thunder road
Pete Ainsworth of Middlesex turned his Tiger Sportsman stock car racing season around with a 30-lap feature victory in the Bond Auto Labor Day Classic program at Barre’s Thunder Road on Sunday afternoon. Errors in geography: Thunder Road was filmed in and around Asheville, NC. In one of the Memphis scenes, Robert Mitchum pays a visit to the mob boss who is trying to horn in on his family’s moonshine business.
The film’s popularity has grown over time, in part due to Bruce Springsteen’s classic 1975 song ” Thunder Road “, which the film, or rather the poster for the film inspired, as Springsteen only saw the poster in the lobby of a theater, not the movie itself.
The movie’s theme song, ” The Ballad of Thunder Road “, was later recorded by Mitchum and became a popular single record, although Mitchum’s rendition does not appear in the film itself.
” Thunder Road ” is a song written and performed by Bruce Springsteen, and the opening track on his 1975 breakthrough album Born to Run. It is consistently ranked as one of Springsteen’s greatest songs, and one of the top rock songs of all time.
The song’s title comes from the Robert Mitchum film Thunder Road. With our six acres of paved vending space full of high-end, custom aftermarket vendors and the nearly 40,000 square foot Thunderdome, Thunder Road is the “Custom Capital of Sturgis Bike Week.”" Dollywood, another theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee also had an attraction called “Thunder Road” which was directly based on the movie.
Sometime after the release of Born to Run, Springsteen wrote a follow-up to “Thunder Road” called “The Promise”, which explicitly mentions the first song by name but reveals a far more pessimistic outlook on the narrator’s life and future. Although early studio recordings were never released, “The Promise” gained considerable legend for its 1978 Tour performances; it finally materialized in a re-recorded version on 1999’s 18 Tracks.
During the 1974 to 1977 Born to Run tours, “Thunder Road” was always played by Springsteen with nothing but a piano accompaniment, an example of which is found on Hammersmith Odeon ‘75.
The lyrics to “Thunder Road” describe a young woman named Mary, her boyfriend, their hopeless lives and their “one last chance to make it real.”






