There's a good deal more overdubbing her, too. Bruce is playing electric guitar now (there was very little on Greetings), and he's superb, both as a rhythm player and as a soloist (check out his highly charged lead at the end of "Incident on 57th Street" and see what I mean - you'd have to go to Robin Trower for comparable intensity). Good as the debut set was, this new one is a staggering advance. Clearly, we are dealing with a highly individual auteur, and I might add, the first big American rock talent since John Fogerty. In fact, not the least of the pleasures of The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle is that with it he has permanently laid Zimmerman's Ghost to rest. I am pleased to report that, despite Columbia's monumentally ill-advised "New Dylan" hype, Bruce Springsteen has come up with a sensational follow-up to his Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Instead he milks it for all it's worth, wrapping up all the song's movements and juxtapositions with his unabashedly melodramatic and loonily sotted Sloppy Joe voice. Springsteen never resolves the conflict (if he ever does his music will probably become less interesting). There is an occasional weak spot or an awkward transition, but for the most part it works spectacularly, and nowhere to more dramatic effect than on "Incident on 57th Street," the album's most stunning track, a virtual mini-opera about Johnny, a "romantic young boy" torn between Jane and the bright knives out on the street.
The best of his new songs dart and swoop from tempo to tempo and from genre to genre, from hell-bent-for-leather rock to luscious schmaltz to what is almost recitative. 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 - funky-butt 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 Clemons on saxes, cook with power and precision, particularly on "Rosalita" and "Kitty's Back," the album's outstanding rockers. 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."īut none of this would matter if the music were humdrum - it isn't.
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. 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. The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle
Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle
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