The album Bruce Springsteen said set up his whole career
Any artist like Bruce Springsteen doesn’t arrive to the world fully formed.
Bob Dylan had to spend a lot of time playing traditional folk music before he hit on the right sound, and even David Bowie worked through his strange vaudeville phase before he was ready to become the theatrical icon that we all know today. ‘The Boss’ at least had a vision in mind on his first records, but he felt that some records showed him musically growing up in real time whenever he listened back to them.
But Springsteen was never exactly looking to make teenage hits in the first place. He always wanted his music to tell the story about the people that he saw around him, and no matter how many times people compared him to Dylan, Springsteen wasn’t speaking to his audience in the same way. He was speaking for you instead of at you, and listening to his greatest works, he took the basis of rock and roll and put it back into small towns.
Because if you think about it, rock had entered the arena by this point, and a lot of the biggest bands in the world started to feel intangible. Led Zeppelin were among the finest rock bands that ever were, but given how much they sang about far-off lands on their later records, it was never going to be easy to relate to them in the way that Little Richard did with his audience back in the day.
And when listening to Springsteen’s songs, you could hear him slowly working his way there, but he had a few bugs to work out in the process. Greetings from Asbury Park was a great record with some stellar songs on it, but compared to what he would be doing on The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, it does come off as a little bit hollow without the power of the E Street Band behind him.
‘The Boss’ could do just as well with a guitar in his hands telling stories, but the last few songs on his sophomore album felt a lot different. The band was being used like a creative force for the first time, and when looking back on the lyrics in those tunes, Springsteen felt that he had hit the template for what he wanted his music to be for the rest of his career.
Not all of them sounded ready for primetime with the song lengths, but it didn’t matter as long as Springsteen could recognise those musical characters, saying, “I guess I started with The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, in a funny way – particularly the second side, which kind of syncs together. I was very concerned about gettin’ a group of characters and followin’ them through their lives a little bit. And so, on Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, I tried to hook things up.”
While there are some musical leftovers that feel much more in line with artists like Van Morrison, the kind of themes in his lyrics are a lot more pronounced this time around. That sense of escape was first beginning on tracks like ‘Rosalita’, and even if the tunes ran a bit long, it was going to take those tracks for Springsteen to eventually hit on something more powerful like ‘Jungleland’ or ‘Wreck on the Highway’.
The next albums might have been punchier than his sophomore record, but Springsteen was more satisfied having a group of characters all together in one space for the first time. Because if you look at the rest of his career, everything from Born in the USA to The Rising were about setting up little musical communities, and Springsteen was more than happy to give the world a glimpse into the kind of small towns and blue-collar workers that he had known for years.
