• Writer: Bruce Springsteen
• Producers: Bruce Springsteen, Jon Landau, and Mike Appel
• Recorded: Spring 1975 at the Record Plant in New York City
• Released: August 1975
• Players:
  Bruce Springsteen — vocals, guitar
  Garry Tallent — bass
  Clarence Clemons — tenor saxophone
  Roy Bittan — piano
  Max Weinberg — drums
  Randy Brecker — trumpet, flugelhorn
  Michael Brecker — tenor saxophone
  David Sanborn — baritone saxophone
  Wayne Andre — trombone
• Album: Born To Run (Columbia, 1975)
• Also On:
  Live/1975-85 (Columbia, 1986)
  Live In New York City (Columbia, 2001)

• A longtime staple of Bruce Springsteen‘s live shows, “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” was released as a single with the B-side “She’s The One.”
• In the song, Springsteen creates a semifactual, semifictional history of the assembling of his E Street Band.
• “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” provided guitarist “Miami” Steve Van Zandt‘s entree into the E Street Band. Springsteen was dissatisfied with the horn charts he and pianist Roy Bittan had written for the song. Van Zandt, an old friend and bandmate of Springsteen’s from Asbury Park, happened to be in the studio, and Springsteen asked him for help. Van Zandt told the highly priced session horn team to put away their charts, and he sang each player his part, which they then duplicated. After that display, Springsteen turned to co-producer and manager Mike Appel and said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you — he’s the new guitar player.”
• Born To Run was Springsteen’s third release, and it reached Number Three on the Billboard 200.
• The album was assisted by a $250,000 advertising campaign, as well as Springsteen’s unexpected appearance on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week (the October 27th issues) in 1975.

FAST FORWARD:

• Springsteen dismissed the E Street Band in 1989, though he reunited with them briefly in 1995, and then for a world tour in 1999-2000, which led to the album The Rising and another world tour in 2002-2003.
• Van Zandt, who now goes by Little Steven, left the E Street Band following the Born In The U.S.A. album in 1984 to work on a solo career, although he’s since returned to the group. In addition to the albums he’s released under his own name, he has made a name for himself as an actor on the HBO series The Sopranos, and he also has a syndicated radio show called Little Steven’s Underground Garage.
• Drummer Max Weinberg has a steady job for the downtime between projects with Springsteen — he’s the leader of the Max Weinberg 7, the house band for NBC’s Late Night With Conan O’Brien.
• Springsteen was inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999.
• The 2002 album The Rising was Springsteen’s first with the E Street Band since Born In The U.S.A.
• In 2006, Springsteen released a new, non-E Street Band album called We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, and toured Europe and North America behind it. He recently released a live CD and DVD from the tour.
• Springsteen dismissed the E Street Band in 1989, although he reunited with them, briefly, in 1995, and for world tours in 1999-2000 and 2002-2003. In 2007 they released a new album, Magic, and are now on tour again.

E Street band keyboardist Danny Federici died April 17th, 2008, at age 58, of cancer.