Bruce Springsteen - Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. (1973)

(Today is Bruce Springsteen's 63rd birthday, and his debut album was mostly recorded forty years ago this time; it was released in January 1973.)

The hope has faded, the dream has ended, and all you're left with is a carnival of lost souls. In the early seventies, as the idealism of the previous decade gave way to a time of exhaustion and malaise, no one seemed to be able to give voice to the period of shell shock America was going through, except for an obscure rock singer-songwriter from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen.

Critic Jon Landau, who later quit journalism to become Springsteen's manager, called Springsteen the future of rock and roll, but the wreckage described in the young rocker's debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., suggests a future already spent and haunted by the recent past. The walking wounded pass through the nine songs on this record. Perverts gratify themselves to simulate romantic feelings; stock car racers destroy themselves while Hispanic boys get blown away by the police for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; a lover attempts suicide. The only people having fun in this world destroy their innocence in the process. Yet in Springsteen's earliest work, there is a determination to stand tall at remain resilient, however and whenever possible, against such desperation.

Bruce Springsteen drew inevitable comparisons to Bob Dylan with this record's lyricism, stringing words together with quick wit and sharp turns, but his knack for poetic imagery was only part of the story. The music was a curious blend of urban rock and roll with the glossy, brassy pop of the early sixties. Bittersweet piano lines are punctured by the sharp bass of Gary Tallent and the wailing saxophone of Clarence Clemons. Bruce is exploring the possibilities of rock and roll and making astonishing discoveries here, but the realities of life on the streets in the "It's Hard To Be a Saint In the City" and the self-destructive behavior of reckless individuals in the dirge-like "Lost In the Flood" suggest that such maturity comes with the price of innocence. The downbeat jazz stylings of the mournful saxophone and murky piano of "Spirit In the Night" present a band of small-time hoods who go out for a night on the edge of town but go over the edge of civilization. The protagonist of "For You" desperately tries to save a suicidal girlfriend even as the hopelessness of the situation suggests a better chance in another life.

Much of the tone of Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. is set by "Blinded By the Light," the opening cut, with its fast-paced images of unseemly characters pursuing cheap thrills.  The hit 1976 cover from Manfred Mann's Earth Band (that group covered several songs from this record) makes the whole affair sound like a merry romp; Springsteen's original version casts these individuals as the losers they are, the outcasts of society unable to find a place for themselves in this scary new world that America has become.  But beauty manages to make its way through this post-modern jungle that is Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. - at the far end of the dingy New York landscape of "Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?", a young Latina throws a rose to a lucky suitor from her perch in Harlem, making it clear, as if to second the sentiment of that another character in the song - a girl named Mary  Lou, who "rides to heaven on a gyroscope" - who claims that "the dope's that there's still hope."  Likewise, it's thrilling to hear Springsteen sing with a pride about finding the key to the universe in the ignition switch of an old car in "Growin' Up."  Unlike Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., Pink Floyd's similarly doomed 1973 LP, The Dark Side Of the Moon, couldn't say such a thing.  Hanging on in quiet desperation wasn't Bruce's way.