"Born to Run" was Springsteen's first worldwide single release (1975), although it achieved little initial success outside of the United States.  Within the U.S. it received extensive airplay on progressive or album-oriented radio stations and the single was Springsteen’s first top 40 hit.

In late 1973, on the road in Tennessee, Springsteen awoke with the title "Born to Run", which he wrote down. According to Springsteen, this was the first spark of the song.

“I wanted to make the greatest rock record that I’d ever heard, and I wanted it to sound enormous and I wanted it to grab you by your throat and insist that you take that ride, insist that you pay attention, not to just the music, but just to life, to feeling alive, to being alive.”

At the time, Springsteen desperately needed a break. Despite vigorous promotion by Columbia Records, his first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, had been commercial flops.

Reflecting on his formative years in Freehold, New Jersey, Springsteen once described the home he grew up in as a “dumpy, two-story, two-family house, next door to the gas station.” “Freehold was just a … small, narrow-minded town,”

Home wasn’t a happy place for Springsteen, and neither was school. A loner by nature, he coasted anonymously without leaving much of a mark. At Freehold Regional High School, he played no sports, participated in no extracurricular activities, and barely passed his classes, according to the biographer Dave Marsh. “I didn’t even make it to class clown,” Bruce later remarked. “I had nowhere near that amount of notoriety.” Springsteen’s only passion was music.

After an unremarkable stint at Ocean County Community College, he relocated to Asbury Park, a gritty coastal community that scarcely resembled the glitzy seaside resort of its earlier days. The town soon became a shadow of its former self—a half-desolate collection of small beach bungalows, decaying hotels, a modest convention center, and a handful of greasy-spoon diners.

But what it lacked in vigor and polish; Asbury Park made up for in artistic vitality. Lining its boardwalk were a motley assortment of bars where aspiring Jersey musicians like, the saxophonist Clarence Clemons, and the guitarist Steve Van Zandt — all of whom eventually played alongside Springsteen — forged a dynamic, interracial, and working-class rock-and-roll scene. The artists who eventually united under the banner of the E Street Band were revolting against the soft-pop sensibilities of the early ‘70s. Combining elements of jazz, funk, Motown, and rhythm-and-blues, the various incarnations of Springsteen’s numerous bands resulted in the E Street Band which enjoyed increasingly wide appeal among men and women from blue-collar families who frequented the Jersey shore music scene.

Various Sources