On June 4, 1984, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band proclaimed, “We Were Born in the USA.”
The now-legendary album offered a bigger, bolder expression of Springsteen’s central themes of community, friendship, economic inequality and patriotism, resulting in a generational work that spawned seven hit singles and sold more than 25 million copies.
Produced by Springsteen, Jon Landau, Steven Van Zandt and Chuck Plotkin, the album launched the band into superstardom and established The Boss as a musical icon of the ’80s.
The Born in the USA tour began with a rehearsal show at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park on June 8, 1984, four days after the album was released on June 4. The band traveled across North America, and then to Australia, Japan, and Europe, before returning to the US in August 1985 to play stadiums.
The album will be released on 40th anniversary red vinyl by Sony Music on Friday, June 14. The special edition will come with a gatefold sleeve, a booklet of archival material from the period, new liner notes written by Eric Flanigan, and a four-color lithograph.
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Here’s a track-by-track analysis of the record:
“Born in America”
The song “Born in the USA” is one of Springsteen’s greatest artistic and commercial successes, and also his most misunderstood.
The song is about the mistreatment Vietnam veterans suffered back home in the ’70s and early ’80s and the unequal achievement of the American Dream, a concept that was misunderstood by then-President Ronald Reagan.
“The future of America lies in the thousands of dreams in your hearts,” Reagan said during a campaign stop in Hammonton in 1984. “It lies in the messages of hope embodied in the songs of Bruce Springsteen, a New Jerseyan whom so many young Americans revere.”
Springsteen countered onstage that Reagan wasn’t familiar with his work.
The album’s third single, its defining sound is Max Weinberg’s crackling snare drum beat; in his autobiography, Born to Run, Springsteen calls it Weinberg’s “finest recording moment.”
more:Bruce Springsteen sends message to fans after European tour postponed: ‘I’ll be back’
“Cover Me”
Deft guitar work and an upbeat Texas blues structure make “Cover Me” stand out as a unique piece of work. It’s not rock, it’s not R&B, but it’s full of strong hooks and charm. Springsteen appears to play both crisp rhythm guitar and wailing Stevie Ray Vaughan-esque guitar leads.
The second single, “The Boss,” showcases a great R&B influenced lead vocal, full of screams, shouts and emotion. Fun fact: this song was originally written for Donna Summer.
“Darlington County”
Roy Bittan would surely be exhausted after this one, and Springsteen shows off his Southern vocals on this rock romp, which features plenty of “shalalas,” Bittan’s Jerry Lee Lewis-esque piano playing, and a rare Clarence Clemons sax solo on “Born in the USA.”
Work on the highway
This Eddie Cochran-esque hoedown is pure musical joy set against the backdrop of a rather sinister tale: the song’s protagonist is serving time working the highway a la “Cool Hand Luke” after being caught with his underage girlfriend.
“Son,” his father says, “don’t you understand that she is only a little girl and knows nothing of this cruel world?”
When that happens, the singer and the prison warden will be “beating up the Charlotte County road gang.”
more:Bruce Springsteen dedicates ‘My Hometown’ to his ‘buddies’ in Freehold and Ireland
“Downbound train”
This working-man’s noir track is darkly edged by Bittan’s early use of a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer, adding an ominous shadow to the tale of a lost soul, out of work and out of love, who is now drifting on the rails of an unfulfilling life, metaphorically and otherwise.
‘I’m on fire’
When rock ‘n’ roll singers sing about being on fire, it’s usually accompanied by a shriek or a scream or a guttural groan. On the compelling and seductive “I’m on Fire,” Springsteen sings the lyric with a sense of resignation: Passion and fulfillment are contradictions, trapped in a box that can’t be kindled by even the hottest fires in the hearth.
“I’m on Fire”‘s stripped-down arrangement of raspy guitars, rim-tapping drums and plaintive synthesizers exudes a sense of isolation that’s easy to fall into, and his fourth single, “The Boss,” in which he plays a lonely auto mechanic in the John Sayles-directed video, won an MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video.
‘No surrender at all’
“No Surrender” features a relentless 4/4 beat from drummer Max Weinberg and one of the most iconic lines in rock and roll history.
“I learned more from that three-minute record than I ever learned in school,” Springsteen sings.
“No Surrender” opened Side 2 on the original album and remains an important part of the band’s universe, being played every night on their current tour.
“Bobby Jean”
Though Roy Bittan’s superbly crafted, tragically tinged, stately piano line dominates the song, which is actually about Steven Van Zandt. The Boss and Little Steven had a falling out over Van Zandt’s role in the E Street Band in the early ’80s, after which Van Zandt left the band and missed out on their massive “Born in the USA” arena and stadium tour. He didn’t rejoin the band until their 1999 reunion tour.
“We liked the same music, we liked the same bands, we liked the same clothes,” Springsteen sings in the song.
That’s true to an extent, but Springsteen and Van Zandt dress quite differently these days: The Boss opts for basic business attire onstage, while Van Zandt sports a psychedelic Beau Brummell-esque style.
“I will fall.”
Released as the sixth single on August 27, 1985, “I’m Goin’ Down” stands out from the other songs on “Born in the USA” because it sounds different from the other songs on the album. Instead, it has a live feel, more like the songs on “The River.”
Repetition is a defining feature of “I’m Goin’ Down,” with The Boss repeating “down” over 50 times, and the addition of some bop-a-lops at the end makes it clear that the lyrics take a back seat to the seductive atmosphere.
‘heyday’
The irony of this fun bar rock ode to nostalgia is that The Boss wrote it in his early 30s, a time when he hadn’t spent much time looking back, but the sentiment is so well expressed that it has become a frequent concert staple.
The fifth single from the album, Springsteen is no stranger to adding fait accompli lyrics these days: As he sang at the recent American Music Honors ceremony at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, “I hope when I get older I don’t have to sit around and think about it, but that’s the way I (foggy)!”
Guess who the “speedball” pitcher was when Springsteen came across him coming out of the bar? According to Freehold historian Kevin Coyne, it was Freehold’s Joe DePew, who was Springsteen’s Babe Ruth League baseball teammate. The two met by chance at a Neptunes headlining night in 1973.
‘Dancing in the Dark’
“Dancing in the Dark” owes its success in large part to the Asbury Park club scene: Springsteen, eager to hear the new song, written and recorded late for “Born in the USA,” took a copy to Asbury Park’s Club Xanadu (now the Porta), where he handed it to a DJ, who played it and the dance floor erupted.
A performance video featuring a then-unknown Courteney Cox also became a hit on MTV. It was the album’s first single, released on May 9, 1984, and showed Springsteen and the E Street Band breaking new musical ground with danceable grooves, synthesizer tones, and DJ remixes.
‘hometown’
In 1973, it was “Greetings from Asbury Park.” Eleven years later, Springsteen shifted his focus to “My Hometown,” aka Freehold, where he recalls real events from his life in Freehold, lending the song a blue-chip artist’s universality. Family, race relations, economic hardship and a connection to the place he calls home are all wrapped up in the album’s seventh and final single, “My Hometown.”
The song’s protagonist is faced with the decision of whether to leave his hometown in search of better economic opportunity. In Springsteen’s case, he didn’t leave; The Boss now lives 15 minutes away in Colts Neck and can often be found around town when he’s not on tour.
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Jersey Shore native Chris Jordan covers entertainment and features for the USA Today Network New Jersey. He can be reached at cjordan@app.com.
