To millions of listeners, Bruce Springsteen's
Born to Run is
much more than a rock-and-roll album-it's a poetic explosion of
freedom and frustration. It confirmed Springsteen's status as a
quintessential American performer: the rocker who, more than any
other, gives voice to our hopes, fears, and aspirations.
Runaway
Dream chronicles the making of the album that launched
Springsteen and his E Street Band into the firmament of American art,
deftly sketching the ambition, history, and personalities that
combined to create the enduring
Born to Run.
Springsteen wanted
Born to Run to be the greatest rock
record ever made. For a musician with just two modest-selling LPs to
his credit, it was an extraordinary ambition, and session by session,
track by track, Masur shows just how much grit, as well as genius,
went into realizing it.
Runaway Dream offers an expert tour of
the trials and triumphs of Springsteen's work. In addition to the
story of the album itself, Masur masterfully places
Born to Run
within American cultural history, showing why the girls, hot rods,
and Jersey nights of the album still resonate, even for listeners born
years after its release.
With his precise skills as a cultural historian, Masur probes deeper,
analyzing the photograph's role in the emotional collision of
civil-rights activism with continued racism and the resulting changes in
the community...
