Springsteen is growing as a writer of music as well as of words. Springsteen himself is an undistinguished but extremely versatile guitarist, which he needs to be to follow his own changes. They’re essentially an R&B outfit - funkybutt is Springsteen’s musical pied-a-terre - but they can play anything thrown at them, be it jazz or Highway 61 Revisited. Sancious on keyboards and Clarence Clemmons on saxes, cook with power and precision, particularly on “Rosalita” and “Kitty’s Back,” the album’s outstanding rockers. Here's Everything That Happened During Beyoncé's Once-in-a-Lifetime 'Renaissance' Tour Openerīut none of this would matter if the music were humdrum - it isn’t. In the midst of a raucous celebration of desire, “Rosalita,” he can suddenly turn around and sing, “Some day we’ll look back on this and think we all seem funny.” They’re striking amalgams of romance and gritty realism: “And the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore,/Chasin’ all those silly New York virgins by the score.” The loveliness of the first line, the punk savvy of the second, and the humor of the ensemble add up to Springsteen’s characteristic ambivalence and a complex appeal reminiscent of the Shangri-Las. Like Greetings, the new album is about the streets of New York and the tacky Jersey Shore, but the lyrics are no longer merely zany cut-ups. Having released two fine albums in less than a year, Springsteen is obviously a considerable new talent. The songs are longer, more ambitious and more romantic and yet, wonderfully, they lose little of Greetings’ rollicking rush. The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle takes itself more seriously. Springsteen was rhyming and wailing for the sheer fun of it, and his manic exuberance more than canceled out his debts to Dylan, Van Morrison and the Band. Most of it didn’t make much sense, but that was the point. The truth is, The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle is one of the greatest albums in the history of rock & roll.Greetings From Asbury Park, Bruce Springsteen’s uproarious debut album, sounded like “Subterranean Homesick Blues” played at 78, a typical five-minute track bursting with more words than this review. He would later make different albums, but he never made a better one. And the album's songs contain the best realization of Springsteen's poetic vision, which soon enough would be tarnished by disillusionment. Lopez's busy Keith Moon style is appropriate to the arrangements in a way his replacement, Max Weinberg, never could have been. Following the personnel changes in the E Street Band in 1974, there is a conventional wisdom that this album is marred by production lapses and performance problems, specifically the drumming of Vini Lopez. Musically and lyrically, Springsteen had brought an unruly muse under control and used it to make a mature statement that synthesized popular musical styles into complicated, well-executed arrangements and absorbing suites it evoked a world precisely even as that world seemed to disappear. The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle represented an astonishing advance even from the remarkable promise of Greetings the unbanded three-song second side in particular was a flawless piece of music. Though Springsteen expressed endless affection and much nostalgia, his message was clear: this was a goodbye-to-all-that from a man who was moving on. With his help, Springsteen created a street-life mosaic of suburban society that owed much in its outlook to Van Morrison's romanticization of Belfast in Astral Weeks. His chief musical lieutenant was keyboard player David Sancious, who lived on the E Street that gave the album and Springsteen's backup group its name. Bruce Springsteen expanded the folk-rock approach of his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., to strains of jazz, among other styles, on its ambitious follow-up, released only eight months later.
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