“Backstreets” by Bruce Springsteen

"Backstreets" closes side one of Bruce Springsteen's 1975 album Born to Run, and it takes its time getting started: a full minute of Roy Bittan on piano and organ, grand and aching, before much of anything else joins him. Greil Marcus, reviewing the album for Rolling Stone, heard in that opening something fit to introduce a rock & roll Iliad. Then Springsteen barrels in, with Garry Tallent's bass underneath, and the song swells into something desperate and huge.

Just who Terry is has kept listeners arguing. Some hear a romance between two men, some an intense friendship gone cold, and others point to Springsteen's early-'70s girlfriend Diane Lozito, though on the 1978 tour he sang of Terry as a woman. Mike Appel, Jon Landau and Springsteen produced, and Jimmy Iovine engineered and mixed.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.