Born in the USA is 40 years old – but very few fans know why its first single Dancing In The Dark nearly didn’t happen
“YOU can’t start a fire without a spark.”
So sang Bruce Springsteen on Dancing In The Dark, the spark that would light the rock ’n’ roll inferno of Born In The U.S.A, released 40 years ago today.
Born In The U.S.A. is a masterpiece.
A searing songbook of hard-luck Americana that touched the souls of the 30million people — so far — who bought it and helped catapult it to No1 around the world, securing its place as one of the best-selling rock albums of all time.
And it turned the 34-year-old, bandana-wearing, ripped jeans-sporting son of Long Branch, New Jersey, into a pop superstar, turbo charging his private campaign to become a rock ’n’ roll legend, a working-class hero who, as he admits, hasn’t done a day’s real work since he was 15.
Bruce had arrived on the global stage.
Move over Madonna. Jog on Jacko.
Bow down to The Boss.
It would take another year for the fire of June 4, 1984, to engulf me.
I “taped” Born In The U.S.A. off a friend’s dad and played that over and over until I found my own copy at a car boot sale months later.
Now that iconic album cover, shot by celebrity snapper Annie Leibovitz, was on my shelf.
When I turned ten, all I wanted to be was Bruce Springsteen.
It is a mark of the — sometimes criticised — pop accessibility of Born In The U.S.A. that it could capture my pubescent brain with its grown-up tales of working for the man.
From the opening synth bars of the title track — a bombastic room shaker whose satirical denouncement of arrogant America is still as vital today — I was hooked.
I hadn’t even had a paper round, but somehow I was empathising with the hard-bitten men of New Jersey, working on the highway, laying down the “blacktop”. Whatever that was.
It was an education.
Maybe I learned more from those three-minute records than I ever did in school.
I was calling my friends “baby” and dreaming of “busting out” of my home town of Chesterfield in Derbyshire in search of a better life.
And all the while just looking for a lover who could come on in and cover me. Or at the very least give me a kiss.
Me and three pals even performed the album during a school assembly, miming along with microphones made of toilet roll tubes covered in foil as No Surrender blared from the twin cassette player my friend Berkeley’s parents had bought him when they came good on the Football Pools.
We wanted to play the whole album until the headmaster objected: “Just the three songs, eh lads? We haven’t got all day.”
Crushed, but elated all the same.
Morning assembly at Deer Park Primary School was not quite the three sold-out nights at Wembley Stadium that Bruce would play during his £70million-grossing world tour of the album.
But God it felt good.
‘Most misunderstood pieces of music’
They were glory days all right.
The local Our Price was besieged with orders from young fans after that unforgettable show (probably).
With our squeaky voices and jumble-sale singlets we proved that Born In The U.S.A. is not just an album for the ages but an LP for all ages.
There is something about its variety — from Dancing In The Dark’s unabashed pop to country-tinged songs such as Darlington County to the rock ’n’ roll spirit of No Surrender and the R&B flavour of platonic love letter Bobby Jean — that helped it take root in the lives of so many lives.
Here was a man whose previous album, Nebraska, had been a dark lo-fi LP of quiet ruminations (and murder!), now turning the dial up to 11 and breaking out the synthesisers that would come to define the sound of the 1980s.
Launching Dancing In The Dark as the album’s first single in May 1984 was a masterstroke.
It instantly recast Bruce, the chronicler of the parts of America that Hollywood had little interest in, as someone who could have some fun. Someone you could dance to.
The accompanying video, shot, somewhat surprisingly, by Scarface director Brian De Palma, showed us a new Bruce too.
There he was, all smiles, bandana binned, bopping away . . . and dragging a young Courteney Cox on stage to dance with him.
Welcome to my disco, was the vibe. And discos across the world lapped it up, the 12in Blaster Mix having us dancing in the dark from Asbury Park to Zimbabwe.
It became a pop sensation, helping Bruce bag his first ever Grammy Award.
All for a song he wrote in one night and only after producer Jon Landau insisted that the album needed an instant, catchy single that would, says Bruce, “throw gasoline on the fire”.
‘Throw gasoline on the fire’
Born In The U.S.A. gave birth to seven singles in all.
The title track, and it’s opener, wasn’t released until later that year and despite the album having “gone nuclear”, as Bruce would later declare, it became a monster hit on its own, going triple platinum.
“When I heard it thundering back at me through . . . gargantuan studio speakers, I knew it was one of the best things I’d ever done,” he wrote in his brilliant 2016 memoir Born To Run.
It is also perhaps Bruce’s most controversial song, as he put it: “One of my greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music.”
For the hard of hearing, Born In The U.S.A. was the ultimate jingoistic anthem, a hymn to the power and pride of America, a “YOO-ESS-AY” chant for all the knuckle-heads.
But of course it was nothing of the sort.
Coming a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, it is a protest song that highlights the poor treatment of the veterans who returned after fighting — and eventually losing — the brutal conflict that had bitterly, and at times lethally, divided America.
Bruce was telling us that to be Born In The U.S.A. could, for some, be far from the blessing the flag-wielding patriots would have us believe.
Ronald Reagan didn’t get it and even fancied using it on the campaign trail during the ’84 presidential elections until The Boss told him to get stuffed.
Everyone still wants a piece of Bruce, and it’s the Born In The U.S.A era Bruce they want.
You can’t turn on the radio without hearing The Boss, either in person or echoed in the output of the many artists who owe him so much.
From grunge bands such as Pearl Jam, who pinched his gravelly baritone, to modern troubadours including Geordie superstar Sam Fender, with his tales of misspent youth lifted up by a saxophone soundtrack inspir ed by Bruce’s late, great collaborator Clarence Clemons.
When I heard it thundering back at me through . . . gargantuan studio speakers, I knew it was one of the best things I’d ever done
Bruce Springsteen
Some have even borrowed literally.
One example is fellow New Jersey band The Gaslight Anthem, who feature Bruce on the title track of their latest album, History Books.
They sing on 2008’s High Lonesome: “And at night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet.
“It’s a pretty good song, baby you know the rest.” You bet we do.
I’m On Fire, the fourth single release from Born In The U.S.A, is the first song I ever learnt off by heart (that wasn’t Jingle Bells).
The sparse and haunting track is one of the album’s more downbeat songs — and at around 2min 35sec its shortest — but it is in these more melancholy tracks where you can find Bruce’s most beautiful lyrics.
On Downbound Train, a hymn to a lost life and love, he sings: “Now I work down at the carwash where all it ever does is rain.” Oof! It still gets you.
Indeed, it is a testament to this collection of 12 songs that, with 21 albums to choose from, they still form a key part of Bruce’s epic sets.
Yes, there were the years when you were more likely to hear him shout “Make America Great Again” than play Born In The U.S.A. but now it’s back.
Last year I managed to bag a ticket to Bruce’s show in London’s Hyde Park, where he played EIGHT songs from the album to a grateful audience of 70,000.
A week later I had lunch with a friend who had been working on the show and had helped me get in.
He asked me how I got on.
I told him I had tears in my eyes when he played Born In The U.S.A.
He looked at me, smiled, and said: “You and everyone else, mate.”
Track listing
SIDE ONE
- Born In The U.S.A. – Single out Oct ’84 (No 5 in UK)
- Cover Me – Single out Jul ’84 (No 16 in UK)
- Darlington County
- Working On The Highway
- Downbound Train
- I’m On Fire – Single out Feb ’85 (No 5 in UK)
SIDE TWO
- No Surrender
- Bobby Jean
- I’m Goin’ Down – Single out Aug ’85 (No 9 in US)
- Glory Days – Single out May ’85 (No 17 in UK)
- Dancing In The Dark – Single out May ’84 (No 4 in UK)
- My Hometown – Single out Nov ’85 (No 9 in UK)