The essentials:
1. The River (1980)
Springsteen first met rock critic Jon Landau in 1974, and eventually made the scribe his friend, producer, and manager. From the start, Landau urged the ambitious young rocker to simplify, and to try to write songs more like the garage rock that was already a major component of The E Street Band live experience. After the long struggle to craft the grim Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Springsteen leaned heavily on his friend and guitarist Steve Van Zandt to help him bash out songs that were looser and less studied, and the result was a two-year burst of creativity that culminated in a double album. The whole of Springsteen is here: the pop, the frat-rock, the country ballads, the working-man's sorrow, the horny teenager's joy, the giddy humor and the life-changing realizations.
2. Born To Run (1975)
Springsteen's first two albums sold poorly and were met with mixed reviews, to the extent that when his third album became a runaway success—with Springsteen making the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week—some people questioned whether show-business chicanery was afoot. Actually, what happened was that years of touring and Landau's brotherly advice helped Springsteen get as close as he'd ever get to the cinematic sound in his head, and in a rock market split between stoner pap and increasingly ethereal prog, Born To Run proved as revelatory as Jaws would be to moviegoers. It was the record people had been waiting for, and even now, it sounds thrilling and timeless, pumping with the blood of a thousand teenagers staring out of their windows at midnight.
3. Nebraska (1982)
Becoming alienated by the values taking hold in the Reagan era—both in the music industry and in the culture at large—Springsteen holed up in his house with a four-track and demoed a bunch of songs about murderers and poor folks. When he tried to turn them into a rock album, they didn't work, so Springsteen released the demos, letting his fans fill in the wide spaces in Nebraska's arrangements with their own ideas about what he was saying, where he was heading, and whether they wanted to follow.
4. The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle (1973)
Springsteen's debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, was a minor misfire, conveying little of the high-spirited E Street rock carnival. And while the production on the follow-up The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle is just as muffled, the songs are among the most sprawling and inventive that Springsteen has ever recorded, jumping from the post-Cream blues boogie of "Kitty's Back" to the Salvation Army band pump of "Wild Billy's Circus Story" to the nothing-else-like-it adolescent mania of "Rosalita." It's a singular album in rock history and Springsteen history, and many of his longtime fans are still hoping he'll return to its style someday.
5. Tunnel Of Love (1987)
Springsteen made the transition from star to superstar with 1984's Born In The U.S.A., then began to beat a retreat, by getting married, dismissing The E Street Band, and recording a low-key, curiously glimmering album about settling down, yet remaining discontented. Tunnel Of Love contains two of Springsteen's best singles—the urgent title track and the sophisticated "Brilliant Disguise"—but the record expresses its theme best in its final song, "Valentine's Day," a semi-rewrite of "Wreck On The Highway" in which the narrator confesses that he clings to his wife more out of nightmarish terror than sweet reassurance. To date, it's the last "great" album that Springsteen has made, though his reunions with The E Street Band on The Rising and Magic have proved that he can continue writing and recording relevant songs for as long as he cares to. Springsteen still has plenty of styles he hasn't yet fully explored—some of which he pioneered.
Miscellany:
Two of Springsteen's most popular songs were actually hits for other people. The Pointer Sisters turned the playfully smirky "Fire" into a pop and R&B smash, while Patti Smith and 10,000 Maniacs both garnered radio play with "Because The Night," a simmering lust anthem that boils over dramatically. Springsteen has performed these songs in concert, but in some ways, they don't really fit into the rest of his oeuvre; both sound like excerpts from albums he never made. (Although "Because The Night" would probably sound just fine on the heady Magic, oddly enough.)
"Light Of Day," on the other hand, has become an essential staple of the Springsteen live show, where he uses it as a kind of altar call for the audience. It's hard to believe now that the song started out as a fairly lame Joan Jett-sung title track to a clumsy Paul Schrader movie:While Springsteen has been covered extensively, he's also done his share of covering, most notably on last year's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, which found contemporary relevance and a surprising amount of rock energy in traditional folk songs. One of the set's highlights is Springsteen's version of the dustbowl ballad "My Oklahoma Home," which he sings as an elegy for the homes lost and people displaced after Hurricane Katrina, ending with a note of hope by pointing out that once your house is scattered to the four winds, your home is literally everywhere.
While touring behind The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen reinterpreted some of his old songs in a retro style that changed some of them for the better. The greatest beneficiary of the treatment was Nebraska's "Open All Night," formerly a slight roadhouse rocker, and now—as heard on this year's Live In Dublin—a jump-jive/Western-swing workout. The debt Springsteen owes to his forbears has never been plainer, nor so happily repaid.
[audio:67809]
« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3
- Comments