“Born to Run,” the record that made Bruce Springsteen a star, was released on Aug. 25, 1975, a week before I started my senior year of high school. But album and artist would escape my notice until that October, when, like a new president or a horrific natural disaster, Mr. Springsteen appeared simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek (a big deal in the olden days). On the former he was wearing an almost sheepish grin and an extra-floppy newsboy hat. Newsweek had him in a white collared shirt with a beatific expression, bathed in a golden glow — either way, goofball or quasi-saint, this was a rock star? He looked more like just … some guy. I am also here to tell you that Bruce was not a cool first name in 1975, Lee and Wayne notwithstanding. Nevertheless, this was the year that launched a thousand (very conservative estimate) boy and man crushes. Not that girls and women didn’t like him, too, but it’s the boys — “BRUUUUUUUCE!!”— who have always been more swoony.
Half a century later, Mr. Springsteen, now in his mid-70s, is still selling out arenas. He is also the subject of an Oscar-hopeful biopic, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” which opened on Friday. Tasked with impersonating the Boss’s extravagantly committed, hoarse and sweaty performance style is Jeremy Allen White, our own era’s thinking man’s workingman’s sex symbol, thanks to his roles in “The Bear” and Calvin Klein underwear ads. Whatever else he brings to the role, he’s an actor whose engines audiences can envision strapping their hands ’cross.
Back when Mr. Springsteen first breached the collective consciousness, as a relatively regular-seeming type, he was an oddball icon by ’70s rock-star standards. In those days, before influencers and podcasters and despite the decade’s unusually well-stocked dressing room of exquisite male movie stars (Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino and, for the kids in A.P. classes, Woody Allen), we young people more often looked to rock stars as avatars for style, sexuality, attitude, politics and the latest pharmaceutical diversions.
For straight white boys like me (bereft of athleticism, good hair and native confidence), that landscape could be bewildering. On the one hand, you had cocks of the walk like Mick Jagger and Robert Plant. On the other, you had androgynous glam rockers like David Bowie and Marc Bolan of T. Rex. Personally, I was intimidated by the former style of entertainer, confused by the latter, however liberating Mr. Bowie was, especially for my other peers. (And I should note that it being the ’70s, Mr. Jagger would on occasion wear lipstick and eyeliner, while Mr. Plant wrote songs about Middle-earth and May Queens, so lines blurred; these weren’t cocks of the walk in a sense that Clark Gable, say, would have understood.)
The cartoon Satanism of Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper wasn’t for me, and neither was the louche wimpiness of a James Taylor or a Jackson Browne. Radio was integrated in those days, and I liked Marvin Gaye and Isaac Hayes’s hits, but their frankly adult sexuality was beyond me. (I’m still mildly scandalized by Mr. Gaye’s “You Sure Love to Ball.”) Elton John’s records were among my favorites, and I appreciated his camp showmanship, but that wasn’t aspirational, at least not for me. The coked-up decadence of the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac might have been, but I didn’t have the bank account (or even a bank account).
In this context, Mr. Springsteen’s working-class, comparatively wholesome heteronormativity, as we wouldn’t have called it then, was either boring or radical. He was sexy, though he didn’t play it up (or not until the back of his nicely fitted Levis were splashed across the cover of “Born in the USA” in 1984). He didn’t wear spangled costumes or designer paisleys but scruffy street clothes — leather jackets, T-shirts, jeans — similar to what acts like Neil Young and the Band wore. But Mr. Springsteen wasn’t a hippie-era survivor, and he sang not about Cortez or Casey Jones or Jumpin’ Jack Flash, but about stuff that mattered to a lot of teenagers: cars, aimless nights, girls with strict fathers, boredom, impatience.
And maybe most radically, when it came to girls, he also sang about love, not just about getting off. Compare a lyric from Aerosmith’s 1975 hit “Walk This Way” — “I met a cheerleader / Was a real young bleeder / Oh, the times I could reminisce / ’Cause the best things of lovin’ / With her sister and her cousin / Only started with a little kiss” — with the opening from “Thunder Road,” the first song on “Born to Run”:
The screen door slams, Mary’s dress sways
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey, that’s me and I want you only
That’s more than just yearningly romantic: Who else in 1975 was still listening to Mr. Orbison’s “Only the Lonely,” an artifact from 1961? Sex was certainly on offer in Mr. Springsteen’s songs, and he wasn’t always a perfect gentleman (as he remarks to poor Mary, “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re all right”); however, the desire he shared was for connection and transcendence, not merely for release. As he tells another girl, just before an ecstatic musical break in the album’s title song, “I wanna die with you, Wendy, on the street tonight in an everlasting kiss.”
Sex that meant something, however inchoate? That was quaint by 1975 standards, when even the resurgent oldies act the Four Seasons would have a hit with “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night),” a jaunty song about a kid losing his virginity to what sounds like a prostitute.
Mr. Springsteen had been hailed a year earlier as “rock ’n’ roll future” in a now legendary review of a Cambridge, Mass., concert, but in truth he was more a throwback to the music’s past: a Brill Building songwriter with a bigger dictionary and a fancier thesaurus, rewriting “A Teenager in Love” or “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” as epic pop poetry — overwrought at times, sure, but then, so was the subject matter. And the audience. That’s why I think the kids who fell for him fell so hard (I mean, aside from the fact that he was a great performer): He didn’t provoke or challenge, boast or tease; he inhabited and affirmed.
I was hooked once I finally heard “Born to Run,” though, as a California kid growing up in a college town who drove his parents’ station wagon, I couldn’t say I identified with the particulars, only the underlying ache and bravado. (I wouldn’t find my rock star role models until a couple of years later, when I began oscillating between Elvis Costello’s angry nerd and David Byrne’s arty faux-naïf.)
After “Born to Run,” Mr. Springsteen moved on to more adult concerns; that is in part what “Deliver Me From Nowhere” is about. He is also better groomed now than he was in 1975 — everyone is — but he continues to cut the same loyal, decent, unpretentious Jersey guy figure, occasionally to the point of cliché. (Or am I just a sourpuss?) I know a lot of men my age who continue to nurse teenage crushes on him, and they could do a lot worse.
Bruce Handy is the author of “Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies” and the picture book “Balloon,” illustrated by Julie Kwon.
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