All He Wanted Was To Be Free: Where Bruce Springsteen's 'Western Stars' Came From

In 1981, after reading the paraplegic veteran Ron Kovic's memoir , staged a concert to benefit the advocacy group Vietnam Veterans of America. For the encore, he played a song he hadn't performed before and hasn't since. Roger McGuinn's "The Ballad of Easy Rider" is a slow-rolling meditation on freedom's attractions and its costs that McGuinn wrote after Bob Dylan offered him one couplet scrawled on a napkin: "The river flows, it flows to the sea/wherever that river goes, that's where I want to be." The song soundtracks an idyllic early scene in Dennis Hopper's hugely influential 1969 road movie , as he and his co-star Peter Fonda (playing drug-dealing hippie outlaws named Billy and Wyatt) ride their motorcycles through a magical Southwestern landscape. It plays again over the closing credits, after Billy and Wyatt have been shot dead on a Louisiana back road by a passing redneck. Springsteen's cover, according to his biographer Dave Marsh, was a nod to veterans' love for the song, with its undercurrents of social exile and personal loss. Reworking it in concert, the Boss also paid tribute to a type of hit he often emulated on his own albums: the big, highly produced existential rock ballad, whose rise dates from around the time redefined the road movie as an expression of young people's confusion and weariness as