The 1973 album Bruce Springsteen didn’t want to make: “We wanted a rock record”
Bruce Springsteen was never going to compromise any of his songs when he made one of his records.
He knew what his audience wanted to hear, and even if his naysayers may be sick of hearing him talk about his feelings, he wasn’t going to stifle himself just to make everyone else happy. If he felt it, it didn’t take much for him to translate that onto a record, but it took a long time before he was making the kind of music that could reach millions of people across America.
But before ‘The Boss’ even made a dent in American culture, he was already being heralded as one of the greatest rock and roll artists of all time. It was high praise coming from someone who didn’t have a concrete hit to his name just yet, but when you look at his inspirations, you could see where the press was coming from. He was clearly a fan of the greatest songwriters of all time, and a lot of those first records had the potential to take everything that he was working towards and turn it into magic.
Then again, he probably didn’t want to have the same kind of pressure on him when Born to Run came out. It was make or break for the E Street Band at this point, and while Springsteen was working tooth and nail to try to get the sounds that he heard in his head, there were a few times where he seemed to be ready to throw in the towel and cut a live record instead of finishing his masterpiece.
He knew he was capable of making a masterpiece if he wanted to, but there’s a reason why a lot of those first records don’t really sound like they’re supposed to. Born to Run already has a few songs that tend to be a bit more rambly than normal, but The Wild The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle has a lot more rough edges to it. Those longer songs do give the album its own unique character, but the jazzier pieces of the band weren’t going to land on the charts the same way that his favourite Rolling Stones songs did.
And given all the comparisons that his record label was making between him and Bob Dylan, Springsteen felt like he needed to fight to make sure that his debut didn’t turn into a folk album at the very beginning of his career, saying, “Initially they wanted me to be purely a folk singer, which I looked like I was when I came up to John Hammond’s office. John wanted it to be a completely solo album with just me and a guitar. We wanted to make a rock record. We settled in the middle with sort of a rhythm section with acoustic music. Dylan and Van Morrison were big influences for me at the time.”
If you were listening to both those records back to back, you’d think that Springsteen was suffering from some identity crisis, but there was more of a method than most people realise. He was trying to synthesise all of his influences together, and while his breakout album contains echoes of everyone from Roy Orbison to Phil Spector, you can hear a lot more of the singer-songwriters that Springsteen loved, like Van Morrison, when looking at the way he approaches songs like ‘Growin’ Up’.
And while the album does sound really flat compared to their later albums, The E Street Band brought new life to these tunes every time they played them live. These stories didn’t have the same sense of identity whenever they performed them in the studio, and if they were able to capture the feeling that everyone experienced whenever they came to see them, they would have something special on one of their records.
Springsteen may have been more keen to make a folk album later down the line when he made raw confessional records like Tunnel of Love, but if this was his moment to become a rockstar, he didn’t want to get there with an acoustic guitar in his hands. He grew up on electric rock, and 1975 was going to be the year when everyone saw the legend hidden underneath that leather jacket.
