“The full E Street Band right here!” Bruce Springsteen announced to the lucky crowd packed into Monmouth University’s Pollack Theatre Saturday afternoon. Springsteen had just performed “Thunder Road” with seven musicians, six of them representing a just-for-this-occasion combination of original and current E Street Band members—Steven Van Zandt, Garry Tallent, David Sancious and Roy Bittan on keys, Ernest Carter and Max Weinberg on dual drums— plus longtime saxophonist Ed Manion. It was the first time this precise combination of musicians had ever performed onstage together, a union of the pre-1975, jazz-leaning E Street Band featuring Carter and Sancious and the version of the band—with Bittan and Weinberg—that’s existed ever since.
Following “Thunder Road” was “Born to Run,” the second of an all-too-brief two-song set concluding the day-long symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of Born to Run at Monmouth University, hosted by the Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music. During “Born to Run” (with Carter nailing the complex drum fill Weinberg has said he’s always had trouble playing), Springsteen and the E Street Band transformed the 700-capacity college auditorium into a stadium, with fans crowding the aisles and shouting “tramps like us.” when prompted.
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It was a thrilling finale to a day of on-stage panels, interviews and roundtable discussions featuring Springsteen himself, alongside many of the musicians and behind-the-scenes figures who played a role in the creation of Born to Run. Speakers ranged from E Street Band members to the album’s engineer Jimmy Iovine to Springsteen’s former and current managers, Mike Appel and Jon Landau, to Eric Meola, who shot the album’s iconic cover, to assorted Columbia Records employees involved in the promotion of the record.
Even if Springsteen himself, who spoke during three separate panels before performing, was the day’s unannounced-but-widely expected main attraction, the symoposium was a tribute to the many musicians, collaborators and industry players who helped make Born to Run the album we know today.
“These were the guys that were there when you need them,” Springsteen said about his bandmates, Appel, Landau and Iovine during a panel about the recording of the album, “when you have nothing, and were no one, these were the guys that gave [me] everything.”
The Born to Run symposium comes during a heightened period of legacy-building for Springsteen in advance of next month’s Bruce biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere. And while that film (and the most recently announced box-set) focuses on Nebraska, it’s been a backwards-looking year for Springsteen in more ways than one. Apart from this year’s Tracks II box set, there’s been plenty of commemorating the 50th anniversary of Springsteen’s most iconic album: Many nuggets from the day’s panels can also be found in Tonight in Jungleland, the recently published book on the making of the album by Peter Ames Carlin, who interviewed Springsteen and Landau on-stage earlier in the afternoon.
But regardless of how many tidbits from throughout the day were first reported by Carlin, hearing those involved with the album discuss its backstory and mythology in-person made for an incredibly entertaining day for fans: There was former manager Mike Appel talking about hardballing both Time and Newsweek editors as he finagled for both covers with “no interview without the cover” policy (one he allegedly even extended to Playboy when they called asking for a Bruce interview).
There was Jimmy Iovine sharing what Springsteen told him after they listened to Born to Run in its entirety on a rainy drive through New Jersey just a few weeks ago: “You peaked!” There was photographer Eric Meola talking about how tired Clarence Clemons and Springsteen were during the Born to Run photoshoot (“They’re yawning in half the shots, exhausted. Yet in the other half, they’re exuberant.”) And there were stories from former Columbia employees Paul Rappaport, Michael Pillot and Peter Philbin about fighting the uphill battle of advocating for an artist they believed in when he wasn’t gaining traction in his earliest years.
Springsteen himself showed up early in the day, first spotted next to Jimmy Iovine in the wings towards the back of the auditorium, arms-crossed, as he cracked up while watching a humorous panel about the 1975 Born to Run tour in which tour photographer Barbara Pyle told a story about documenting Springsteen smiling for the first time in a year: “This guy was a shut-in!”
Springsteen then appeared in three consecutive panels. He responded to being asked how “Born to Run” sounds to him 50 years later: “It sounds like I fucking sound!” He told stories about his mother forcing him, at age 13, to pretend he was 12 to avoid paying adult prices for admission to a movie theater. He reflected on having a Peter Pan poster hanging in his bedroom circa 1974, the one that inspired him naming the character in “Born to Run” “Wendy”: “Not sure what that [says about] my adult life; It actually explains quite a bit of it!” He admitted he stole the opening of “Born to Run” from “The Locomotion.” He reflected on his controlling tendencies in the studio during Born to Run and talked about how intimidated he was by seasoned session pros like the Brecker Brothers and David Sanborn: “I was young and insecure about anything and everything.”
And he made jokes at his own expense. At one point, during a discussion of “Backstreets,” (a song “about those summer nights when you’re left on your own,” he called it) Springsteen asked for the song’s lyrics to be pulled up on a teleprompter. When that didn’t immediately happen, Carlin asked him which lyrics he needed.
“I want all of them,” Springsteen responded. “I’m 76; I don’t know any of them!”
(At his own solo show later that evening at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, Max Weinberg joked in-between songs about how earlier in the day various E Street Band members had compared and contrasted their respective hearing aids with one another backstage.)
Towards the end of the full-band panel about the recording of the album, Van Zandt pulled out a guitar to demonstrate a story he’s told many times before: How a conversation he had with Springsteen resulted in the last note of the “Born to Run” guitar riff being changed from a minor chord to a major chord. The crowd laughed as Van Zandt played the riff as it sounded before he pointed out to Bruce that it was a minor chord.
“For those of you who don’t know music,” Springsteen said of the song’s riff before Van Zandt sparked the change, “this would’ve changed history.”
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