In the mid-1970s, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band learned an invaluable lesson about the music industry: sometimes, all it takes is the right person believing in you to be the difference between your career taking off and it swirling down the drain. And sometimes, the right person is a college kid with access to his school’s newspaper.
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The fact that the student’s father was Irwin Segelstein certainly helped, too.
Bruce Springsteen Had a College Newspaper To Thank for His Career
Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band had developed a cult following along the East Coast, thanks to their prolific playing schedule and first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., and The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle. But commercially speaking, the albums weren’t far above “flop” status. The band knew their relationship with Columbia Records was growing frail. After label management changed, Springsteen was even more unsure of what his future as a musician would look like.
“That was two records,” Springsteen recalled in a 2005 appearance on CBS’ Sunday Morning. “Two strikes, three strikes, you’re out, maybe. Then, you’re back where you started, or worse, in more debt.”
As fate would have it, the new head of the CBS Records Division, Irwin Segelstein, had a son who attended college around Springsteen’s usual performance circuit. That college’s newspaper ran a story criticizing CBS Records for trying to edge Springsteen out for contemporary artists like Billy Joel. “He brought it home, and his dad was now the head of CBS Records,” Springsteen said with a laugh. “He said, ‘Dad, what about this guy? Amazingly enough, he listened to his kid. He called us up and said, ‘Hey, my son, you know.’ And that kind of got us back inside the door.”
The record label agreed to fund one more record for Springsteen on the condition that if it wasn’t successful, the label would terminate its relationship with the young singer. Springsteen agreed and began writing what would become the title track to his third album, Born to Run.
The Spark of Inspiration That Would Bring the Album to Life
Under immense pressure, seemingly from all sides, Bruce Springsteen sat in his New Jersey house and waited for inspiration to strike. He came up with the title of the album first: born to run. “I liked it because it suggested a cinematic drama I thought would work with the music I was hearing in my head,” he later said, per Peter Carlin’s Bruce. “The song is a release. It’s an expression of the humdrum, the daily existence that you break out of.”
That short, three-word phrase laid the foundation for the entire album. “This was the turning point,” Springsteen said. “It proved to be the key to my songwriting for the rest of the record.”
Generally speaking, album reviews were positive. Born to Run peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top LPs and Tape charts and No. 7 in Australia and the Netherlands. The album cemented Springsteen as a rock icon in his own right and effectively saved his band from being on the record label’s chopping block—thanks in no small part to Irwin Segelstein’s college-aged son.
Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
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