Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: Bruce Springsteen, broken down by 20 songs that define his themes and styles, and five albums that every serious rock fan should own. Springsteen's latest album, Magic, was released this week.
Bruce Springsteen 101:
The Jersey-bred Springsteen started gigging around his home state beginning in 1965, first as the 16-year-old wunderkind guitarist in a garage-band called The Castiles, and later, at the end of the decade, as a shaggy-haired guitar hero fronting the heavy blues-rock outfit Steel Mill. Throughout Springsteen's early adventures in clubbing—which included at least three more band names and countless different line-ups—Springsteen seemed torn between the different styles he was both capable and interested in pursuing. Part of him wanted to crank out hooky hit records, like The Rascals. Part of him wanted to grind through long jams, like The Allman Brothers. And part of him wanted to be Bob Dylan, telling rambling stories about colorful characters over rickety electric folk music. His Dylan side had won out by the time he landed a record deal with Columbia in 1972—the label even took out ads dubbing him "the new Dylan"—but his commercial and creative breakthroughs would come later in the decade, when he learned to eschew clever wordplay and just sing direct songs about relatable topics.
If any one song encapsulates Springsteen—his indelible melodies, his gripping storytelling, his grasp of emotional and cultural detail—it's "Atlantic City," a morose crime story debuted on the stark 1982 folk album Nebraska. Populated by the kind of colorful characters that haunted Springsteen's early albums, yet steeped in the working-class anxiety that started to take hold around 1978's Darkness On The Edge Of Town, "Atlantic City" begins with a general report on mob violence and ends with one hard-up mug taking a job that's bound to get him killed. Springsteen sells the song with his croaky, committed vocal and small lyrical gestures (like when the narrator, kindly to the last, tells his girl to "put on your stockings, 'cause the night's gettin' cold"). And then there's that chorus, so spooky and unduly hopeful: "Maybe everything that dies some day comes back."
"Atlantic City," for all its atmosphere of despair and danger, is a love song, and it's in the love song format that Springsteen has been easiest to like—even when he bends the concept a little. "Two Hearts," from 1980's The River, is an exultant paean to the concept of couplehood, and though it ends with an admission that the singer is alone—but looking, always looking—The E Street Band's relentless drive elevates a simple plea for togetherness into something epic and eternal.
"Two Hearts" by Bruce Springsteen
"All That Heaven Will Allow," from 1987's Tunnel Of Love, is a much lighter song: ebulliently poppy but not cloying. It's another declaration that love is all our man needs, but this time, he's holding onto something he's already got, and describing how confident it makes him feel to have a steady. After writing that song, Springsteen went through a divorce and remarriage, then wrote "If I Should Fall Behind" for 1992's Lucky Town. The singer's recent history of loss and rejuvenation informs the song, which is filled with poetic imagery of beautiful rivers and oak boughs, and lovers who fall out of step. "But I'll wait for you," Springsteen half-whispers, "And if I should fall behind, wait for me."
In the above four songs, there's something serious at stake. But in "Cindy," an aspiring boyfriend makes a series of halfhearted attempts to court the object of his infatuation and keeps getting rebuffed, in almost comical fashion. "Cindy" was slated for the original single-disc version of 1980's The River—known then as The Ties That Bind—and it remains the only song from that record that didn't make it onto the final album or any of the official Springsteen leftovers collections. It's a slight song, but endearingly so, and it showcases Springsteen's gift for throwaway pop numbers—a direction he could've gone in had he chosen to be The Rascals instead of Dylan. And yet the song is no throwback. Listen to "Cindy"'s shimmering guitar bridge, which was recorded in 1979, yet anticipates the just-around-the-corner Britpop sound of bands like The Smiths and Aztec Camera.
"Cindy" by Bruce Springsteen
Intermediate work:
After Springsteen signed with Columbia, he recorded Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, a lyric-stuffed quasi-boogie record with a lot of songs that showed promise—including one, "Blinded By The Light," that became a #1 hit in a prog-rock arrangement for Manfred Mann's Earth Band—but the overall sound was too derivative and amateurish, and nothing like the raucous rock-and-soul revues he and his newly dubbed "E Street Band" were starting to perform to packed clubs up and down the East Coast. Springsteen really announced himself as an original on album number two, The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, released in late '73 (roughly nine months after Greetings). With songs like "Rosalita" and "Incident On 57th Street" pushing past the seven-minute mark, The E Street Shuffle allowed Springsteen to explore different moods—from slapstick to serious—within the same song, and also let him show off his crackerjack bandmates.
Throughout his career since, Springsteen has tried to recapture that sprawl, in songs that spread across landscapes and drag handfuls of lost people along in their wake. (It's this style that's proved inspirational to modern rock bands like The Hold Steady and The Arcade Fire.) Sometimes these songs run long, and sometimes Springsteen keeps them compact. During the sessions for The E Street Shuffle, Springsteen recorded (and eventually abandoned) a few vamp-y songs that had been road-tested and audience-approved, and a few garage-rock exercises that didn't fit the style he was exploring at the time. "Seaside Bar Song"—eventually released on the box set Tracks—is one of the latter, rocking a tinny organ, a Duane Eddy guitar riff, and a bleating sax, all as if The Beatles never happened. The song features a yearning break in the middle and a few other oddball touches in the arrangement that mark it as a product of the '70s, not the '50s, but the propulsive sound and vivid road imagery help connect the music Springsteen grew up on to the music he was about to make.
"Seaside Bar Song" by Bruce Springsteen
"Thunder Road"—and the entirety of 1975's Born To Run album—picks up where "Seaside Bar Song" left off, exploring the inner lives and anxieties of people who cruise the night in souped-up Chevys. "Thunder Road" builds from a tinkling piano and images of screen doors and wind-blown hair to a promise of escape, set to music that chugs, rumbles, and pulls away in triumph. It's the apotheosis of the "young Springsteen" style, and ground zero for his next stage.
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