‘Tonight in Jungleland’ Details the Bruising Backstory Behind ‘Born to Run’

Peter Ames Carlin chats with AARP about his new book on how Bruce Springsteen’s seminal 1975 album transformed him into The Boss

Rob Tannenbaum,

AARP

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Published August 06, 2025

Illustration of Brice Springsteen with the cover of his book, "Welcome to Jungleland" superimposed over it

In his new book, Peter Ames Carlin explores what he calls the “hero's journey” that shaped Bruce Springsteen's iconic 1975 album “Born to Run.”

Leland Foster

Peter Ames Carlin was a 15-year-old in Seattle, looking for a sign that adult life wasn’t “spirit-killingly mundane,” when he heard Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promised Land” and was fascinated by its ability to express both strength and vulnerability. That drew him into a career as a music writer, and in 2012 he published Bruce, a best-selling biography of Springsteen. Now, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Born to Run, Springsteen’s masterpiece, he’s written Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run, an incisive account that links the album’s long and difficult birth to the singer’s family history. You can read an excerpt here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The backstory to Born to Run is one of a man on a quest, isn’t it?

It’s got a lot of the hero’s journey, a Joseph Campbell type of thing about it. Bruce is on a quest through the frustrations and hurdles he’s got to leap. His belief in his mission is so profound that nothing is going to turn him around. At the time, he was very much a fringe character at Columbia Records.

He’d made two albums, neither sold well, and Columbia was thinking about dropping him.

So this was the moment in his career where it was all on the line. A lot of powerful people at Columbia wanted to drop him. Sales weren’t good, and he had a grand tradition of screwing up high-profile shows for the industry. When the record-company guys showed up, he would not always be on his best form.

Longtime Springsteen fan and rock journalist Peter Ames Carlin also wrote a 2012 biography of the Boss.

Terry Allen

What do you make of him playing badly at industry showcases?

I think he was suspicious of his own ambition. He desperately wanted to be a big rock star, but just as desperately wanted to be known as a serious artist with something significant to say. There was a convention in the summer of 1973, in San Francisco, when he had to play after Edgar Winter’s band, and he was so grossed out by the lasers and smoke and the executives that he played all his least commercial songs, at the greatest length he possibly could, and infuriated everybody. In the book, he says, “Ambivalence is my lifetime condition.”

It also seems like he made Born to Run in the midst of tumult, including changes in his band, a new coproducer and pressure from the record company.

From the time he was little, he was used to a certain amount of tumult and emotional chaos. That was familiar to him. It made for a very fertile period. He was up against the wall and he knew it.

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What research material did you have access to that fans haven’t heard?

I listened to every minute of the studio sessions — about a week’s worth of long days. And I had access to Barry Rebo’s footage of Bruce’s shows at the Bottom Line [a club in New York City] in 1975. There are two full shows that were professionally shot, full color, and they sparkle. Maybe they’ll release it someday. It’s jaw-dropping.

The week Born to Run came out, Springsteen was simultaneously on the covers of TIME and Newsweek. When he saw the magazines, he was “pissed,” according to bandmate Steve Van Zandt. Why?

When I was getting to know Bruce, he said, “When people treat me like I’m a superhero, I feel diminished.” Some artists want you to know their work but don’t want to be worshipped. They want their work to be seen as extraordinary, but live as ordinary folk.

In what ways was his personality shaped by his family?

the cover of 'tonight in jungleland: the making of born to run'

Carlin's book arrives 50 years after the August 1975 release of "Born to Run."

Penguin Random House

As with everyone, a lot of his framework was created as a child with the primal experiences he had. His father was undiagnosed bipolar — a good man, but subject to wild mood shifts. His father treated him like a waste of space he could barely tolerate. At the same time, his grandparents greeted him as the Second Coming of the daughter they had lost when she and Bruce’s dad were children.

His father’s sister Virginia died when she was 5, after being run over by a truck.

Yes. Bruce was always splayed between a sense of his own specialness and a sense of his failure — and remains that way, to some extent. When he’s onstage, he is the vision of his best self. But at home, the real Bruce is nowhere near that guy. It’s not always a happy place to be, inside his own head.

When Springsteen heard the finished Born to Run for the first time, he wanted to scrap it and start over. Why?

He had put every ounce of himself into making the album and got exactly the album he was after. And that was terrifying. It’s the dark end of his ambivalence, this terrible sense that he could never be good enough.

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Rob Tannenbaum is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Blender, GQ and many other publications.