Jungleland

[1] 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 opening.

It was on July 12, 1974, at The Bottom Line, New York, that Springsteen finally decided to debut it live; at this juncture it is still very much of a piece like other jazzed-up mini-operas from The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, influenced by David Sancious.

[2] When the E Street Band assembled at 914 Sound Studios on August 1, 1974, it was to secure a usable basic track for "Jungleland", "already earmarked as the centrepiece of the album".

Later that month, David Sancious and drummer Ernest "Boom" Carter gave their notice, replaced by Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, and a violinist, Suki Lahav, who would make important contributions to "Jungleland".

In the following months, "Jungleland" was played live regularly, losing its jazz influences, adding Suki's violin to the introduction, and Springsteen making many lyrical modifications.

[2] On April 18, 1975, sessions moved to The Record Plant in New York City, with Jon Landau now co-producer, and his "keen young engineer" Jimmy Iovine, replacing Louis Lahav, who had returned to Israel with his wife, Suki, after her last show in March.

Smoke a lot of pot and try to stay calm," said Clemons, who spent sixteen hours playing and replaying every note of his "Jungleland" solo "in order to satisfy Bruce's bat-eared attention to sonic detail.

"[5] 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 "Magic 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 last two stanzas, coming after Clemons' extended solo, describe the death of the Rat and his dream, which "guns him down" in the "tunnels uptown", and the end of the love between him and the Barefoot Girl.

The song concludes with a description of the final fall of the Rat and the lack of impact his death has: "No one 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."

John Malkovich used the song, among a nearly all-Springsteen theatrical soundtrack, in his 1980s Steppenwolf Theater production of Lanford Wilson's play, Balm in Gilead.