With “Born to Run,” Bruce had escape on his mind and he certainly got that. The son’s lot at the time consisted of that “damn guitar” and a Beatles-on-Ed Sullivan-inspired rock & roll dream that was now 10 years down the road.

Bruce felt suffocated, imprisoned by this small town and the brooding heavy hand of one unhappy bus driver who often expressed dissatisfaction with his son’s lot in life. Dutch’s lone son had been born in 1949, and by the time the son was drifting through Freehold High School the two Springsteen men were locked in a well-worn, bristling father/son struggle the elder Springsteen struggled for control of his son and of his own disappointments the younger one struggled for independence day, for freedom. One of Freehold’s 13,000 inhabitants was a man named Douglas “Dutch” Springsteen, a bus driver among other things. The town experienced a massive population explosion during Springsteen’s teenage years in the 1960s, and still it was home to just 13,000 or so by 1970. Home was Freehold, New Jersey, and the surrounding area that included Asbury Park, Bruce’s musical real estate on the Jersey Shore, and Long Branch, where the then-24-year-old was living when he wrote “Born to Run.” Freehold, a commercial hub and the county seat of Monmouth County, sits comfortably in the Raritan Valley, give or take 35 miles from bustling Manhattan, New York. Tramps like us, he’s noted, were simply running away from home. Springsteen wasn’t really running from anything quite so grand as all that. Run toward fulfillment, or away from expectations? CBS Records, which had once been so high on the kid from Jersey that he’d been hailed as the new Dylan, was now questioning his future at the label. None of his singles to this point - “Blinded by the Light,” “Spirit in the Night,” and “4 th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” - had sniffed the charts. Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons on the Born to Run album artworkīruce Springsteen’s first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, each released in 1973, hadn’t connected with an audience despite an abundance of ambitious brilliance.

Bruce born to run