Bruce Springsteen‘s unreleased song vault is a source of seemingly infinite wonders. Just two months after releasing seven shelved albums on Tracks II: The Lost Albums, Springsteen has gone back into the vault and emerged with the Born to Run outtake “Lonely Night in the Park” that he’s sharing to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of the landmark LP.
“Lonely Night In the Park” was recorded at New York’s Record Plant across two days in May 1975, and came very close to appearing on Born to Run. Springsteen included it on several proposed Born to Run track sequences in his notebooks, and Jon Landau argued it should be on the album instead of “Meeting Across The River.”
“I won my way on things,” former Springsteen manager/Born to Run co-producer Mike Appel told Backstreets in 1990. “When [Landau] and Bruce would say ‘Here’s Lonely Night in the Park and Linda Let Me be the One.’ They came in and they thought that was going to be a commercial song. And I won my way. I said ‘These are such dogs and the lyrics are so bad.’ I said, just go away. I said these songs aren’t staying on the record − over my dead body. I told him this stuff was ‘shit.’ And nobody today would talk to him like that.”
“Lonely Night In the Park” remained little more than a myth until SiriusXM’s E Street Radio played the song in 2005, around the album’s 30th anniversary. The credits for this new version include Steve Van Zandt and Ron Aniello on guitar, confirming there were recent overdubs on the original studio recording. (Van Zandt didn’t join the E Street Band until the Born to Run tour, and Aniello didn’t enter Springsteen’s orbit until the 2000s.) But they stuck with Springsteen’s vocal track from 1975.
The 30th anniversary of Born to Run in 2005 was celebrated with a new box set and documentary. The plans are a little more muted for the 50th this year, but the Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center For American Music is holding a 50th anniversary symposium at Monmouth University’s Pollak Theatre on September 6. According to the official website, the symposium will feature “panels, presentations, and interviews with members of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, as well as with journalists and historians, music industry legends, and special guests.”
That evening, an expanded lineup of Max Weinberg’s Jukebox will play the Stone Pony Summer Stage in Asbury Park, New Jersey. “Surprises in store!” Weinberg promised in a Tweet promoting the event.
If all of this doesn’t fulfill your Born to Run 50 needs, Peter Ames Carlin — author of the definitive Springsteen biography Bruce — has just released Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run. It features new interviews with Springsteen, Landau, Appel, and members of the E Street Band. Check out an exclusive excerpt about the messy birth of “Jungleland” right here.
