Bruce Springsteen grew up in a dying factory town in New Jersey, watched his father move between dead-end jobs, and turned that anger and despair into the most celebrated body of working-class rock music ever recorded. The irony is that his songs about ordinary people made him a multimillionaire who hadn’t punched a clock in decades.

This episode traces Springsteen from his Freehold childhood through the E Street Band, Born to Run, Born in the U.S.A., and the contradictions of becoming rock’s most famous blue-collar voice.

• Born to Run in 1975 launched him onto the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week
• Born in the U.S.A. was misread as patriotic anthem despite being a protest song about Vietnam veterans
• He has performed marathon concerts regularly exceeding three hours for over five decades
• He won twenty Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999