Stay or go? Thankfully for Springsteen fans, he went. This is a defining moment in a young life - it's decision time. The work of the band here is marvelously empathetic. Yes, the lyrical imagery is a bit overwrought and his vocal is perhaps too dramatic, but it all goes to serve the drama of the storyline and the music is suitably cinematic. He had bigger ambitions and needed to find a way out of a dead end circumstance. This is Springsteen surveying the late teenage/early 20s summertime Jersey Shore scene of the early 1970s and declaring "this boardwalk life is through". A perfectly realized slice-of-life tale that fits its title on the nose. I hear a bit of Little Feat here.Ĥth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) - This is the artistic high-point of the album, at least lyrically. Bruce's vocal is poor (a problem that creeps in periodically through this album he sings it with that annoying marbles-in-his-mouth slurring that he would thankfully retire after this early period of his career), but this is as funky as the E Street Band ever got. It's a nothing song lyrically, but the band carries it. The E Street Shuffle - I didn't like this track for the longest time, but it has grown on me over the past 20 years or so. At the time, he probably didn't realize where his strengths were - he just wanted to make some sort of an impact. As such, it's a bit of a case of Bruce wearing another man's clothes here, but the songs are so great and the band so perfectly suited to play this type of music that it ends up hardly mattering that the album doesn't really play to Springsteen's strengths. It shows little folk influence and sees him appropriating a sound that he didn't seem to have the greatest affinity for - the Jersey Shore bar band mix of white soul/R&B and rock. I would argue that it is probably the least representative of all of his albums, or the least-Springsteenian. In many ways, it's the odd (or wild) child in Springsteen's catalog. WIESS is a quantum leap forward creatively. However, this is where most of the comparisons to Bruce's debut end. It also didn't sell much at all upon its initial release (although it did garner Springsteen a following in Philadelphia) and didn't achieve real commercial success until after the BIUSA boom over a decade later. As with Greetings From Asbury Park N.J., I didn't hear The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle until probably the mid-1980s.
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