Before Bruce Was 'The Boss'

He was just a skinny kid playing the club circuit in the early 1970's but, for Bruce Springsteen, an album called "Born to Run" was about to change all that.

As he went into a studio to make the record, his first two albums had been flops and his record label was growing restless.

On CBS News Sunday Morning, CBS News Correspondent Anthony Mason takes us back to Springsteen's lean years, to the time when "Born to Run" was born, when Springsteen struggled to create the classic that would prove he really could live up to all his promise.

Now, "Born to Run" has become a classic, a seminal album in every way, and it's being reissued.

In fact, by any accounting, "Born to Run" is considered one of the great rock records of all time, a remarkable confluence of events and musicians that led to one of popular music's most successful ventures.

Mason asked Springsteen if it ever amazes him that he was only 24, when he made "Born to Run.

"It was just rock music, you know," Springsteen answered. "That's (what) 24-year-old kids would do, you know."

In 1974, when Springsteen and his E Street Band went into a studio to record his third album, he was a promising singer struggling to hang onto a recording contract.

"We'd had a couple of what were considered flops, and that was two records, two strikes. Three strikes, you're out, maybe," he told Mason.

"Greetings From Asbury Park," Springsteen's debut album, had sold only 20,000 copies. His second album sold even less than that.

Bruce Lundvall, who was the head of marketing for Columbia Records at the time, says the performance of those two records was "very disappointing. And people were beginning to question, 'Well, is Springsteen really gonna be a long-term artist here?' "

"Was the company sweating it out while he was working for over a year?" Mason wanted to know.

"Well, some of us were, sure, you know," replied Lundvist.

Mason put it to Springsteen directly: "When you started writing songs for this album, were you saying to yourself, 'It's my last chance?' "

"I lived with a lot of death anxiety, so I always thought that," Springsteen chuckled. "That's the way I always write, you know: 'Oh, this is the last one.'

"I was reaching; I wanted to make one of the greatest, you know, rock records ever."

Springsteen had a sound in his head, cinematic lyrics, and an epic layered sound that paid homage to producer Phil Spector.

He tells Mason, "We would cut with the live band, just a small section of us, three or four of us, and then layer things on, you know."

After laying the basic track of "Born to Run" with drums, an acoustic guitar and bass, the musicians added electric guitars and piano, plus electric guitars and piano. On top of that, saxophone and a glockenspiel, plus Fender Rhodes, glockenspiel, and saxophone. Finally, the full album mix had synthesizers, tambourines and strings.

"It took a long time to write the first one," Springsteen says, "a lot of failure, failure, failure along the way."

Springsteen sweated it out in the studio for more than a year.

"You've said the album became a monster," Mason reminded Springsteen.

"There was a monster working on it; me, maybe.

"There was a moment where there was a lot of pressure on for the record to come through. There was just pressure on us in general for it to be something special, because that was the bar that I set for myself.

"When I put my band together, it wasn't casual, and I wasn't modest about it. I didn't want to be good. I wanted to be great. I wanted to be great. I aspired to the kind of impact and success that my heroes had."

The recording of the first two albums had gone relatively smoothly, Springsteen says, but with "Born to Run," he ran into his first, "I can't get it done."

When Steve van Zandt, an old friend who later joined the band, stopped by the studio, Springsteen was recording, "Tenth Avenue Freezeout," and having trouble with the horns.

"He wasn't gonna stop until it was right, you know?" van Zandt reflects. "And Bruce, he said, 'What do you think?' I said, 'Well, not so good. So he says, 'Can you fix that?' I said 'Yeah, I think I can fix that.' "

"And so," Springsteen recalls, "they just started, 'Da da, ditti da, ditti da, da da,' and boom, it was there, you know."

In the summer of 1975, recording was finally finished. But when Springsteen listened to the master, he hated it: "It just didn't sound right to me. … I think I was home and I took it, and threw it in my swimming pool, because I didn't think it sounded right."

"And finally," says Jon Landau, who co-produced the record and later became Springsteen's manager, "somebody from CBS, from Columbia called me and said, 'Hey, you know, there's no album?' "

Landau called Springsteen.

"What," Mason wondered, "did you say to him on the phone, when he basically wanted to throw the album away?"

"Well," Landau replied, "what was happening was, if I may say so, is that Bruce was having a panic attack and, back in 1975, neither one of us knew what that was."

Then the album came out.

When "Born to Run" was released in September of 1975. Rolling Stone called it a "magnificent album that pays off in every bet ever placed on (Springsteen)."

On the radio, he had his first hit single. The album climbed to No. 3 on the charts.

"But," observes Landau, "there came a point where we almost started to succeed a little too much."

That October, Springsteen made the covers of both Newsweek and Time in the same week.

"What changed," Mason inquired.

"Everything changed then, you know," Springsteen said. "Expectations, obviously. …I think you'll find, in a successful band, some guys go, 'Man, this is it! We're livin' the life. Let the the good times roll.' And other guys go, 'Oh, shit, you know, what next, you know. What am I gonna do now?'

And I was more of that school. I had the ego and the ambition to feel like I belonged on the cover of Time and Newsweek. On one hand, I felt like that; on the other hand, it scared me. You know, I had to sort my way through it after that."

To Jay Cocks, who wrote the Time cover story, Springsteen's music was different, "something that was a little more turbulent than people were hearing on the radio, something that was a little more restless. And maybe, something that was a little more desperate. … He put an edge back into things.

"It's just like a flashlight that's been shining too bright for too long: The battery starts to dim. And you need something fresh just to get the light shining again. And that's what Bruce did."

A remastered "Born to Run," complete with a documentary on its making and a 1975 concert, will be released this week.

On the road recently, Springsteen says, he played the album for the first time in maybe 20 years.

"All the sufferin'," he remarks, "and the time we put in, and the obsessiveness, sometimes that can drain your music of life. In this particular instance, it just packed it with all your hopes, and your fears, and your concerns, and it all got packed in there, and that's where it stayed for … the past thirty years."

He would record better selling albums.

Superstardom was still to come, Mason concludes. But, with 'Born to Run," Bruce Springsteen had found his sound, and his fans."