On August 25th, 1975, Bruce Springsteen released the album that forever changed his life, Born To Run. It is an eight track masterpiece that finally proved The Boss worthy of the lavish praise the New Jersey music scene had been heaping upon him.
The eight tracks go as follows (links are taken from the 1975 performance at The Hammersmith Odeon, which along with the 1978 show at The Winterland and his 1980 show in Los Angeles, mark the Boss’s greatest live performances).
#1. Thunder Road.
#2. Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.
#3. Night. Did Not Perform As Part of Set List.
#4. Backstreets.
#5. Born To Run.
#6. She’s The One.
#7. Meeting Across The River. Did Not Perform As Part of Set List.
#8. Jungleland.
If listening to that doesn’t put you in a good mood, I’ve got nothing for ya.
As Greil Marcus said in his October 1975 review of the album for Rolling Stone Magazine: “It is a magnificient 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. And it should crack his future wide open.”
That’s when you know you’ve done something great in life: when you can produce something that pays off on every bet ever placed on you. Reaching our life’s potential often requires substantial financial resources in order to do so. If you want to restore a dilapidated church, you need to have the bank account balance necessary to be able to write out a $300,000 check to cover the cost of the repairs.
If you want to bankroll a legal case to fight eminent domain in your community, you need to be able to write a big check to bring in the best legal talent available. If you want to run a business empire, you need that first couple hundred thousand dollars to get a business under a belt to provide the cash streams that can fund your future endeavors. Most of us have ideas on our head (some of which we share with others, and some of which we keep private) of what it would take to lead a satisfying life and to leave the world behind in a better place than when we first encountered it. Heck, Springsteen couldn’t have released Born To Run if his mom wasn’t willing to put up a month’s salary to buy him a guitar in his early teen years. It sucks having dreams we can’t act upon—and that is why it is important to create a sizable gap between what we earn and what we spend, because it is from that surplus that we can build something that will give us the capital to make the kind of changes in the world that we dream about.