Of the many mysteries surrounding Bruce Springsteen’s early work, few are as tantalizing as the never-recorded, never-performed “Glory Road.”
Bruce included it on an early 1974 track list for his upcoming third album (which proved to be further out than he might have wished for at the time)…
At least for a time, it appeared that “Glory Road” was a candidate for anchoring the closing end of Side One (along with its alternate, “She’s the One“), but the lack of a runtime after its entry suggests that Bruce had yet to take it into the studio.
If you can’t help but wonder what “Glory Road” must have sounded like if it even had a shred of a chance of knocking “She’s the One” off of the record–consider that in another early album sequence Bruce had “Glory Road” listed as an alternate for “Born to Run.”
Time and again during the recording of Born to Run, “Glory Road” shows up on potential album sequences–sometimes as an alternate for now iconic songs, sometimes on its own.
And yet maddeningly, we’ve never heard the song.
In fact, for decades all we knew about “Glory Road” was its title, and a cryptic reference to it as a potential early version of “Thunder Road” in Charles Cross’ Backstreets: Springsteen, The Man and His Music.
In a 1995 interview, Molly Meldrum asked Bruce about it, but even Bruce didn’t seem to remember it.
But almost twenty years later, in May 2014 (a full four decades after Bruce first flirted with awarding it prime real estate on his third album), a hand-written lyrics sheet emerged in an on-line auction. And when fans were finally able to lay eyes on the legendary song for the first time, the jury remained out on whether “Glory Road” was an early version of “Thunder Road.”
But we realized with a jolt that “Glory Road” does share DNA with another signature Springsteen song:
Today, that last line is iconic: “Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”
But with early album sequences clearly showing both “Born to Run” and “Glory Road” on the album (one sequence even had them as bookends, with “Born to Run” opening and “Glory Road” closing the album), it’s unlikely that Bruce would have had such a powerful line close both songs.
Therefore, the lyrics sheet above is likely a very early draft of “Glory Road.” Quite possibly, it pre-dates “Born to Run” and potentially evolved into two separate songs, only one of which survived.
Or maybe it evolved into three songs, because if we read the lyrics, we can certainly see a thematic if not a lyrical link to “Thunder Road.”
She danced on my hood like an angel locked in overdrive
She had a hemi-powered Chevy and her trans was backed by power glide
She begged Billy take me for a ride
Take me to glory road, bring me to glory road
I looked out over cross my hood and saw the highway buckle in the heat
Let me take you to the place where the whores and the angels meet
I wanna take my walk in the sun
Don’t try to hold me back cause you ain’t got the guts to come
Some day you’ll see tramps like us, baby we were born to run
Besides some metrical similarities that may well be coincidental, that last verse certainly echoes the closing escapist sentiment of “Thunder Road.” The narrator entreats his girl to join him on the open road (in somewhat less romantic fashion), and the “tramps like us” line fits so perfectly that we can’t help but realize (if we hadn’t already) just how thematically similar “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run’ are–one almost wonders if our narrator simply moved on to Wendy when Mary refused to get in the car.
It’s a fan’s frustration to have so many artifacts of this key progenitor of two iconic songs and yet not a single recording. We can only hope that somewhere in the depths of Bruce’s vault lies a demo that might someday be released into the wild.
Glory Road
Never recorded
Never performed
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