By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The soundtrack of my Notre Dame education—Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run—was released a half century ago in August 1975, well before I knew where I would go to college.
Last month Springsteen and the E Street Band gathered at Monmouth University in New Jersey to celebrate the album’s 50th anniversary and to reminisce about how they made their iconic music. Then they climbed up on a stage and played it.
I wish I had been there. Born to Run has a special place in my heart too.
I did listen to other music during my four years (1979-83) living under ND’s Golden Dome. REO Speedwagon and the Eagles played on campus in 1979, and Journey and Van Halen performed there in 1980.
One Notre Dame friend constantly played the then-new Pink Floyd album called The Wall. Another introduced me to a groovy new set of Off the Wall tracks from Michael Jackson.
And although we all loathed football rival Southern Cal, I liked hearing the USC Trojan band perform with Fleetwood Mac on the new Tusk LP.
Still, the sound and the voice I remember hearing most often on the Notre Dame campus when I got there belonged to the Boss. As a Utah boy, I knew little about the Asbury Park artist.
Springsteen’s rising star initially lit up only the East Coast, with little to no radiance way out here in the Intermountain West. His lyrics and music were rooted in his Jersey Shore blue-collar experiences, not in my mountains and deserts.
I recently searched a Utah newspaper archive for the time period of my pre-teen and early teen years (1970-74). I found only one article about Springsteen.
Utah noticed Bruce in 1975, after Born to Run landed him on the cover of Time magazine. I could not hum even one of his tunes, however, when I first got to Notre Dame in August 1979.
That changed fast.
Within minutes of settling into my dorm room, a Springsteen-obsessed neighbor (from the East Coast, of course) cranked up the volume on his stereo. I heard that now-familiar mumble/moan:
“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.
Sprung from cages on Highway 9
Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected
And steppin’ out over the line…”
I did not own a car, let alone a fast one, and I had no idea where Highway 9 is. (FYI, it’s on the Atlantic coast.) But I was intrigued.
I kept listening:
“Oh, 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…”
My Northern Utah hometown (Ogden) was not a “death trap” or a “suicide rap.” But as an 18- year-old Irish Catholic boy who’d grown up in a broken home and as an outsider in Latter-day Saint country, I did feel a bit confined there.
Notre Dame seemed like the perfect antidote—at once familiar/Catholic as well as novel/renowned. So I headed east for college while my first roommate (from Connecticut) thought he was going to school out west.
We went in opposite directions searching for the same thing… something different.
Music historians say Born to Run combines rock and roll, pop rock, R&B, and folk rock with “character-driven lyrics” that describe “individuals who feel trapped and fantasize about escaping to a better life, conjured via romantic lyrical imagery of highways and travel.”
That’s pretty much what I heard too, on my first day at Notre Dame:
“Together we could break this trap
We’ll run ‘til we drop, baby we’ll never go back
Oh, will you walk with me out on the wire?
‘Cause baby I’m just a scared and lonely rider
But I gotta know how it feels
I want to know if love is wild, babe
I want to know if love is real…”
That kind of yearning brought me—and many others—to Notre Dame all those many decades ago. We too wanted to know “how it feels.”
How it feels to be an adult (or at least more like one).
How it feels to be free (at least freer).
How it feels to know (or at least know more).
And even how it feels to love.
(BTW, the 2-1 male/female ratio at Notre Dame made finding love there a bit more challenging. One of my friends often joked back then that ND meant “no dames.”)
When I left for college, disco still was popular in Utah. I knew how to move my feet to Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” and how to make all the hand/arm motions for the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”
These are great songs, of course, and among the most popular disco tunes of 1979. They also were vehicles for escape, if not quite in the dramatic and philosophical manner of the Boss.
However, I also quickly learned that in 1979, Notre Dame was done with disco. So, I started listening to Bruce.
And Springsteen resonated for a kid who had never been to New Jersey. Among other things, I too wondered what to do with the sadness and madness in my soul:
“The highways 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
Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul…”
Few of my fellow Domers were Bruce’s blue-collar kin. They came from the American middle and upper class, making their rabid devotion to the Springsteen ethos odd, or at least ironic.
But I was his economic cousin. It was a financial miracle that I managed to afford (with lots of help) four years of a Notre Dame education.
Yet, regardless of our varied economic status, my fellow ND Springsteen fans and I were on a journey together, looking for the same thing:
“Oh, someday girl, I don’t know when
We’re gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go, and we’ll walk in the sun
But ‘til then, tramps like us
Baby, we were born to run…”
Looking for a place in the sun. Is there any better definition of growing up?
That’s probably why Born to Run became the soundtrack of my Notre Dame years. At least that’s what I tell myself today during my more contemplative moments.
But then I crank up the volume and listen to the song once again and I realize…maybe I just fell in love with the catchy tune and those awesome closing Springsteen lyrics:
“Come on Wendy, tramps like us
Baby, we were born to run.
Woah-oh-woah
Hm-hm-hm
Oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh
Whah-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh
Hm-hm-hm
Woah-oh-woah
Oh-oh-oh.
Woah-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
