The Story and Meaning Behind Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland”

“Jungleland” is the album-closing track of Bruce Springsteen’s career-making third LP Born to Run. The album features three of Springsteen’s most iconic songs: the title track, “Thunder Road,” and “Jungleland,” an operatic nine-and-a-half-minute ode to hope and innocence’s attempt to survive the city’s mean streets. 

Make-or-Break Moment

Most people don’t realize that Springsteen’s career was on the precipice at this point. He’d been signed to Columbia Records in 1972 on the strength of an audition for John Hammond, who had signed Bob Dylan a decade earlier. Indeed, Columbia envisioned Springsteen as an acoustic guitar-sporting folk singer, and didn’t even realize he had a band when he signed. The first two albums were well-reviewed, if generally short of adored. 

By May 1974 when recording began on Born to Run, the stakes were high. The label had considered cutting him loose due to poor sales, but instead doubled-down with an even bigger budget for his third album. Springsteen and his manager, Mike Appel, produced and mixed the album, whose scope quickly grew. Springsteen envisioned a Phil Spector-style “Wall of Sound,” and sessions dragged on due to his perfectionism. It took six months just to finish the title track. The rest of the album would take another eight months.

“My obsessive/compulsive nature, which crippled me through much of the rest of my life, does come in handy once in a while,” he told The Observer in 1997. “I wanted something unique that you couldn’t hear in the live show.” 

Live Maestro to Studio Whiz

This was an important transition for Springsteen, who had initially built his appeal around the live show. The dramatic, rafter-raising approach was part of the design, to create something memorable but also to attract an audience united by the feelings the music evoked.

“I had to have songs that could capture audiences who had no idea who I was,” he wrote in his 2016 autobiography, also called Born to Run. “As an opening act then, I didn’t have much time to make an impact. I wrote several long, wild pieces that were basically the soul children of the lengthy prog-rock music I’d written with [early band] Steel Mill. They were arranged to leave the band and the audience exhausted and gasping for breath. Just when you thought the song was over, you’d be surprised by another section, taking the music higher. It was what I’d taken from the finales of the great soul revues. I tried to match their ferocious fervor.” 

Springsteen told The New York Times in 1997: “I very consciously set out to develop an audience that was about more than buying records. I set out to find an audience that would be a reflection of some imagined community that I had in my head, that lived according to the values in my music and shared a similar set of ideals.”

Lovable Losers

In many ways, “Jungleland” is the expression of those ideals. Born to Run features an upbeat, hopeful song opening both sides of the album, and closes each side with a broad sweeping track that ends in sadness and loss, the hope kindled by the opener extinguished in the end by fortune’s hard heart. 

This is, in a nutshell, the arc of “Jungleland,” which like much of Born to Run posits the car as the ultimate symbol of freedom. These two lanes could take us anywhere, he sings on the album-opening “Thunder Road.” 

The quandary’s that these roads don’t lead anywhere. For all his talk of freedom, the only redemption he can offer on “Thunder Road” is from the backseat of his car. This again is a road that doesn’t really lead anywhere. (It’s not like he’s promising to marry her.) 

This is the crux of the issue: A young man full of hopes, dreams, and life is trapped by the circumstances of his birth/social class and unable to realize the fire that burns in his heart. He worries that if he can’t escape the city’s fraudulent glow he will be consumed by what’s inside of him.

Give This Fair City Light

“Jungleland” opens like an evening with people getting together. “The Rangers,” who could be state cops or maybe just people who run free, are having a homecoming, setting up that it’s a special night. So much so that the Magic Rat is gonna take a stab at romance.

From the beginning their environs are haunted by the shadows of other kids, perhaps contemporaries, perhaps ghosts of those who wandered Flamingo Lane in the past. Before the stanza ends we are told Maximum Lawmen are after them. They want to put the free-spirited rat in cuffs, much like the main character in “The River” will be slapped with a union job and wedding coat after getting his girl pregnant. Freedom’s consequences mostly lead to its demise.

Springsteen sets the stage, from the churches to the jails, tonight is is silence in the world, as we take our stand. He gives us the sacred, the profane, both quiet in anticipation of a night that might usher more into their ranks, as we define who we are. (At 24, this was very much what Springsteen was in the process of doing!)

The second movement highlights the activity on the street, lit by the gas station placards, because you can’t power your getaway car without fuel. All around people are making deals or compromises from which they won’t return: Secret debts are paid … they vanish unseen. The cops are the ones who violate the sanctity of this opera/ballet with their sirens blaring. Again we see the law and establishment as the foe of kids and self-actualization. 

The Musical Lottery Ticket

In the end of this movement, kids brandishing guitars like weapons hustling for the record machine, connecting the fight to Springsteen’s own pursuit of a recording contract that might lift he and his bandmates out of this wasteland. They have to fight each other for this chance, highlighting the dark zero sum nature of escape from working class environs or perhaps just the place where one is mired.

Notice how in the last movement it’s the visionaries who are trapped outside in the latest fashion, while inside the local girls are dancing to the most popular acts, unaware of the coolness residing just outside the door. Lonely-hearted lovers struggle with desperation in darkness and find no relief, while elsewhere behind a locked bedroom door, surrender is finally negotiated, though there’s no sense peace is restored. 

Moments later the Rat is defeated by his own ambitions as his own dream guns him down. His loss is isolated—echoing down them hallways in the night—and lonely. There was no one to hold his hand or even watch his tragic end. Everything that came before just goes out like a girl’s bedroom light. Life and opportunity are nothing if not transient. 

What’s Flesh and What’s Fantasy

We’re all caught in a desperate battle, like that of lonely riders from “Born to Run,” on a last chance power drive. Everyone is competing to make their dreams real—a real death waltz between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy.

Springsteen suggests, almost like truth-is-stranger-than-fiction, that the sadness of this street-born tragedy is too great or perhaps so familiar that it defies explanation: And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all / They just stand back and let it all be. Even here, the sense of isolation is palpable. The creatives of the community don’t raise a finger, just stand exhausted in mute witness.

Or perhaps they fear the echo of their own creative/authentic mortality. Springsteen closes saying everyone must make their stand or watch quietly as the sands run out of the hourglass, and concludes with the flourish that even if one attempts this honest stand, they’ll probably fail and live to suffer.

Why is this powerful? Because if one dies for one’s dream, at least they go out heroically, a martyr for what they believed. But if one dares to dream and fails, what dreams will come, per Hamlet? Or more precisely, what is it to live after you’ve lost all your dreams, and is that worse than dying?

The concluding line could be a local TV news teaser: “Youths disappear into shadows following fraught, innocent dreams to their destruction. …” More at 11, Tonight in Jungleland.

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Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns