Jungleland (9:50)

“Jungleland” is an almost ten-minute long, epic closing song on Bruce Springsteen’s classic 1975 album Born to Run, and tells a tale of love amid a backdrop of gang violence. It contains one of E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons’ most recognizable solos. It also features short-time E Streeter Suki Lahav, who performs the delicate 23-note violin introduction to the song, accompanied by Roy Bittan on piano in the foreboding opening.

The song in its lyrics mirrors the pattern of the entire Born to Run album, beginning with a sense of desperate hope that slides slowly into despair and defeat. The song opens with the “Rat” “driving his sleek machine/over the Jersey state line” and meeting up with the “Barefoot Girl,” with whom he “takes a stab at romance and disappears down Flamingo Lane.” The song then begins to portray some of the scenes of the city and gang life in which the “Rat” is involved, with occasional references to the gang’s conflict with the police. The last two stanzas, coming after Clemons’ extended solo, describe the final fall of the “Rat” and the death of both his dreams, which “gun him down” in the “tunnels uptown,” and the love between him and the “Barefoot Girl.” The song ends with a description of the apathy towards the semi-tragic fall of the “Rat” and the lack of impact his death had- “Nobody watches as the ambulance pulls away/Or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light,” “Man the poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all/They just stand back and let it all be.”