Chris Christie reminisces about Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ for album’s

The album “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band was released on this day in 1975, and went on to become one of the most talked about and beloved rock and roll albums of all time.

“It is a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on him – a ’57 Chevy running on melted down Crystals records that shuts down every claim that has been made”, wrote Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus. “That morning, we’d just completed the last of the mixes in New York, and exhausted but thankful to be out of the studio, we headed north, ready – we thought – for whatever this music was going to bring us”.

The “Born to Run” album was considered a last-ditch effort to see if Springsteen’s music could appeal to a wide audience. This haunting little masterpiece a few loser planning a harmful crime as a way to impress a woman is the very essence of movie noir, in a three-minute nutshell. He was one of us. “However what’s fascinating to me is that probably the most highly effective moments within the music are wordless”, Phillips says.

I listened half-heartedly until Clarence Cleamons’ sax solo came in – and then I was hooked.

Springsteen hasn’t always reciprocated Christie’s love, declining to play at his inauguration in 2009 and poking fun at the governor’s “Bridgegate” scandal. It is, at any rate, an epic portrait of an urban nightscape erupting into “West Side Story” violence (“there’s a ballet being fought out in the alley”) that brings the album to a fitting, apocalyptic climax.

But Springsteen has participated in some jabs at Christie over the years. The “cherry tops” in the lyrics refer to the old-fashioned squad cars with the single red light. “It’s uncooked emotion. There’s as a lot which means and emotion in that howl as something in that track”.