followed by about 90 – 95% of popular songs, which tend to proceed along the lines of verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus, or “A-A-B-A-B”, often with a middle section, thus “A-A-B-A-B-C-A-B”, as the musical theorists would have it; Thunder Road doesn’t have a chorus at all, and only arguably has a bridge, or “middle eight” (the part that begins “well I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk”, which some wouldn’t characterize as a bridge at all). Instead it builds verse upon verse, with successive variations, in a progression that sounds, to my ears anyway, more like A-A-B-C-D-E-C, while working towards its stirring conclusion. As I discovered while doing the usual background reading for this post, you’ll hear the same sort of thing in a number of Orbison’s biggest hits. Oh, Pretty Woman, for example, likewise has no chorus at all, and is structured A-A-B-C-A-D, while Crying has been described as proceeding A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F-H:

It’s this sort of departure from the norm, which the listener may barely perceive except sub-consciously, that helps create a sense of mounting energy and tension, until finally the thing comes to an immensely satisfying climax, augmented mightily by the typically deft and powerful saxophone outro from “Big Man” Clarence Clemons. By that point you pretty much want to stand and cheer, while exhorting young Mary (who maybe isn’t quite so young anymore) to go on, stop wasting time and get in the man’s car. This could be your last chance to break on out of this dump and get somewhere, Mary! For God’s sake, girl, take it! Go!

It’s not every songwriter that can get you going like that. Bruce always could, and still does it all the time, yet after all these years, and everything he’s since achieved, I’m still prepared to hear arguments that this bracing kick in the pants from 1975 remains the greatest song in his remarkably varied and accomplished repertoire.