A year before Born To Run came out, music critic Jon Landau saw a performance where many of the as yet unreleased songs were performed and wrote: “I saw rock and roll’s future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.“

Those words describe the exact feeling that surges through my body every time I hear this album.

Of course, I was already aware of who Springsteen was. I’d enjoyed ‘Rosalita’ from his 1973 album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, and then a few years later, I’d heard the radio pumping out ‘Born To Run’. Fast-forward to 1978 when a friend at uni gave me the album on cassette (yes … cassette!) and well, it wasn’t long before this double-sided work of art was screaming from the speakers of my dad’s mustard orange Holden utility. This was the car I used to drive around the streets of Melbourne, picking up friends and heading to the beach or to the Dandenongs. (Remember the Sky High restaurant?)

Bookended by the five-minute ‘Thunder Road’ and the nine-and-a-half-minute behemoth ‘Jungleland’ were six more tracks that jumped out from my stereo like a sonic thunderclap. The sound was borne of Phil Spector and story arcs straight from Springsteen’s own life growing up around New Jersey and the boardwalk of Ashbury Park. Springsteen’s deliberate attempt to make an album that was larger than life was a perfect fit for the album’s content – his imagining of teenage life and its attempts to escape the restrictions that encompassed it.

I soon went out and purchased a Naulilus Half-Speed Mastered Edition on vinyl – the bee’s knees to audiophiles at the time.

In 1978 Darkness on the Edge of Town was released, complete with ten new songs to take in. I was still reeling from the electric jolt of ‘Jungleland’, of the beauty and sadness of ‘Meeting Across The River’, and now all of a sudden I had ‘Badlands’, ‘Candy’s Room’, ‘Streets Of Fire’, ‘Prove It All Night’. It was like having so much ice-cream and needing to eat it quickly just in case it disappeared forever. I couldn’t get enough.

The songs were shorter, tighter. There was a better chance they would be heard on radio but I didn’t care. That mustard orange ute could be heard coming from a mile away, the speakers blaring out my BASF tape with Born on one side and Darkness on the other. The only problem I could find with this new technology was that I didn’t have a tape player that changed sides automatically. Meanwhile, another Half-Speed Mastered Springsteen had made it into my collection.

In 1980 The River was released and for the first time, I felt doubtful. Would I suffer a letdown? Would I get tired of these anthem storybooks that had so strongly captured my imagination only 3 years earlier?

My concern was unwarranted. Within this new collection of stories about loss and despair, about girls and cars, I found incredible highs and powerful pop songs. ‘I’m A Rocker’, ‘Sherry Darling’, ‘Hungry Heart’ and my favourite, ‘Cadillac Ranch’, got me through my early twenties while ‘The River’, ‘Point Blank’ and ‘Wreck On The Highway’ were staples on mixtapes I would make for friends and girlfriends in the years to come.

For this album I found a Japanese pressing in Discurio – not as good as the Nautilus but definitely the best vinyl going around. I also soon got my hands on Greetings from Ashbury Park, NJ and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. When you listen to these earlier albums you can really see what Springsteen was trying to get at, where it all began – they’re the building blocks that would become Born to Run.

Before Springsteen, I’d already seen music as an escape from the rigours of a strict ethnic upbringing, and had been buying vinyl on the sly for some time. Band On The Run from Paul McCartney & Wings and Suzi Quatro’s self-titled debut in 1974 are ones I remember fondly.

Springsteen, though, made me want to write. He made me want to read books other than those on the school syllabus or The Hardy Boys. I was filling pages with lyrics that I was sure would one day make it onto an album by me or someone much like Bruce. These lyrics would fill A4 lined pages and when packaged with a huge intro, lead break and outro would surely make it to 8-minutes long. If the radio didn’t want to play them then so what? I thought, how many of Bruce’s songs didn’t conform to the two-and-a-half to the three-and-a-half-minute time restriction? I didn’t want to be that guy anyway.

Over the decades since my first listen, my brother who is 10 years younger than me has become probably an even bigger fan. He’s a musician and listening to him, there are times when I can hear Springsteen permeate his music. I’m so grateful to Bruce for this common link that he’s given me and my brother. Even though we’re separated by a generation we’ll always share a love of music that endures over time.

Today, I own all of his albums and DVDs including some bootlegs and even now, I know exactly what I was thinking and feeling when I listened to each and every one of his albums. He has never disappointed me, whether live or on record, never failed to capture a moment in time or elicit particular emotions in me. He is an artist of my time and for my time. As with the Beatles, or as Seinfeld captured characters of my generation, Bruce Springsteen continues to speak to me and continues to deliver.

Lou Fulco