For my birthday this year I bought tickets to see Bruce Springsteen play here in Jersey at MetLife stadium on Labor Day weekend. I normally avoid stadium shows, but the Boss is near and dear to my heart and I have yet to see him perform. To prepare, I decided to listen to all of his albums in order and write about them. (I did the same for Bob Dylan a couple of years ago.)
Each post in this series will group his album into periods since it’s one of my favorite historiographical hobbies. Plus, why should Taylor Swift have all the eras fun? (Both artists like to play three hour sets, had conflicts with their management, and have had struggles with depression, so they are not so far apart as you'd think.)
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Springsteen had been playing music in the Jersey Shore scene for a long time before his first album. His stories of this world are some of my favorite parts of his memoir, especially Danny Federici constantly running out of gigs so cops couldn’t serve warrants on him. He even fronted a heavy rock band called Steel Mill that sounds far different than the Boss we know. He also tried and failed to go West and join the San Francisco scene. If you listen to “He’s Guilty” you can tell that Springsteen could have had a career as a guitar hero for hire if he had never made it big on his own.
Instead of going to Haight-Asbury, he stuck to Asbuty Park, which made an immense difference. The Shore is its own unique place, and in the 1970s it was on the skids. Highway travel and a more affluent society meant more people could travel to Florida and other points instead of the shore beaches. The Shore became a haven for young people, but also for a rougher, less tourist-friendly culture. Asbury Park itself was impacted by rioting rooted in deindustrialization and racism. It was a place for working-class bohemians, not the usual hippie crowds. As always in Jersey, New York City lurked just over the horizon, the center of the world pulling with immense gravity. It too was on hard times in the 70s, a place like the Shore that sat outside of the dominant suburban culture.
Springsteen’s first three albums are embedded both in the grimy counterculture of the boardwalk and in the streets of 70s New York. His next periods would try to speak to working-class America writ large, but these records are some of the best evocations of a specific time and place put to wax.
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973)
When Springsteen finally broke out of the Shore bars and small NYC clubs with this major label release, he was billed as one of many “New Dylans.” The early 70s was the apex of the singer-songwriter and the record labels were always searching for new ones. This album suffers a bit because deep down, Springsteen loves the old-time rock and roll and its heavy R&B bedrock. Here he is in folk singer with a guitar mode but with Vini Lopez’s drums and Clarence Clemons’ sax hinting at a raucous rock and roll potential.
Despite the arrangements not being what they should, Springsteen makes a strong debut. “Blinded By The Light” kicks things off brilliantly with a youthful energy that’s still infectious today. That spirit remains throughout the album's scenes of the Shore and the streets of New York. The latter brings a harrowing story of killing, in "Lost in the Flood," a precursor to Springsteen's later ballads of despair. Despite songs like this and "Mary Queen of Arkansas," Springsteen returns to exuberance on "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City," a fine album closer.
Rating: Four Bosses (out of five)
The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973)
Here Springsteen gets the rollicking E Street Band sound missing from his debut. It's his last album with Vini Lopez on drums and David Sansious on keys in the E Street Band, and the best glimpse of what Springsteen must have sounded like playing some Shore bar on a hot July night. It's also the most Shore of any of his albums. "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" is his true Jersey Shore anthem, referencing specific places that still stand in Asbury Park. It pretty directly addresses the Shore's decline, the feeling that it is a place that time has left behind. You can hear the narrator wondering if he needs to get out, which I think was on Springsteen's mind at the time, too.
Despite that brooding, the album also contains "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," a burst of true joy that never fails to put a smile on my face. While Springsteen's career struggled at this point, the song's narrator can barely contain his happiness over getting a record deal.
This album is probably Springsteen's most overlooked of his early career, but it rewards listening. The longer and more complex songs also hint at the great leap forward he's about to take.
Rating: Four and a Half Bosses
Born to Run (1975)
This is where it famously all came together. Springsteen spent months perfecting the title track and ended up on the covers of Time and Newsweek, touted as the "savior" of rock and roll. It was quite a turn of events for the kind of guy who was a "critic's artist" after his first two records.
It is still sounds like nothing else, a unique musical monument. I have heard it so many times, but it still staggers me every time. While the character in "Sandy" wondered if he still belonged on the Shore, the narrator of the album opener "Thunder Road" knows that he is "pulling out of here to win." When I moved from Texas and quit academia to live in New Jersey with my wife, it was the song I cranked from my car as I put that town in the rearview mirror.
That moment in my life tested me, and Springsteen passed his own test with this one. It literally saved his career and made him a star. The Shore could no longer hold him. That's the theme of "Thunder Road" as well as "Born to Run": the need to escape the crushing circumstances of daily life. Having grown up in a small town I longed to leave, these songs still send a chill down my spine. Springsteen became a star with this album because he tapped into people's need for the fun of rock and roll that had been lost in the turgid arena rock of the era, and because he spoke to the kind of longings in our hearts that get heated up to the point of emotional insanity.
Beyond that, "Backstreets" and "Jungleland" are operatic in the best sense, and "She's The One" rides a Bo Diddley beat harder and better than anyone has other than Bo himself. The Jersey Shore Poet shot for the sky and made it, something those of us hiding on the backstreets can find hope in.
Rating: Five Bosses
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