Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wings For Wheels: The Making Of Born To Run’ on Paramount+, A Look Back At The Making Of A Classic Album And A Rock Star’s Emergence

First released back in 2005 and the winner of a Grammy for Best Long Form Music Video, Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run is regularly available for rental or purchase on various streaming services, but arrives for free on Paramount+ as part of its horde of content from MTV. Directed, edited, and produced by Thom Zimny (The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town), and built around rare archival footage of Bruce Springsteen, his band, and the 1974 sessions for Born to Run, Wings for Wheels also features commentary and recollections from Springsteen, Jon Landau (also an exec producer), Max Weinberg, Clarence Clemons, Steven Van Zandt, and other current or former members of the E Street Band.     

Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Bruce Springsteen bought his first set of wheels in 1974, “a ‘57 Chevy with dual four-barrel carbs, a Hurst on the floor, and orange flames spread across the hood.” Price: two grand. The 25-year-old musician had some money to spend, with his first two albums showing promise and the ecstatic E Street Band live show established. But his next act needed to be the one, a record that would satisfy his label’s financial investment and propel him into…well, into whatever was next. (He hadn’t figured that part out yet.) Springsteen fell upon the phrase “born to run,” liked its cinematic quality, and thought it fit with the new music he was making. Released in 1975, Born to Run hit number three on the Billboard chart, and went on to sell millions of records. It’s the album, he says in Wings for Wheels, that established the characters “whose lives I’d trace in my work for the next three decades.”

As an early-2000s era Springsteen drives around New Jersey in a Chevelle SS, pointing out his old haunts and the little West Long Branch house where he wrote Born to Run on a piano, Wings for Wheels dips into the past with archival footage from the sessions for the album, sessions that proved to be contentious as Springsteen obsessed over his creative process, experiments with various instruments and multiple overdubs lingered, and Mike Appel was supplanted as producer and manager by Jon Landau, whose bond with Springsteen bordered on the cerebral. (The E Street Band was also integrating two new members in drummer Max Weinberg and pianist Roy Bittan.) It would ultimately take over a year to record Born to Run, with its title track alone requiring six months of grueling work.

Beyond the rare video footage here, it’s the access Wings for Wheels has to all those tapes from the lengthy Born to Run sessions that are a real goldmine. Gathered at a studio mixing desk in 2005, Springsteen and Landau play early “Born to Run” takes that feature just the rhythm section, or the addition of strings; at one point, Springsteen pares down the mix to isolate the acoustic guitars, illustrating how they layered specific instruments over one another to fill out his original arrangements. “Jungleland” also gets the revisit treatment – of take 14, with its prominent violin in the intro, Springsteen says they probably should’ve used it – and saxophonist Clarence Clemons describes their work to nail down his eventual solo on “Jungleland” as “the most intricate collaboration in the history of my life with Bruce Springsteen.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Musicians and songwriters revisiting their classic material with fresh ears, as Springsteen does here with Born to Run, is also a feature of the recent U2 documentary Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming with Dave Letterman. And filmmaker Thom Zimney’s numerous Springsteen-related credits also include Letter to You, a doc featuring live performances that accompanied the veteran singer and songwriter’s 2020 album of the same name.

Performance Worth Watching: At one point, the film cuts between Bruce Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt, who unprompted and in completely separate interviews each recall the exact moment that Little Steven saved “Born to Run” from becoming too overwrought. It came down to a single note. “The way I played the riff was, I bent up to the major note” – here, Springsteen does this on the same Fender Telecaster he played back then, the one from the Born to Run cover art – “but we had so much crap on the track by that time, you could no longer hear the note being bent to the major.” It was Van Zandt who understood intrinsically the importance of that major note, how it needed to be heard, and that it should be apparent in the mix.  

Memorable Dialogue: “I worked very, very long on the lyrics to Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen says in Wings for Wheels, “because I was very aware that I was messing with classic rock ‘n’ roll images that easily turned into cliches. I worked really hard getting the soul of the song, and the spiritual side of the song right.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing but the promise of an endless summer night, and the refracted imagery in Springsteen’s songwriting for Born to Run. “Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge, drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain…”

Our Take: Looking at the old footage included in Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run, it’s kind of crazy when you realize how young Bruce Springsteen really was when he was making this now iconic album. He’s just a lean, rangy kid in his mid-20s, wearing threadbare T-shirts and favoring a floppy knit hat, a regional star at best who was on the hook to craft a hit for Columbia Records, and was apprehensive about all of that, but who was nevertheless determined to create something that rewarded his creative control, upheld the integrity of his band, expanded the scope of his songwriting, and incorporated the themes he would return to over the ensuing decades. And after all of the late nights, the playing and replaying of parts, the Wall of Sound-style overdubs – the glockenspiel in “Born to Run” remains an unexpected gem – and literally finishing the final mix as they prepared for tour, this kid actually did it. Born to Run was released to wild acclaim, Springsteen hit the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously, and a new rock star’s arrival was official. And on the resulting European swing of the Born to Run tour, he’s seen to be still wearing T-shirts and that floppy knit hat.

When asked about the album’s legacy, Springsteen and current and former E Street members all agree that their hard work was worth it, that Born to Run galvanized intra-band relationships and set the tone for what they would accomplish together in the years and albums to come, from its intimacy of songwriting to the gospel fervor blasting through Clemons’ saxophone. But it also feels typical of Springsteen that his final word on it is as a working musician. It laid his aspirations out, he says, driving through Jersey in a Chevy. But after all of the headaches, after you make it, all that’s left to do is listen.  

Our Call: STREAM IT. With its revealing use of archival audio and video, Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run will be a real treat for any Bruce Springsteen heads longing to have been in the Record Plant alongside The Boss and The E Street Band as they made one of their defining musical statements.  

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges