There’s no single rock artist who is more “next-door” American than “The Boss” himself, and Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 hit, “Racing In The Street” is a cult classic that, like Paul Revere’s “SS 396” celebrates everything that’s good about Chevy muscle.

The Boss’ exposure to what he once coined in 2010 as the “car culture” informed his songwriting in the case of this musical, big-block celebration, and in that year he described to Rolling Stone his earliest experiences with that culture during the late ’70s, “That was sort of the local culture of Asbury [New Jersey] in the ’70s, which was still deeply enmeshed in car culture,” explains Springsteen.

Boss explains how the car culture of Asbury made him feel as a young person, and how his first interactions with that culture would inform his involvement with the car hobby from that point forward, “If you went to the Stone Pony, it was a constant circle of souped-up muscle cars on Saturday and Sunday. Once again, I sort of stood outside of it…I didn’t have a car, but I wanted one real bad!” said Springsteen of his earliest muscle car memories.

If you’re anyone who came from the generation of “kids” that were born from the late ’70s to the early-to-mid ’80s, but had parents and grew-up in the 1990s, then you can most certainly relate to listening to the all-too-familiar stories of mechanical mayhem from the era. It was those car stories that came straight from the heart of places like Springsteen’s Asbury.

As kids we were unable to remember the rod and muscle scene of the late ’70s, but with the Boss’ help, the generation in question certainly did paint a pretty cool picture of what it was all about!