“I’m sorry if it sounds corny, or like typical middle-aged-white-guy bullshit, but that’s what happened to me,” writer Peter Ames Carlin reflects in his recently released Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run. “The music felt supernatural… and I’ve felt myself being drawn into the same spell countless times while listening to Born to Run…”
Carlin’s book centers on a single chapter in the ongoing saga-like novel of Bruce Springsteen’s musical life. Namely, the development and production of his career-defining album Born to Run, released in 1975. But it also just so happens to be the chapter that turns the whole story around, toward the direction of next-level limitless success, commercial and critical achievement. Carlin’s book depicts an abbreviated timeframe in Bruce’s history, but it simultaneously captures the essence of the complex Born to Run period and its entire impact and quality.
With this book, and by penning this story, Carlin is, in a sense, playing to the crowd, telling the tale’s best moments, the part that everyone, fans of Bruce’s and non-fans alike, would be interested in hearing. It depicts an artist on the rise, yet—much like the newly released Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere—it simultaneously suggests that this same phenomenon, this exact trope, could fit the mold of any artist. This story could have happened with any creative.
Or could it have? Bruce Springsteen, patron saint of Freehold, New Jersey, partly poet, all rock-and-roller, and eternally introspective, is singularly perplexed by self-examination. Struggling to balance the seesaw between his working-class upbringing on one side and his unique cerebral genius on the other, at all times forced to confront these two selves and somehow make sense of them, to accept their truths.
From a broader perspective, tracing Bruce’s discography and related fandom and success, the evolution between his second album, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973), and third album, Born to Run (1975), signifies the greatest mountain climb in the artist’s career. With the release of Born to Run, Springsteen became the cultural phenomenon he is known for today.
There is a simultaneous universality and conciseness to the characters on this record. Mary in “Thunder Road,” Terry in “Backstreets,” and the struggling would-be criminals in “Meeting Across the River,” are all some of the strongest manifestations of Springsteen’s writerly potential, true-to-life seekers who strive beyond their means—emotional, monetary, and otherwise—all en route to settling their personal negotiations between lofty goals and realistic acceptances.
Tonight in Jungleland focuses largely on the critical role that Springsteen’s two managers played in shaping his own understanding of his artistic identity. First, there was Mike Appel, the initial guiding force who journeyed with Bruce from his earliest days. Then there was Jon Landau, the sympathetic rock writer who re-envisioned Springsteen as “the future of rock and roll” in a career-defining concert review for Rolling Stone.
Peter Ames Carlin, whose previous books have covered the careers of R.E.M., Brian Wilson, and Bruce Springsteen in comprehensive biographical form, presents a thoroughly researched account of Born to Run’s development and recording processes. He celebrates the project as a fan would, yet simultaneously addresses the intricacies of Springsteen’s Born to Run era with the meticulous detail of a true documentarian.
The work is also personalized by reflections and descriptions of candid interviews with Springsteen, which are peppered throughout the work. Overall, upon completion of Carlin’s book, the reader is left with the knowledge that the recording of Born to Run was an arduous process. Which, in some ways, is at odds with the listening experience, which is one of such pleasure and ease. What was happening then, however, was an artist’s identity transformation, during which a musician leaves behind the smaller aims of his youth and his past, and becomes grand, becomes who he was born to be.
