Bruce Springsteen, just like my son Alex, produced some fantastic unintentional irony when he was a young man (and I learned this from the fascinating book Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin) because while Bruce was writing and recording songs about being sprung from cages and driving down Highway 9, songs about offering Mary redemption and escape beneath the dirty hood of his car, about two lanes that could take her anywhere-- car-centric anthems like "Thunder Road" and "Born to Run"-- and stories about the Magic Rat driving his Dodge over the Jersey State line to meet a barefoot girl in "Jungleland"-- while he was making this seminal rock album, Bruce could NOT really drive a car-- he was so obsessed with music and his guitar in high school that he never learned to drive, and he didn't get his own vehicle-- 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible-- until after the album's release, in 1976 . . . so perhaps that's why the album is so romantic about cars: Bruce hadn't experienced road-rage, maintenance costs, and traffic yet; if he had, he might have had a very different tone towards automobiles and the Magic Rat might have caught the PATH over the Jersey state line.
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He wryly confessed this in one of his Springsteen on Broadway monologues. Highly amusing.
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