Baby We Were Born to Struggle

Bruce Springsteen, creativity, and the advent of a frictionless AI age

Several days ago, August 25, was the 50th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, one of the greatest albums in history. Today Springsteen is a music legend, and songs like “Born To Run”, “Thunder Road”, and “Jungleland” are classics. But none of these things were true half a century ago when Springsteen set out to create his third record. At the time, he had released Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle in 1973 to critical acclaim but commercial failure. Bruce and the E Street band were touring relentlessly around the country just to survive, and his label Columbia Records was souring on him due to the financial loss from his records. Springsteen was staring down the prospect of his artistic career dying before it had barely begun.

Even in that dark moment, he had the glimmers of something new. In late 1973, watching muscle cars drive up and down Ocean Avenue in Asbury Park, he saw scrawled across one of the cars a phrase that he wrote down in his notebook: Born to run.¹ What’s wild is how much effort it took for him to get from that moment to the iconic song that we know today.

I recently finished reading Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin, where he documents the torturous process of making the album. He uses Bruce’s work on the title track as an avatar for the struggle of whole experience. Of the earliest version of the song from early 1974 Carlin writes:

One early draft of the lyrics was called “Wild Angels.” Scrawled on a sheet of lined notebook paper, the verses describe a litany of modern urban catastrophes. Murderous junkies turn shotguns on soldiers on leave from Fort Dix. Them wild boys did it just for the noise / Not even for the kicks. Roads crumble, drivers are crushed beneath their own cars. The game is so rigged, it’s murderous. This town’ll rip the bones from your back / It’s a death trap / You’re dead unless you get out while you’re young.

He wrote more drafts, filling notebook pages in hotel rooms in the wee hours after shows, or while lounging on the musty sofa in the little bungalow he’d recently rented in a working-class section of Long Branch, north of Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore. The lyrics evolved, but the darkness persisted. Baby, tonight I saw a fast rebel / Crushed beneath the wheels of his own hemi began one verse. By the end we see the rebel breathing his last, clutched in the arms of his “beautiful surfer girl.” In another version the narrator witnesses the death of all his heroes, crushed beneath the weight of / Their own Chevy Six. And what of the beautiful surfer girl?… Dead on a beach in an / Everlasting fix.²

Over the spring and early summer of 1974, Bruce kept working on the song: “I remember it coming slowly. And it took me a lot of pages to write.”³

When it came to recording the music, things weren’t much smoother. Carlin writes:

Ensconsed in 914 [recording studio in Blauvelt, NY] in the wee hours, [Mike] Appell and Bruce seemed to try every idea that occurred to them. A string section. An ascending guitar riff repeating through the verse. A chorus of women chiming in on the chorus. An even bigger chorus of women ooh-ing behind the third verse. Still more strings on the bridge and on the last verse, doing those disco-style swoops, like sciroccos whipping up from the dance floor. They’d work out a part, hire whatever musicians or singers were needed to get it on tape, then mix it all together to see what they had. Sometimes it would stick, sometimes they’d just laugh, shake their heads, and slice it out….Work on the instrumental track went on and on, but it still didn’t rival Bruce’s laboring over the lyrics. He had always put energy into his narratives but the pressure he felt to get “Born to Run” just exactly right pushed him to a whole other level of perfectionism, determined to get every word, every nuance, every syllable, something like flawless. No, exactly flawless. 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. He’d find a pen, open the book, look at the page, and just…think. He’s be there for a while. An hour, two hours, maybe more.⁴

Now, you might read that and think, “That’s not genius, that’s just neurotic” and you’re probably partly right. But also, who am I to question the methods of one of the greatest artists of all time creating one of the greatest records of all time?

This is the big impression I came away with after reading Carlin’s book: how much literal blood, sweat, and tears went into creating this singular album.

It also made me wonder: is struggle a necessary ingredient in the making of great art? A quick perusal of history would suggest that it needs to be in there somewhere.

Bruce GPT?

I read Carlin’s book during a summer where I as an English professor am still trying to figure out what the hell do I do in the age of generative AI? Now, I should state up front that I am not anti-AI in principle. In fact I use it at times to help me brainstorm and research, and I am trying to teach students how to use it in ethical and limited ways. But I have decades of training in reading and writing and critical thinking. My students do not, and yet they are being ushered into a world where tech bros are falling over themselves to talk about how AI can do ALL THE THINGS for you and make you so much more EFFICIENT and PRODUCTIVE. They seem fixated by the prospect of a frictionless utopia. How am I supposed to teach my students the value of struggle and effort in a such a world where every tech tool wants to shove AI in their faces and ChatGPT can write them an essay in 30 seconds?

Now, I’m not suggesting that a college freshman essay is comparable to a musical masterpiece, nor am I suggesting every creative effort requires the agony that Springsteen went through in creating his masterpiece. But I am worried that we, and particularly the young people around us, are being thrust into a world that will be smoother but also duller, more bland, less colorful, and more robotic. A world in which the only Born to Runs being made are from third rate Bruce GPTs.

1. Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin, 4

2. Carlin, 5

3. Carlin, 52

4. Carlin, 67-68