On March 25, 1979, Bruce Springsteen went to the Fast Lane nightclub in Ashbury Park, New Jersey to see his friend Patti Smith play. One year earlier, Smith had scored her first Billboard chart hit single with Because The Night, a song originally written by Springsteen during his studio sessions for his Darkness on the Edge of Town album, and passed along to the punk poetess by Jimmy Iovine, who was working on both Darkness... and Smith's Easter album. The Fast Lane show actually inspired Springsteen to write another punk rock song, not for Smith, but for the Ramones, who were also on the bill that March 1979 evening.
"I saw the band, I had a lot of fun, talked to them backstage, and I said, Maybe I'll write a song for the Ramones," Springsteen recalled in a December interview with Howard Stern. "I went home, middle of the night, took about 20 minutes, it was done."
As was customary, Springsteen played the song for his manager Jon Landau soon after writing it. Landau had observed that a number of Springsteen's more direct, poppier songs had become hits for other artists - Manfred Mann's Earth Band had scored a US number one single covering Springsteen's Blinded By The Light, while The Pointer Sisters reached number 2 on the Billboard chart covering Fire - and upon hearing Hungry Heart, he told Springsteen "Keep it for yourself."
Springsteen heeded the advice, and after recording the song for his 1980 album The River, it was chosen as the record's first single. Released without an accompanying video, the song reached number 5 on the Billboard chart, giving the New Jersey singer/songwriter his first mainstream hit.
"That's good management, dammit," Springsteen told Stern. "This thing was our first actual hit. We became a 'date night' band suddenly, where women started to come to the shows... Jackson Browne had all the good looking girls, the guys came to see us... some homoerotic undercurrent in our music, that was all there was to it [laughs]."
Ramones would never score a Top 40 hit single in America.
Watch Springsteen's full interview with Howard Stern below.
