Of course it is, with ‘Lost In The Flood’, ‘Blinded By The Light’ ‘Spirit In The Night’ – both written quickly when Davis didn’t hear a hit single - on it, not to mention ‘Growing Up’ and ‘It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City’, two songs that would catch the ear of one D. Few bought it, which is hard to fathom in retrospect, because it’s marvellous. The critics at Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy liked it, but that and a quarter will get you a ride on the subway. Springsteen’s debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., hit the racks to a fairly resounding “so what?” on January 5, 1973. Clive Davis was persuaded and Springsteen’s name was typed on a Columbia contract. It’s these tapes that open Springsteen’s vault-raiding Tracks box set (Springsteen has revealed he’s working on volume two), proving beyond doubt that Hammond knew about his onions. Hammond heard something and, after seeing Springsteen perform in The Gaslight in Greenwich Village, produced some demos at the CBS Studios. He turned up on May 2nd and played ‘Growin’ Up’, ‘It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City’, ‘Mary Queen Of Arkansas’ and ‘If I Were A Priest’ – a re-recorded version of which showed up on Letter To You. Hammond was serious – this is the man who had organised Billie Holiday’s first recording session, the man who had signed Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, the man who arranged for the issue of Robert Johnson’s King Of The Delta Blues Singers in 1961, thereby changing the course of rock n’ roll history – but Springsteen was serious too. That management got him in front of Columbia Records’s John Hammond for an audition in 1972. With The Castilles, Earth, and – marginally more successfully – Steel Mill, a band which counted amongst its number Danny Federici, Vini Lopez, and Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen slowly but surely learned his trade.
His mother took out a loan to buy him a better guitar and he never, despite plenty of indications that he should have at least thought about it, looked back.
#E street shuffle tv
It didn’t take, but when The Beatles played the same TV show in 1964, Springsteen was lost forever. His father suffered from his own demons, exacerbated by drinking, so Springsteen turned his love on his mother, who rented a guitar for her young lad after he saw Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show when he was still only about 7. Later on, as things got more serious for The Boss, he would sing in ‘Badlands’ that “it ain’t no sin to be glad your alive.” He has made many, many great records, and he’s still making them, but he never made one that sang more about the joy of living than this the joy of living, the dream of freedom.Īs everybody knows, Springsteen came from a working class background in New Jersey. Of all the records that beckon you into this golden Avalon of the heart and mind, there are few, if any, that do it with such a joie de vivre grin on its face as the second Bruce Springsteen album, The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle. To never grow up, to stay in a gang with your friends, to be constantly on the move from place to place, to live a life devoted to the arts, to never sit at a desk unless you choose to, to never even consider purchasing an alarm clock: Who wouldn’t want that?
#E street shuffle free
Eternal youth, free booze, and constant favours from whatever sexual partner(s) is/are of interest to you are all part of it, sure, but what really interested me was the promise of freedom. I’m talking here about the glorious dream that rock n’ roll sells you. The circus dream stayed with me, to be replaced, in time, by the dream of being in a rock n’ roll band. Or, failing that, become some sort of cowboy/pirate hybrid. When I was a young lad I wanted to run away with the circus.
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