“I’d written the lyrics sitting on the edge of my bed in this shack in Long Branch, New Jersey, thinking “Here I come, world!,”” Springsteen once said. It was in the living room on an Aeolian piano that, as detailed in interviews given by Springsteen, he wrote “Born to Run,” “Thunder Road,” “Backstreets” and other songs that would end up in his breakout album Born to Run. He would move back to Long Branch – his birthplace – and live in this West End Court beach side bungalow in an attempt to craft a make-or-break album. That’s the buyer willing to pay for that.” While any successful homebuyer is free to do what they want with the home, “it is the hope to find someone with that passion for Springsteen,” added Holder.īuilt in 1920, the home was rented in 1974 for a year by Springsteen, months after his second album The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle struggled to find an audience.

“We’re talking about the intrinsic value of this house, of the value of Springsteen’s history. “Yes, I mean, c’mon,” said real estate broker George “Rives” Holder when asked if the Springsteen factor helped raise the home’s value. Listed at $299,000, this property appears to have a significant “rock ‘n’ roll premium,” as similar places around the area list for anything between $170,000 to $275,000, according to Zillow. Time was when this version would be gathe ring dust in a box somewhere and would never see the light of day.It is this piece of Bruce Springsteen’s history that has attracted much attention to a home at 7 1/2 West End Court on the Jersey Shore. We should just count ourselves lucky that we live in a time when both are available to us at the click of a mouse. I could well imagine Nick Cave doing a version of TR and it would sound a lot like this.Īs I have stressed that is only my reading, but it speaks volumes for Bruce's power as an artist that he can interpret his own work in such different ways.

My feeling is the narrator in this version knows he has lost all hope and that he is heading for oblivion, he just does not have the courage to face it alone, he needs his girl to face it with him. there is no prospect of a world beyond the redemption offered, there is a only cold hopelessness. This version is (again just in my view) coming from a much darker place. When the narrator in the BTR version suggests they 'roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair' it is because in that action you will for a fleeting moment feel the full possibility of freedom, however elusive it may prove to be in the longer term. They only redemption on offer be beneath this dirty hood but it is redemption with hope on the other side. He didn't fully explain it but it is there. The BTR version had, hope, it had (has) optimism, (though a little desperate). They are two very different versions, almost with two different meanings, in my view.

Springsteen wings for wheels