Hallelujah for Bruce Springsteen’s Definitive “Hail Mary” Album

Bruce Springsteen had been giving it his all on the mean stages of Asbury Park, New Jersey’s faded shores for a while by the time he finally had enough. He was at a point where he could go no higher as a local act. He and his band were the undisputed best, putting on the hardest working stiff show on the boardwalk, but he knew he’d hit a ceiling. He’d been fronting a band that played straightforward live rock for years to crowds along the eastern seaboard but had maxed out the commercial and creative potential of the direction he’d been heading.

Springsteen realized it was time to get serious if he wanted to establish himself as a songwriter and impress a record label with a singular voice. In 1972, he abandoned his hard-driving, guitar-focused live formula for something more thoughtful.

“The new sound I was pursuing, an amalgam of good songwriting mixed with soul-and-R&B -influenced rock music, would eventually be the basis for the sound of my first two records…. There would be no more guitar histrionics. I now valued ensemble playing at the service of the song,” writes Bruce Springsteen in his 2017 autobiography, Born to Run. He knew the transition would be tricky and come at a price: “I soon found out that though this was more personally and musically satisfying, in the Garden State, it was simply not as financially fruitful a soil as pounding hard rock, and surviving got harder.”

Springsteen walked away from the several thousand dollars his band made a night as a performing act to live on nearly nothing while he built a new sound. Harder still was the next path he would have to follow to reach for that golden ring few would obtain: creating a unique sound and convincing others it was worth buying, convincing a record label, then radio stations, and finally building up the buying public in sufficient numbers.  

When he got his big break to audition for John Hammond at Columbia Records, he appeared alone and played an acoustic version of his new compositions. The low-key dynamic singer/songwriter was king of the pop charts in the early 1970s – on par with James Taylor – and the label presumed that was the sort of performer they were signing. Hammond signed Bob Dylan to Columbia and thought he was discovering another inspired rock poet troubadour in Bruce Springsteen, not a hard-driving axe man of the Jersey Shores.

Consequently, Springsteen delivered a compatible sound on his first two albums, reflecting that side of his multifaceted musical personality. While critically acclaimed, their sales did not impress. Springsteen’s debut release in 1972, Greetings from Asbury Park, only sold about 23,000 copies and was considered a flop by the label. Indeed, his original recording submission for the album was rejected by Columbia for not having any “hits”, and Springsteen had to pen “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night” quickly to get past the label’s threshold of commerciality. Still, these songs would not get significant exposure until later in his career.

After his second release in 1973 didn’t sell any better than the first album, Bruce Springsteen could feel his label’s impending desire to cut their losses. At this point, with two major label albums under his belt and respect in the industry but with no sign of broad commercial appeal, he was viewed as a thoughtful, underappreciated talent whose career had petered out. He was good, but like so many talented musicians, his sound hadn’t clicked with enough people. 

He owed Columbia one more album under his contract, and it was crunch time: “All our cards were down. The question was, beyond critics and my small cult following, could I stir interest in that larger audience that lay at the end of the radio dial? Cult artists don’t last on Columbia records. We missed this one, contract’s up and in all probability will be sent back to the minors deep in the South Jersey Pines. I had to make a record that was the embodiment of what I’d been slowly promising I could do. It had to be something epic and extraordinary, something that hadn’t quite been heard before.” He surely felt trapped – artistically and otherwise – when he sat down to write the signature song on his next album.

Bruce Springsteen on the Run

Bruce Springsteen would grow to be known as an artist who gave voice to blue-collar Americans with few options, but this was no surprise for someone who sat squarely in a generation of the lower-middle class trying to make it in an embargo-fueled recession of the 1970s. While he understood he was good at his chosen field, he also knew that this guaranteed nothing in this world. If that didn’t pan out, he likely had zero options beyond the music business. There was nothing to fall back on.

He was burning through his last wish from the genie that was Columbia Records. To make matters worse, the men at the record company who had believed in him, the legendary John Hammond and Clive Davis, were gone by this time, replaced by record execs with a less supportive vision. 

Creatively, Bruce Springsteen was somehow even worse off. While he knew there was a path to take his music to the next level, it would remain a mystery unless he could pull it all together in one last shot for greatness. He needed a perfect blend of the poet troubadour with the light touch and the over-the-top front man with the burning axe in his hand and the bravado to match. He had to throw his musical heart all the way to the back rows; Springsteen had to be Dylan and Jagger all in one.

He wrote “Born to Run” as an intentionally vague song about escape, but from where? (Wherever this is, because this is nowhere.) But to where? (Anywhere but here; here was death: “…a death trap…a suicide rap”). He was in purgatory. Unwilling to return to tavern gigs on the Jersey shore, yet unsure how to take the next fatal step toward the promised land.

The song that was the namesake of his next album was a dark anthem featuring a hero on a quest, a desperate lust for survival in the face of overwhelming odds. Bruce Springsteen put all that young man fever and tired yearning into a wail of a song, likely because it was exactly how he felt at the time: already worn out by a youth spent banging up against long odds but still exuberant over the slim possibilities of redemption to be found just down that long dark road. 

With this new sound, he was putting himself out there, not as a tough, blue-collar rocker or a complex soulful poet of the streets, but as a scared kid who was howling out to his destiny in the night. “It was”Born to Run” was New Jersey opera – an ultra-romantic, vulnerable work that came with some risks as unique artistic statements are wont to do. 

He struggled to hand “Born to Run” over to the label because he knew this third album, and possibly this one song, was his only ticket out of Palookaville. His first two albums were released in 1973, and now it was 1975, and he still hadn’t fulfilled his contract by delivering the third album. He knew it was the beginning or the end – nothing in between.

“I wanted to craft a record that sounded like the last record on Earth, like the last record you might hear, the last one you’d ever NEED to hear. One glorious noise … than the apocalypse”. He kept the album under wraps a full year after starting the project, refusing to deliver it to Columbia, dreading the judgment day that entailed. He spent months trying to polish it since he felt his life depended on it, which it did in many ways. He kept the album’s precious master tapes under the bed of anxiety he had made for himself, pulling them out ad nauseum in an effort at further refinement. He sat in the studio, worrying the bone for days on end, re-mixing and listening for the lost chord secreted somewhere within the 72 tracks that made up the one song alone, “Born to Run”.

Ultimately, he had driven himself sick with self-doubt, convinced the project was flawed. He begged Columbia to scrap the whole thing and let him release a live concert at a small club instead, a safer return to familiar territory. He felt defeated working to produce a masterpiece in the studio where there were endless opportunities to review and tweak a performance – a nightmare for a perfectionist staring into the abyss (would they buy it? Who are “they”? The label, radio, listeners… anyone).

The answer, of course, was a resounding “yes”.   

“It’s a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on him,” Grail Marcus of Rolling Stone magazine gushed after its release, seemingly aware of the personal gamble and torment behind the work. Marcus went on to say that Springsteen’s release “should crack his future wide open.” It did. Bruce Springsteen looked back on the period surrounding the album’s creation with mixed emotions, perhaps loath to admit the toll it took on his soul and the lingering suspicion of how close he came to just disappearing into the lesser histories of popular American song, another artistic casualty of rock and roll.

Rush’s Hail Mary Album

While Springsteen labored to reinvent his sound to break into the charts, another band in the mid-1970s followed its collective muse instead, without a care for whether it would ever get them radio play. Their backs were also up against the wall at a critical stage in their career.

Rush released their self-titled debut album in 1974. Full of straight-ahead rock, the band’s self-released work got them noticed and signed to Mercury Records. However, within a few months, the Canadian power trio was looking to replace their drummer for health reasons. With the advent of Neil Peart, Rush had a much more complex percussionist grounding its sound and a new songwriter capable of pushing their lyrical narrative in a whole new direction.

Peart was well-read and opinionated, and his lyrics translated into a dramatic departure for the band into a more cerebral and progressive style: a thinking man’s rock. Rush didn’t view this shift in creativity as self-indulgent but merely self-actualizing at that point in their career.

As bassist Geddy Lee saw it, “We were tasting the stew and spicing it up bit by bit. We were our own target audience writing music for ourselves on the assumption that there were enough people out there with the same sensibility as us who would dig it too,” Lee writes in 2023’s memoir, My Effin’ Life.

For Rush’s next two albums, Fly by Night and Caress of Steel, the band’s compositions became longer, more unconventional concept pieces and with each release, less airplay was the result. Of course, their label took note. “Mercury’s belief in us was clearly on shaky ground,” recalled Lee. “The record company wasn’t sure if we were developing in the ‘correct way,’” he said in the 2010 documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. “They wanted us to be more like Bad Company and not so much like this weird thing we were becoming.”

When the time came for Rush to go on the road to promote the release of their third album, they began to appreciate the risks associated with heedlessly following their evolving vision. With little promotion or radio attention, they dubbed the shows in support of Caress of Steel, as the “Down the Tubes tour”. Lee recalls, “It was disheartening to pull up again and again to find a small, shitty club where you could barely fit our gear on the stage. That smelled like failure.” Peart also lamented that at that juncture, “everything took an awful downturn, and it was off the crest of a wave too, because we were so in love with what we’d done, we were so into it and so proud of it.”

Rush shared the somber assessment that Bruce Springsteen held at a similar low point in his creative career. Lee acknowledged that at the time, “quitting music and taking a straight job was inconceivable to me. I had no other skills.” Peart recalled that at that lowest ebb the band felt alone: “Mercury was pressing for more commercial stuff, singles that fit the radio format more and less long complex pieces… Things couldn’t have been bleaker really. (Mercury was) just leaning on us at our weakest.”

At the end of that disastrous tour, Rush were bloodied but unbowed. The doubts and dissension that often creep into a band’s dynamic at such moments were not permitted by an esprit de corps unique to most rock acts. They discussed their situation and decided to remain captains of their own souls.

Lee recalled a defiance in the collective will of the band at that crucial moment: “We made (the album) 2112 figuring everyone would hate it, but we were going to go out in a blaze of glory.” Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage) “We decided Fuck it, let’s do this now or go down trying. I’d like to call it courage, but I’m not sure that in 1976 we were fully aware of the risk we were taking,” he writes in My Effin’ Life. “There are times in life when economic circumstances have an emancipating effect on the decisions you make: one is when you’ve saved up enough money that you follow your bliss; the other is when you’re at the end of your rope and no longer care about the consequences of your actions. At that moment we decidedly fell into the second category.”

For their new album 2112 – likely their last, or so they thought – they landed on a mini sci-fi opera concept once again conceived by Peart. The namesake composition for the album was the antithesis of radio-friendly, taking up the entire first side of the record and representing a big middle finger to the powers that aligned to force the band’s creative compromise.

Undoubtedly, they were influenced in this decision by the theme featured in their new magnum opus. Dedicated by the band’s drumming bibliophile to Ayn Rand, whose writings were a manifesto for the concept of the individual uber alles, the work was a clarion call to freedom against overwhelming odds of conformity. “The individual versus the mass,” was how Peart later summed up the work. (Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage)

“It was an album that contained a great amount of frustration and anger. We were very disillusioned with the whole state of things. We had kept our integrity, and it wasn’t panning out for us, and we’d been written off by the industry. So, this album contained all of that rejection and determination… and I can listen to that album now and feel that electricity and I know that’s what made people respond to that album because it was so direct and so impassioned”. (Rush 2112 – Neil Peart Interview Clip)

Lee remembers, “2112 took four weeks to record and all in all it’s the album we wanted to make, defiantly oblivious to other people’s expectations. We felt triumphant. If we were going down at least we were going down swinging. Naturally, we wanted people to like it, but we had to love it first.” (My Effin’ Life).

Upon hearing the new album, Mercury was nonplussed, to say the least: 2112 was definitely not what the label ordered. Once again, getting zero radio airplay and uniformly terrible reviews by the music press, Rush doggedly took their last musical message on the road and eventually built a whole new following off the strength of their live presentation and simple word of mouth.

In so doing, 2112 grew to such a success that it launched Rush into a new phase of their career, one they would never leave. Gone were the days of looking over their shoulder and being scolded for lacking hit singles. In the words of the band’s guitarist Alex Lifeson, “2112 really bought us our independence. The record company has never been in on a single session that we’ve ever done. In fact, when we’re done (with a new record) it’s all packaged, and they accept it the way it is. They have no choice.” (Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage). 

Geddy Lee summed up the lesson learned from the defining episode: “If we learned one thing from all of this it was that a young artist’s greatest asset is the word ‘no’. It’s an immensely valuable word. There will always be pressure on you to compromise, pressure to sell your dreams short and there will always be people who want you to be something you’re not but none of those things can happen without your permission. My most urgent advice to aspiring artist is always, ‘Be true to yourself and just say no’.” (My Effin’ Life).

While Springsteen and Rush followed different paths to arrive at their respective turning points, their careers were saved by a singular resolve. With varying degrees of moxie, grace, and self-confidence, they faced withering odds to stake their artistic claim in the last possible moment and prove their resilience and worth. 

Geddy Lee was right to acknowledge the natural inflection point between having everything and nothing to lose in equal measure. When such circumstances arise during the creative process, they can form an invincible crucible in which truly remarkable art is born. The choice for the creatively inclined becomes brutally simple: leaping off a cliff to escape the peril of whatever commercial realities are fast approaching may only lead to an equally certain demise. Or it may be the only path to unfurl hidden wings that reach soaring greatness. Perhaps only the most brave and foolhardy take that leap and answer the question once and for all. 

Works Cited

Dunn, Sam and McFayden, Scot. Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. Alliance Films. 10 June 2010.

Ladd, Jim. Innerview Show. “Rush 2112 – Clip“. 1980. via YouTube.

Lee, Geddy. My Effin’ Life. Harper. November 2023.

Springsteen, Bruce. Born to Run. Simon and Schuster. September 2017.

Taysom, Joe. “The classic album Bruce Springsteen hated: ‘I couldn’t stand to listen to it'”. Far Out. 22 May 2024.