Born in the U.S.A.: Ranking the Songs
And a whole lot more on the 40th anniversary of Springsteen's seminal monster
This summer marked the 40th anniversary of the release of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. I was in middle school when the album came out, and like most kids my age, Born in the U.S.A. was my first introduction to Bruce Springsteen. That fact was inconceivable to oldest-school Springsteen fans who had been listening to the Boss since the early ‘70s and who found it galling that Gen Xers like me were oblivious to “Thunder Road” and “Badlands” and “The River” and everything else from Bruce’s back catalog when “Dancing in the Dark” arrived in 1984.
(Technical amendment: My actual first exposure to Springsteen was, in all likelihood, the Manfred Mann’s Earth Band cover of “Blinded by the Light,” a rock-radio staple in the late ‘70s, but I didn’t know Springsteen wrote it and didn’t hear his original version until much later. Same thing with “Fire,” which I knew from the Pointer Sisters’ cover, a smash in ‘78. I wasn’t aware that Bruce wrote that one until I saw Robin Williams on TV one night imitating Elmer Fudd singing “Fire” (“I’m dwivin’ in my caw…”). When Williams introduced his standup bit as “Elmer Fudd sings Bruce Springsteen!” I remember thinking, “Who is Bruce Springsteen? That’s a Pointer Sisters song.”)
So my barely pubescent self was unaware that Springsteen was a rock heavyweight long before Born in the U.S.A. came out. I had to go back and pick up ‘70s Bruce later. As far as I knew, Springsteen debuted with the massive Born in the U.S.A. album with its hit singles and heavy-rotation MTV videos. The only version of Bruce with which I was familiar was the muscled bandana-wearing dude who dominated Kasey Kasem’s American Top 40 in 1985 and sang a growly verse on “We Are the World.”
My older brother, Shane, picked up Born in the U.S.A. (on vinyl) when it was new, so I first absorbed the album through our shared bedroom wall. He played it non-stop for a few months. I was, at the time, a little metalhead with Van Halen and Ted Nugent posters on my wall, but Springsteen was making his way into my room and into my ears whether I liked it or not. And before long I did.
Along this time, an older friend of ours, Kurt Davis, scored tickets to Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. Tour in Kansas City. (Kemper Arena, Nov. 19, 1984.) Kansas City is a three-hour drive from my hometown in southwest Missouri, and I’m not sure what motivated Kurt to get tickets since he was even less acquainted with Springsteen than we were. In fact, I remember Kurt standing in our house a few days before the show and asking us if we had ever heard of a group called the E Street Band. He thought they were the opening act because printed on his ticket was “Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.” We teased him mercilessly for this bit of ignorance, never mind that we were hardly Springsteen aficionados ourselves. A few days later, Kurt came back from the concert raving breathlessly about it, calling it a life-changing, religious experience.
Kurt died almost five years later in a car accident. The Kansas City show that Kurt attended eventually surfaced as a bootleg recording and is generally regarded by fans as one of the best Springsteen shows ever captured on tape. When I found a copy of the bootleg sometime in the ‘90s, I listened to it over and over. It’s a monumental set filled with incredible musical moments and energy and storytelling, Bruce and the band at an absolute peak. And, while I didn’t think it was possible, that bootleg, titled Kansas City Night, took my love of Springsteen to an even higher level. To this day, whenever I listen to that show, it’s both heartwarming and heartbreaking to imagine Kurt somewhere in the middle of that crowd that night.
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