Review Summary: Now I know your mama she don't like me 'cause I play in a rock and roll band and I know your daddy he don't dig me but he never did understand
Bruce Springsteen is an American legend. He's made a near 40 year career out of capturing the essence of Americana. Songs like "Rosalita", "Born to Run", and "Glory Days", not only offer an endearing cross-section of the American dream, they encapsulate a youthful vigor and joie de vivre that resonates across the generational divide. Thirty-six years after first making waves with
Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., The Boss is just as popular as ever. In this decade alone, New Jersey's native son and his E Street Band have had four consecutive albums debut at number one on the charts, tour after tour grossing in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and earlier this year they performed at the Super Bowl XLIII halftime show.
Its almost hard to believe, but despite Springsteen's domination of the American music scene for the last 30 years his career had a rocky start. After being signed to Colombia records in 1972, the then 22 year old Bruce Springsteen released his debut album,
Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., in January of 1973. While his mix of hometown folk-swagger with blues rock garnered him instant Dylan comparisons, the positive reviews didn't translate to sales, as it only sold 25,000 copies in its first year of release. Some 9 months later, The Boss and his then unnamed E-Street band, released
The Wild, The Innocent, & The E-Street Shuffle. Like his debut, it was released to critical acclaim and slow sales.
The Wild, The Innocent, & The E-Street Shuffle saw the folksier tendencies of
Greetings... put on the back burner in favor of a grand fusion of nostalgic Rock 'n' Roll and soulful R&B. This fit seamlessly with the fiery youth of the inner city characters that Springsteen had decided to mold his album around. When taken in as a whole,
The Wild, The Innocent, & The E-Street Shuffle, with its care free sense of cool, abundant attitude, and youthful energy, is the musical equivalent of The Fonz.
“The E-Street Shuffle” starts off the album of its name sake awash in heavy funk. A boogieing clavichord and uproarious sax set the background for a rough and tumble tale of young punks, cute girls, run ins with the law, and teenage love. Lyrically, Springsteen is at the top of his game. Lines like
“Them schoolboy pops pull out all the stops on a Friday night / The teenage tramps in skintight pants do the E Street dance and everything's all right” and
“Now those E Street brats in twilight duel flash like phantoms in full star stream / Down fire trails on silver nights with blonde girls pledged sweet sixteen,” weave a vivid tale that glorifies the iconic James Dean style 1950's greaser. In the process, The Boss adds a personal touch by introducing characters like the rough and tumble Power Thirteen who
“gave a trooper all he had in a summer scuffle" and his girl, Little Angel. This is commonplace on
The Wild, The Innocent, & The E-Street Shuffle as Springsteen lays out song after song after song of the pulse of New Jersey, be it the
West Side Story-esque love story of Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane in “Incident on 57th Street” or the balladry of a man facing a world of
”switchblade lovers” and miscreant greasers, who is tired of chasing the factory girls and just wants to settle down with his Sandy, on “4th of July, Asbury Park.”
Usually on an album full of hits and fan favorites its hard to pin down a definitive stand out track, but “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” is the glistening jewel at the heart of
The Wild, The Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle. Springsteen's youthful story of a romance with a girl named Rosalita and wanting to be able to liberate her from her parents and the swamps of Jersey makes full use of his band with soaring brass, driving Hammond organ, thunderous drums and an addictive hand clap bridge, to take his saccharine sweet rock and roll sound to new heights. “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” is the feel good hit of the 20th century.
The Wild, The Innocent, & The E-Street Shuffle is The Boss at his finest. While it may not have the same scope and grandeur of the album following it, Springsteen's mega-hit
Born To Run, it contains more than ample doses of the lively spirit, youthful enthusiasm, and endearing optimism that made Bruce Springsteen not only a household name, but the epitome of the American experience.
