Born in the USAAufgenommen Anfang 1982 bis April 1984 in den Power Plant Studios, New York, N.Y.
Veröffentlicht am 04. Juni 1984
Billboard Top Ten - Platz 1. erreicht am 23. Juni 1984
Mitwirkende Künstler: Bruce Springsteen - Gitarre, Gesang, Harmonika
Steven van Zandt - Gitarre, Mandoline, Gesang
Garry Tallent - Bass, Horn, Gesang
Danny Federici - Orgel, Glockenspiel und Klavier bei "Born in the USA"
Roy Bittan - Keyboards, Klavier, Gesang
Clarence Clemons - Saxophon, Percussion, Gesang
Max Weinberg - Drums, Gesang
Richie Rosenberg - Trombone, Background Vocals bei "Cover Me" und "No Surrender"
Ruth Jackson - Background Vocals bei "My Hometown"
Produktion: Bob Clearmountain - Tonmeister
John Davenport - Tontechnik
Jeff Hendrickson - Tontechnik
Toby Scott - Tontechnik
Bob Ludwig - Mastering
Steven van Zandt - Co-Produktion
Annie Leibovitz - Coverfoto
Andrea Klein - Art Direktorin, Cover Desginer
Tracklist: Born in the USA
Cover Me
Darlington County
Working on the Highway
Downbound Train
I'm on Fire
No Surrender
Bobby Jean
I'm Goin' Down
Glory Days
Dancing in the Dark
My Hometown
Infos:Die Songs von "Born in the USA" wurden hauptsächlich in den New Yorker Power Plant Studios aufgenommen. Ausserdem fanden einige Sessions in The Hit Factory, New York und Thrill Hill West, Los Angeles statt. Die Produktion dauerte über zwei Jahre:
Januar bis Mai 1982 - Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band mit Steven van Zandt
Aufnahmen in den Power Plant Studios und The Hit Factory, New YorkUnter anderem wurde "Lions Den", "Savin' Up", "Out of Work", "Club Soul City", "Angelyne", "All I Need", "Hold On", "Love's in the Line", "Cover Me", "Protection", "Born in the USA", "Downbound Train", "Working on the Highway", "Darlington County", "I'm Goin' Down", "Murder Incorporated", "A good Man is hard to find", "My Love won't let you down", "Wages of Sin", "This hard Land" und "Frankie" eingespielt.
Januar bis Februar 1983 - Bruce Springsteen ohne Band
Aufnahmen in den Thrill Hill West Studios, Los AngelesSongs: "The Klansman", "Seven Tears", "Fugitive's Dream", "One Love", "Betty Jean", "Unsatisfied Heart", "Richfield Whistle", "Cynthia", "County Fair", "Little Girl Like You", "Delivery Man", "Shut out the Light", "Follow that Dream", "My Hometown", "Sugarland", "Johnny Bye Bye" und "Don't Back Down".
April bis Juni 1983 - Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
Aufnahmen in The Hit Factory, New YorkSongs: "Cynthia", "Country Fair", "My Hometown", "Pink Cadillac", "On the Prowl", "Car Wash", "TV Movie", "Stand on it", "Janey don't you lose Heart", "Now and forever", "Summer on Signal Hill" und "None but the Brave".
September 1983 bis Februar 1984 - Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
Aufnahmen in The Hit Factory, New YorkSongs: "Brothers under the Bridges", "No Surrender", "Bobby Jean", "Man at the Top", "Light of Day", "Beneath the Floodline" und "Rockaway the Days".
Singleauskopplungen in den USA:Als erste Single erschien "Dancing in the Dark" am 04. Mai 1984 in den USA veröffentlicht
1984 - Dancing in the Dark - The Billboard Hot 100 - 2. Platz
1984 - Cover Me - The Billboard Hot 100 - 7. Platz
1984 - Born in the USA - The Billboard Hot 100 - 9. Platz
1985 - I'm on Fire - The Billboard Hot 100 - 6. Platz
1985 - Glory Days - The Billboard Hot 100 - 5. Platz
1985 - I'm Goin' Down - The Billboard Hot 100 - 9. Platz
1985 - My Hometown - The Billboard Hot 100 - 6. Platz
Das Album "Born in the USA" hielt sich nach der Veröffentlichung für 139 Wochen in den Billboard Top 200 Charts. 7 Wochen stand "Born in the USA" auf Platz 1. Bis zum Jahre 1995 wurde das Album in den USA mit 15 Platinauszeichnungen, und einer goldenen Schallplatte bedacht.
Kritik aus dem Rolling Stone Magazin:Though it looks at hard times, at little people in little towns choosing between going away and getting left behind, Born in the U.S.A," Bruce Springsteen's seventh album, has a rowdy, indomitable spirit. Two guys pull into a hick town begging for work in "Darlington County," but Springsteen is whooping with sha-la-las in the chorus. He may shove his broody characters out the door and send them cruising down the turnpike, but he gives them music they can pound on the dashboard to.
He's set songs as well drawn as those on his bleak acoustic album, Nebraska, to music that incorporates new electronic textures while keeping as its heart all of the American rock & roll from the early Sixties. Like the guys in the songs, the music was born in the U.S.A.: Springsteen ignored the British Invasion and embraced instead the legacy of Phil Spector's releases, the sort of soul that was coming from Atlantic Records and especially the garage bands that had anomalous radio hits. He's always chased the utopian feeling of that music, and here he catches it with a sophisticated production and a subtle change in surroundings - the E Street Band cools it with the saxophone solos and piano arpeggios - from song to song.
The people who hang out in the new songs dread getting stuck in the small towns they grew up in almost as much as they worry that the big world outside holds no possibilities - a familiar theme in Springsteen's work. But they wind up back at home, where you can practically see the roaches scurrying around the empty Twinkie packages in the linoleum kitchen. In the first line of the first song, Springsteen croaks, "Born down in a dead man's town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground." His characters are born with their broken hearts, and the only thing that keeps them going is imagining that, as another line in another song goes, "There's something happening somewhere."
Though the characters are dying of longing for some sort of payoff from the American dream, Springsteen's exuberant voice and the swell of the music clues you that they haven't given up. In "No Surrender," a song that has the uplifting sweep of his early anthem "Thunder Road," he sings, "We made a promise we swore we'd always remember" no retreat, no surrender." His music usually carries a motto like that. He writes a heartbreaking message called "Bobby Jean," apparently to his longtime guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt, who's just left his band - "Maybe you'll be out there on that road somewhere. . .in some motel room there'll be a radio playing and you'll hear me sing this son/Well, if you do, you'll know I'm thinking of you and all the miles in between" - but he gives the song a wall of sound with a soaring saxophone solo. That's classic Springsteen: the lyrics may put a lump in your throat, but the music says, Walk tall or don't walk at all.
A great dancer himself, Springsteen puts an infectious beat under his songs. In the wonderfully exuberant "I'm Goin' Down," a hilarious song that gets its revenge, he makes a giddy run of nonsense syllables out of the chorus while drummer Max Weinberg whams out a huge backbeat. And "Working on the Highway," whips into an ecstatic rocker that tells a funny story, hand-claps keeping the time about crime and punishment. Shifting the sound slightly, the band finds the right feeling of paranoia for "Cover Me," the lone song to resurrect that shrieking, "Badlands"-style guitar, and the right ironic fervor for the Vietnam vet's yelping about the dead ends of being "Born in the U.S.A." Though there's no big difference between these and some of the songs on Springsteen's last rock LP,The River, these feel more delightfully offhanded.
The album finds its center in those cheering rock songs, but four tracks - the last two on either side - give the album an extraordinary depth. Springsteen has always been able to tell a story better than he can write a hook, and these lyrics are way beyond anything anybody else is writing. They're sung in such an unaffected way that the starkness stabs you. In "My Hometown," the singer, remembers sitting on his father's lap and steering the family Buick as they drove proudly through town; but the boy grows up, and the final scene has him putting his own son on his lap for a last drive down a street that's become a row of vacant buildings. "Take a good look around," he tells his boy, repeating what his father told him, "this is your hometown."
The tight-lipped character who sings "I'm On Fire" practically whispers about the desire that's eating him up. "Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull," he rasps. The way the band's turned down to just a light rattle of drums, faint organ and quiet, staccato guitar notes makes his lust seem ominous: you picture some pock-marked Harry Dean Stanton type, lying, too wired to sleep, in a motel room.
That you get such a vivid sense of these characters is because Springsteen gives them voices a playwright would be proud of. In "Working on the Highway,: all he says is "One day I looked straight at her and she looked straight back" to let us know the guy's in love. And in the saddest song he's ever written, "Downbound Train," a man who's lost everything pours his story, while, behind him, long, sorry notes on a synthesizer sound just like heartache. "I had a job, I had a girl," he begins, then explains how everything's changed: "Now I work down at the car wash, where all it ever does its rain." It's a line Sam Shepard could've written: so pathetic and so funny, you don't know how to react.
The biggest departure from any familiar Springsteen sound is the breathtaking first single, "Dancing in the Dark," with its modern synths, played by E Street keyboardist Roy Bittan, and thundering bass and drums. The kid who dances in the darkness here is practically choking on the self-consciousness of being sixteen. "I check my look in the mirror/I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face," he sings. "Man, I ain't getting nowhere just living in a dump like this." He turns out the lights not to set some drippy romantic mood but to escape in the fantasy of the music on the radio. In the dark, he finds a release from all the limitations he was born into. In the dark, like all the guys trapped in Springsteen's songs, he's just a spirit in the night.
MTV Interview aus dem Jahre 1984:Born in the USA
Marc Goodman - MTV / 1984
I grew up in a little town where I wasn't interested in what they were teaching me in school. None of my friends… they were all in the same boat as I was and so were my folks. There was nothing coming… there was nothing getting in there. It wasn't a house where there were books or where there was any kind of cultural thing happening.
For me my mother and father, until I was 25, they were like furniture, they came with the house. I never thought of my mother as a woman, a girl with her own dreams and desires. And my dad he was just this guy that was a little older than me.
I wanted to see the Beatles once. My father hated it… Great! (laughs) He was like… we used to fight. He used to want to see Bonanza, which was on the same time as Ed Sullivan on Sunday night. We used to battle over that TV… life or death. And it was frightening. I think it was something… it was more than this.
Once of the things about rock 'n' roll is that it's an art of self-creation, and a lot of times you want to erase too much of your past. Like usually… that moment of explosion when… Bang! You run into whatever it was that made you pick up the guitar, the moment you hold that thing and you look in the mirror… You gotta want to get away from something real hard for it to happen.
When I was young I wanted to play. I wanted to perform. I wanted to travel. I wanted to feel as free as I could. I guess I consider myself lukcy that, when I was a kid, I found something that I liked to do, something that gave me some sense of personal satisfaction. I see so many people, so many friends of mine who still don't know exactly what they want to do. But it's only a piece of it… I mean, sometimes when I'm laying down… it's amazing… I can't believe it that when I was 14 or 15, I thought about doing this and somehow I did it, I got there. And all the things that had to go right, and just a certain amount of luck, and real hard work since we started. I guess that that's a part of it I feel a certain satisfaction about, because there's a lot of other people in the boat.
What I do is fun and it's brought me a lot of satisfaction, but there's a lot of other people who go by their lives in different ways, they don't get interviewed, they don't have a big fuzz made over them. But I don't think that what I do is more important… It's just noisier.
I never felt the necessity to have a record out every year or every six months. I don't think that that's what it was about exactly. I guess there's a bad thing about it, is that it feels like a friend who goes away and doesn't write. I can remember when I was 15 or 16 I was waiting for the next release of Rolling Stones… But there are many records coming out, and unless I have something that's worth saying… I don't want to have something on the shelves or just something in the store. That's not why I started to do it in the first place. I write a lot of songs before I release a record. Actually, that's one of the main things I want to change about the way we operate. I want to get more records out, more different kinds of records.
I try to make the songs real visual, like movies, real cinematic… like the Nebraska songs. Some of my best songs are like that.
Some people thought Nebraska is just about despair. I guess my feeling about it is that when I wrote it, I felt that it was true. It was the only record where after it was done, I really didn't care what people thought about it or said about it or anything. I just felt it was right. It was true. I guess basically where there's truth, there's hope. That's kind of my outlook.
A lot of times I feel lucky to have something to write about. The Nebraska stuff was something that had a lot of detail to it, but the details alone doesn't just work. You have to have some emotional structure to hang them on. That record was kind of a mystery. I wrote it in about two months. It just came kind of out of the blue. If it's a good record is should be. If you knew how you did it, it's probably not that good. The best stuff you do you don't really remember how you did it. It just kind of pops out of your mind.
Goodman: Do you think you've gotten better at developing characters?
The craft gets better. I've gotten better at doing that. I know more about it. I think I know more about what makes a good song. So I know if I'm writing one or not.
My songs are basically about people. I guess the cars came in because they're always about people in transition. Going from some place, going to some place. They've left, but they haven't arrived anywhere. It was funny, I remembered the other day that when I was a kid I used to cry to get in the car. I don't know why, but I guess it started back then. My mother always tells me. I heard somewhere that in thunder and lightning the safest place is in an automobile, because if the car gets struck it goes to the wheel (laughs).
Goodman: I read somewhere your dad used to throw everyone in the car.
He was a terrible dictator about that Sunday drive. The only place we used to go was get in the car, and he never stopped. He was always like, "We're gonna stop the next place". And then we'd see it coming, and we'd all get like, "Here it comes, here it comes!" And then he'd drive by! He was funny. Finally, at the end of the day we'd stop at some motel. We used to go to Bear Mountain. That's where he used to take us on the weekend. I guess I got some of it from him too.
Goodman: There's something else that's cropped up a lot these days. I hear it in "Dancing in the Dark", you talk about the passing of time, all the years going by… When you were 18 were you thinking, "Gosh, I'm getting old!"
Yeah, I did. Because I thought when I was getting 20, that was it, I'm not gonna be a teenager anymore. I remember when I was turning 20 it was like… disappointing. I turned 30 when I was 27. I started early. I remember thinking, "Oh, I'm almost 30." But I don't really think about it that much anymore. I'm kind of enjoying it, I guess.
Goodman: It's like you're having fun, you're making kind of a joke about it?
Yeah, right now… the band's great, everybody's feeling great. I feel the best I ever felt on stage. I don't think that's such a big a deal as it once was, if it ever was that big a deal. It's just what you're doing and what you've got inside of you. I guess I kind of wanted to sing about it in those songs, because it was kind of happening. I was always concerned with singing about somebody that was my age. I wanted to, like, stay current with myself. I don't know, when I'm 40 I can sing this song and laugh. It started with "Rosalita"… I was looking back already and I was only 24 then.
Goodman: As the years progress and you look back at your library of songs, are there songs that grow up and change or mature?
Well, most of them. They funny thing is that most of them hang in there pretty good. I guess I still feel like a part of all of them. Like tonight we did "Spirit in the Night" and I haven't done that thing in, I don't know how long. And that was fun. I always go back and there's always some wise in it. I look back, especially on my first record where I was kind of writing anything that came into my mind. That was my style. I'd write on the bus, I'd write on the subway. It was real kind of stream of consciousness. And the main thing was it all had to rhyme. Like "Blinded by the Light". I was just trying to find a bunch of words that rhymed. And I always find lines in those songs that I still feel, like, yeah, I still feel like that!
["Born to Run"] breathes a lot. That opens up. That's still one of the most emotional songs for me When we play it at night. It's just that big roar. To me, when I sing "Born to Run" now I hear "Nebraska" in it, I hear "Born in the USA" in it. All that stuff was in those songs. It just wasn't… At different times you focus on a different aspect of what you do. That's one that seems to mean the most to the people, and that makes those songs more powerful, because like people take them and make them their own.
The only thing that really feels like what I should be doing is when I play with the band. It's great. I miss just being with those guys like that off stage, 'cause when we're off we don't see each other a whole lot. We see each other a little bit. That's where our main basis for our communication and friendship is, playing in the band.
Goodman: Steven is no longer in the band. What happened there?
Well, he had all these songs, they were great songs. The record he made, Voice of America, is one of the best records I ever heard. He just was at that place where it was time for him to do… to have his own band. We've been friends since we were real young, 15 or 16. I met him in the Hullabaloo Club in Middletown, and we just kind of hit it off. We used to go to New York and Café Wha in Greenwich Village on the weekends, and they had these matiné shows. We just did all that stuff together. Then we'd come home and try to get the sounds those guys would get on their guitars. We'd both go down in the basement and, you knnow… "How do we do that?" And turn the amp up as loud as we could. He was always a lot of laughs. We'd always get together, go to the movies. We just got along real good. But I'm glad he's doing what he's doing, because I think he's got something real important to say, and I think he's saying it just real… tremendously.
I've known Nils for actually quite awhile. I met him about 10 years ago. When we knew that Steve wasn't gonna do the tour, he was just one of the first people I thought about. We didn't audition anybody or anything. He just kind of came up and stayed in my house. We just talked, and his feeling about music and rock 'n' roll is like our feeling, the rest of the band. He was a guy that I knew I was gonna get the commitment out of, and he won't look at it like a job. It's a dedication for him. And he just stood over there and it felt good. And Patti… that was… she joined the band only a couple of days before we left to go on the road. I met Patti at Stone Pony in Asbury Park, and she just came out to where we were rehearsing and she sang with the band, and it was a big relief, because "wow, somebody's gonna hit that note every night and it's gonna be in key!" And it's nice. She's been great. I like having her there too. It's nice having a woman there. It changes the feeling a little bit. I want to get to where I can use them more, her and Nils. First night it really felt like a different band. It felt really different. It was funny. It feels just real natural.
Me, I make the records so I can be in a show. That's the thing I always felt meant the most… ever since the first time I got up at the Elk's Club and sang "Twist and Shout".
My education was [listening to records at night] and that taught me the most important thing… that there's more to life than what you see around. And that was something they couldn't teach me in school, you couldn't learn it in the house, and you couldn't learn it from people you were hanging with on the street or anything. That was the most important lesson of my life. I guess at night that's the only thing we try to say. It's the only message: don't sell yourself short.
Goodman: One of the other things happens during the show is toward the end you let out a call to "let freedom ring".
I guess for me in the end that's what Elvis Presley said to me and what I felt from his music. That was it. That's the rock 'n' roll message if there is one. That's just what it's always said. What Elvis says, what Prince says… that there seems to be… what I always felt from it… Just tear down the walls a little bit, look outside, see what's going on around you, what's happening to your friends or your family. Just making a little more room for everybody, just a little breathing room. Maybe we can change the world, or change something. I think you can change people's lives. It happened to me.
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... Bis 1984 war vieles von dem, worin noch heute sein Ansehen als Künstler und als Rockmusiker begründet liegt, doch schon längst passiert. Danach hatte er dann sicherlich mehr Möglichkeiten, sich in verschiedene Richtungen auszuprobieren, woraus Alben wie "Tunnel Of Love", "The Ghost Of Tom Joad" oder die "Seeger Sessions" hervorgegangen sind. Aber seine Alben waren danach nie wieder auch nur annähernd so sustanziell und so bemerkenswert wie seinerzeit "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" oder "Born To Run" (und gleich zwei aufeinanderfolgende Alben von dieser Klasse hat er nach BITUSA erst recht nie wieder zuwege gebracht). So vieles von dem, was die Faszination an ihm als Musiker und auch als Songwriter bis dahin ausgemacht hatte, war doch mit dem Erscheinen der BITUSA letztlich endgültig gestorben. 
Davon, dass ich das Album auch wegen seiner dünnen, aseptischen Abmischung und wegen der fiesen 80er-Keyboard-Sounds nicht sonderlich schätze (und auch nur ganz, ganz selten mal höre), will ich gar nicht erst anfangen ...
