Bruce Springsteen almost drove his band to quit while making ‘Born to Run’

The infamous sax solo Clarence Clemons plays on Bruce Springsteen’s rock classic “Born To Run” is so vibrant and exhilarating that it seems like a moment of pure inspiration on Clemons’ part.

In truth, as Peter Ames Carlin lays out in his new book, “Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born To Run,” (Doubleday, August 5), it was the exact opposite. I came together note by meticulous note in a studio session that set new records for frustration.

Springsteen’s songwriting mastery was developed through an obsessive process that found him toiling over ideas, lyrics, and concepts virtually non-stop.

“If you saw Bruce offstage, at home, or on the road in 1973 or 1974, you wouldn’t have to look very far to find his songwriting notebook,” Carlin writes. “He usually kept it within reach and always had a song, or more likely several songs, working at the same time.”

The 1975 album “Born to Run,” Springsteen’s third, came to life over many months of tortured labor by Springsteen, a perfectionist whose process at the time could best be described as demented exhaustion.   

To arrive at the familiar version of the title track, Springsteen tried just about every musical idea he had ever heard, played, or thought about including a string section, women singers backing up the chorus, and even a disco portion.

For the song’s infamous sax solo, Springsteen worked with Clemons by singing his vision for the solo note by note, having Clemons play it, then changing one note, having Clemons play it again, and so on. This went on for hours, throughout the night.

“He spent ages working on it with Clemons, eight, ten, maybe twelve hours, playing the same notes over and over again, Bruce looking for a slightly different feel, a slightly different tone, a tiny adjustment to the rhythm of this passage, this pair of notes, this portion of that note,” writes Carlin.

Springsteen’s obsession with the details in the music, however, was nothing compared to how he labored over the song’s lyrics, constantly re-writing, seeking a different tone, a new phrase, anything that would help him make “Born To Run” as great as he knew it could be.

“Sometimes he’d be in the midst of a take, sing a few lines of a verse, shake it off, then take his notebook to a folding chair,” Carlin writes. “He’d find a pen, open the book, look at the page, and just…think. He’d be there for a while. An hour, two hours, maybe more.”

That time proved to be worth it, because the song was improving dramatically as it went. Springsteen’s longtime fans would hardly recognize the early versions of the song. 

At one point, it sounded like a musical salute to “Mad Max.”

“A song that had started as a nearly surrealistic portrait of a world gone mad — racers run down by their own cars, the highway buckling beneath their mag wheels, the thrill-kill junkies gunning down soldiers ‘just for the noise/Not even for the kicks’ — had been remade into a vibrant highway saga that, while heavily symbolic, could be recognized as existing on the modern Jersey Shore,” Carlin writes.

Given all this, the album’s recording process almost crumbled under the weight of Springsteen’s relentless perfectionism.

Stephen Appel, Springsteen’s road manager at the time, describes a scene of pure chaos.

“You’re working and it sounds great and so you start to think you have it right, but Bruce says, ‘Nope, it’s s–t,’” says Appel in the book. “And then you work for hours to change it. And then that’s done, and Bruce says, ‘You know what? Maybe it was better before, because now this sounds like s**t.’ And you would do that for ten to fifteen hours a day.”

When the album was finally complete, it was played for executives at Columbia, including Walter Yetnikoff, who had just been placed in charge of all of CBS’ record labels. (Columbia was owned by CBS at the time.) 

After he heard the entire album, Yetnikoff was asked what he thought and replied, “It’s like f—ing.”

Despite this rave review, when Springsteen the perfectionist heard the album’s final mix for the first time, he had a very different reaction.

As the music played, Springsteen started adding self-deprecating commentary.

“Oh, well, if I’m going to sing something I guess I should oversing it, that’s great,” Springsteen said. “Oh, and here comes the saxophone, that’s gotta be a Bruce Springsteen record, nothing clichéd about that.”

When the record was done playing, Springsteen said, “I dunno, man, maybe we should just scrap it. Toss this s–t and start over.”

Hearing that, Clemons, known as “The Big Man” at a towering 6’5”, stood up and walked out of the room without saying a word. Every member of the band and crew followed.

Of course, the record was not scrapped. Given that Springsteen’s first two albums had not sold well, Columbia executives ordered 100,000 copies printed — a number that, at the time, indicated the label had low expectations — and were shocked when pre-orders hit three times that.

The album became a #1 hit, and would dominate American rock radio for decades to come.

Both Time and Newsweek, two of the biggest magazines in the country at a time when that meant something, put him on the cover in the same week.

Interviewing Springsteen in 2024, Carlin found, unsurprisingly, that his view of the album had changed.

“I’m very, very fond of it,” Springsteen, now 75 years old, says in the book. “And on its anniversaries, I get in a car and I play it from start to finish, right? I just drive around listening.”

On these jaunts, Springsteen makes sure he ends up on West End Court in Long Branch, New Jersey, just outside the rented bungalow where he first put thoughts for the song to paper.

“I get there right before the end, right before [the album’s last song] ‘Jungleland,’” says Springsteen. “And I park there. I sit by the curb and I let ‘Jungleland’ play, all the way through.”