Peter Ames Carlin

And the narrator of the song at first just seems a little dopier than the guy in the final version.

And at one point, he sort of interrupts himself and all these promises about how, you know, they're going to go live on the beach and never get old and the sun's going to shine all the time.

And then, you know, he

He gets a few verses into that and finally he says, oh, I know this is all just jive, but the night is coming and I'm alive.

These are ideas that he would perfect and plug into not just the finished Thunder Road, but into all songs that would pop up over the next few decades.

But when he played it for John Landau, who was then the record review editor,

editor of Rolling Stone and also a really well-known writer and critic and who had produced some records earlier in the 1970s.

John heard that and said, you know, you've really got to tighten this up.

And they became very good friends earlier in 1974.

And John was a very strong voice in urging Bruce to structure his work more carefully.

Exactly.

This is the version that's the near final lyrics.

So he's already created the melody and the structure of the song that we know from the album.

But this is a completely different take on the song with a completely different mood and a different message in a sense.

And by the time you get to the end and he gets to that line that plays so dramatically in the finished version, you know, it's a town full of losers.

I'm pulling out of here to win.

And then

The drum – that great drum riff by Max Weinberg and then that very symphonic kind of movie hero music that comes at the end of the song.

Instead of that climactic –

end to the song, you get him almost murmuring, it's a town full of losers in a voice that makes you feel like he doesn't really believe this, you know, like he doesn't sense that that road is taking him anywhere gorgeous.