Born to Run

Columbia funded it after two poorly selling records, and he would be dropped if it failed. He wanted the sound of Phil Spector's productions, and said he imagined Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan with Spector at the desk. The title track took six months at 914 Sound. During the long sessions David Sancious and Ernest Carter left and Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg replaced them. Landau joined early in 1975, after suggesting that the saxophone solo in the song that became Thunder Road move to the end, and took the work to the Record Plant. Clemons spent sixteen hours on the Jungleland solo, and when the first acetate arrived Springsteen threw it into a hotel pool.

It reached number three in America. Greil Marcus called it magnificent in Rolling Stone, and the New York Times placed it among the great records of recent years, though The Real Paper's Langdon Winner heard a monument to rock orthodoxy. It entered the National Recording Registry in 2003, and its fiftieth anniversary was marked by a symposium at Monmouth University in September 2025, where Springsteen said that at the time he had nothing else.