Live July 2018 version
It was a beautiful fall November evening. It was during the writing of my book. I drove back to my neighborhood where I grew up, looking for uh... but I still don't have a fucking clue. All right? But uh... all I know is the streets were dead empty and the whole place looked like it had been locked down since 1955. My corner church was silent and unchanged, no weddings, no funerals. I rolled slowly another 50 yards up my block to visit my great tree, and it was gone. It had been cut to the street since the last time I had drove through. So I got out of the car and I looked down and there was a square of musty earth that held the remaining snakes of its roots on the edge of a parking lot. So I reached down, I picked up a handful of dirt and I just kind of ran it through my hands. And my heart sank like, like a kid who had suffered some irretrievable loss. You know, like some, some piece of me was gone. Um... I don't know. I guess I... It was just it had been there long before I was. I assumed it would be there long after I was gone. And I liked that. It, it felt eternal. It was at, at, it was at the center of our street and it had rooted our neighborhood for so long. So I sat there for a while just cursing the county. And listening to the sounds of the evening come on, and I looked again and I realized it was gone. But some, some essential piece of it was still there. The air and the space above its roots. I could still feel the life and the soul and the light of my childhood friend there. It's just that its leaves, its branches, and its massive trunk were now outlined, shot through, by evening stars and sky. But my great tree's life couldn't be ended or erased so easily from this place, because it's history, and history matters. Its imprint was too great. It was too old and it was too strong, and it had been there too long... to be done away with so easily. It had stood witness to everything that had happened on these small streets beneath its arms. All the joy, and all the heartbreak, and all the life. And when we live amongst ghosts, always trying to reach us from that shadow world. They're with us every step of the way, you know. My dead father's still with me every day. I miss him, and if I had a wish... oh man... I wish he could have been here to see this. But I visit with him every night. A little bit. That's a grace-filled thing. And Clarence, I get to... I get to see and be with Clarence a little bit every night. And Danny, Walter, and Bart, my own family, so many of them gone from these houses that are now filled by strangers, but the soul, the soul is a stubborn thing. Doesn't dissipate so quickly. Souls remain. They remain here in the air, in empty space, dusty roots, in sidewalks that I knew every single inch of like I knew my own body as a child, and in the songs that we sing. You know, that is why we sing. We sing for our blood and for our people. Because that's all we have at the end of the day. Each other, and... maybe that's what I'm looking for when I go down there. I just wanna commune with the old spirits. Stand in their presence, feel their hands on me... one more time.
Anyway once again, I stood in the shadow of my old church, you know. You know what they say about Catholics. Yeah, there's no getting out. No, no, you know, once they got you, they got you. The bastards got you when the getting was good. They did their work hard and they did it well. 'Cause the words of a very strange but all too familiar benediction came back to me that evening. And I wanna tell you, these were words that as a kid, I mumbled these things, I singsonged them, I chanted them, bored out of my fucking mind in an endless drone before class every fucking day. Every day, the green blazer, the green tie, the green trousers, the green socks of all of St. Rose's unwilling disciples. You know, but for some damn reason as I sat there on my street that night, you know, mourning, mourning my old tree, and once again surrounded by God, those were the words that came back to me and they flowed differently. It was "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on this Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day. Just give us this day, and forgive us our sins, our trespasses, as we may forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, all of us, forever and ever. Amen." Well may God bless you, your family, and all those that you love. And thanks for coming out tonight.
In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
We sprung from cages on Highway 9, chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected, and stepping out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap, we gotta get out while we're young
'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run
Wendy, let me in, I wanna be your friend, I wanna guard your dreams and visions
Yeah just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims, and strap your hands across my engines
And together we could break this trap, we'll run till we drop and we'll never go back
Walk with me out on the wire
'Cause I'm just a scared and lonely rider, I gotta know how it feels
I wanna know if love is wild, I wanna know if love is real
Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard
The girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors and the boys try to look so hard
The amusement park rises bold and stark, kids are huddled on the beach in a mist
I wanna die with you, Wendy, on the street tonight in an everlasting kiss
Well the highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody's out on the run tonight but there's no place left to hide
So together, Wendy, we'll live with the sadness, I'll love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday girl, I don't know when
We're gonna get to that place where we really wanna go and we'll walk in the sun
Till then tramps like us, baby we were born to run
Woah woah woah, woah-woah-woah
Woah woah, woah-woah-woah
Woah woah woah, woah-woah
Woah woah woah, woah-woah-woah
Woah woah woah, woah-woah
Thank you.
The above lyrics are for the live July 2018 performance of BORN TO RUN at Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City, NY, during Springsteen On Broadway. The song was played solo on acoustic guitar.
This performance of BORN TO RUN was recorded on 17 or 18 July 2018 during the taping of the Springsteen On Broadway Netflix special. It was released on the Springsteen On Broadway album in 2018.
Springsteen On Broadway was a Bruce Springsteen concert residency held at Walter Kerr Theatre (in 2017-2018) and St. James Theatre (in 2021) in New York City, NY. The show consisted of Springsteen performing five shows a week, Tuesday through Saturday, at the Broadway theatres. The sold-out series of performances began with seven previews starting on 03 Oct 2017 and officially opened on 12 Oct 2017. It was extended three times after its initial eight-week run, running through 15 Dec 2018 and bringing the total number of performances at Walter Kerr Theatre to 238. On 10 Jun 2018, Springsteen received a special Tony Award for his Broadway show. In 2021, an additional limited run was announced, this time held at St. James Theatre instead of Walter Kerr Theatre. This new series of performances opened on 26 Jun 2021 and ran through 04 Sep 2021, bringing the total number of performances at both theatres to 268.
The show featured Springsteen, solo, playing guitar, piano, and harmonica, performing his music, restating incidents from his 2016 autobiography Born To Run, and performing other spoken reminiscences written for the show. His wife, Patti Scialfa, has also appeared at most shows, singing backing vocals on a total of three different songs.
Springsteen On Broadway, a Netflix special directed by Grammy- and Emmy-winning filmmaker Thom Zimny, was filmed during two special invitation-only shows on 17 and 18 Jul 2018. The film launched globally on Netflix on 16 Dec 2018 at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time, just hours after the final Broadway performance at Walter Kerr Theatre closed. Two days prior, on 14 Dec 2018, Columbia Records released Springsteen On Broadway, an audio album encompassing the full film soundtrack. The audio was mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig. The album is available physically as a 2-disc CD set or a 4-disc LP set, as well as digitally.
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List of available versions of BORN TO RUN on this website:
BORN TO RUN [Album version]