Bruce Springsteen – Born in the USA
Joe Siegler
- AllMyVinyl #36
- Band: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
- Album Title: Born in the U.S.A.
- Release Date: 4 Jun 1984
- Date purchased: 22 Feb 2021
- Location purchased: Amazon
- Color of vinyl: black
- Number of discs: 1
- Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]
Bruce Springsteen is someone that most everyone knows. Even if you don’t care for his music, you know of him. Might even like a song here and there – he’s got so bloody many of them (21 studio albums & 23 live albums). Heck, just this album alone had seven top 10 singles. For an album with 12 songs, seven of them going top single is a a hell of a ratio. Now I’m not gonna claim Bruce wasn’t popular before this – he most certainly was (this was his seventh album overall). But this album propelled him into the stratosphere in popularity. This album was the best selling album of 1985, and has sold over 30 million copies, so I’m not the only one who likes it.
It was also my onramp with Springsteen. I was 19 when this came out, and the primary target for it. MTV was in full swing then, and the videos that Springsteen had from this album were in heavy rotation all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I saw Bruce pull Courtney Cox from the audience to dance with him back then. While I do not think MTV made Bruce (or this album), it certainly didn’t hurt.
I never bought this album on vinyl back in the day. The copy I have is new, I bought it in Feb of 2021 – in the first year of me collecting vinyl again. It appears to be a 2014 reprint based on the small print on the record. I probably bought it on cassette tape when it was new, but if I I did, I don’t remember that, nor do I still have it. But what I do remember is buying it on CD in 1985. In fact, it was the first thing I ever bought on CD. But I didn’t get my first CD player until Dec 1987. Back then they weren’t super cheap, so when I saw a deal, I snapped it up. This was also the era of the CD longbox. It took me a little over two years to be able to listen to the CD. I still have this CD nearly 40 years later.
That CD gets used a lot, because every July 4th here the album gets played. It’s usually my wife who does that, but sometimes I’ll join in too. We also watch the movie Independence Day on the 4th of July as well. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve listened to this album in our house. Too many to count. I’m also pretty sure my wife had her own copy on cassette tape back in the day too. We’re both children of the 80’s. ha. :)
My writing about the music will be lesser on this one, because simply I adore the entire album. There’s not a single song that I ever want to skip. I play one and I play ’em all. Sometimes I think that’s a bit of a cheat, but for this one I’d have a struggle to say “loved Clarence’s sax on this song, or Van Zandt’s guitar on that one”. The album in a lot of ways feels like one giant song to me. Obviously it’s not, but I view the entire thing as I already said – “all or none”.
Having said that, a few bits.. I loved the title track and it as my first experience with politicians and musicians. Ronald Reagan used to use “Born in the USA” as a campaign stop song. I don’t recall Bruce saying you can’t do that like people do today, but I seem to remember a remark about “he doesn’t know what that song is really about!”. This is true – and survives to this day. I’ve seen modern politicians make the same mistake, and it’s equally amusing 40 years later – people don’t learn. The key there is the song when it was being written had the title of “Vietnam”.
Speaking of the writing on this album, when I was reading briefly before listening today, I read that the sessions for this album produced between 70 and 90 songs. According to Wikipedia they’ve turned up all over the place, but the song I know most from this group is “Pink Cadillac”. This guy isn’t Prince level prolific, but 90 songs for an album that you only release 12 from? That’s a LOT.
Darlington County has a chorus I like singing along to. The song Working on the Highway is probably my least fav on there, but even that one works for me as it doesn’t slow down a bunch from the start. I also like the song “I’m on Fire”, but something Robin Williams did years ago I can’t shake. Now I know Williams wasn’t doing THIS song, but he did this bit called “Elmer Fudd sings Bruce Springsteen“, where he uses the lyrics “It’s like FWIIIIIIIIIIIIRE” – I hear it every time I listen to this song despite it having nothing to do with this song.
If you make me pick one, I’ll probably go with Glory Days as something I enjoy more than anything else on the album. Enjoy the hell out of that track. The album ends with a slower song “My Hometown” – the kind of track I imagine older Springsteen fans gravitated towards. But even that song works for me – perfectly placed as the end of the album.
I’ve bought every Springsteen album that came out since this one (and several before this – hello Born to Run). I’ll get to them in due course (if they’re on vinyl). But for as long as I’ve been a fan of his, I never saw him live until 2023 in Dallas. It was as glorious as I had been told his concerts were. I was behind the stage, but I didn’t care – it was a glorious party. I included two of my own videos below (one from this album, one not).
I know this was written for a social media platform dedicated to Black Sabbath, so this isn’t EXACTLY the same musical style (ha), but good tunes are good tunes – and this album has them in spades..
“Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man”
