7. Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. (1973)

So here’s where it all started. To be honest, over the years I haven’t spent a ton of time with Springsteen’s debut album. Perhaps that’s partially a result of me having grown up and become a Bruce fan in the ’00s, but as is the case with Tunnel Of Love, I’ve certainly spent more time listening to his material from the last decade than I have with Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. To specify: It’s true I don’t find myself listening to this album the whole way through much, but half its songs are early Springsteen classics that became absolute killers live. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

After cutting his teeth playing in ’60s pop bands in the mold of the Beatles and the Stones (check out his band the Castiles’ “Baby I“), Springsteen became a bit of a local sensation playing in hard rock bands like Steel Mill, apparently mesmerizing people with his searing guitar solos and jams that sound like they were really, really long for a dude who never got stoned (Springsteen has apparently always been averse to drug use of any kind). Eventually, he tired of that, becoming inspired by artists like Van Morrison and Joe Cocker and moving more toward a jazz-soul-folk-rock blend. There was a push and pull between whether his debut should be a folk or rock album, and Greetings kind of wound up somewhere in between. Columbia marketed the hell out of it, some of that “New Dylan” stuff was tossed around, but it failed to sell as well as they’d hoped upon its early-1973 release.

Despite lacking an immediate commercial impact, Greetings is revered amongst all the other albums of the classic Springsteen era, and usually pops up in all those classic rock countdowns or lists of best debut albums ever, etc. Personally, I’ve always liked it but never thought it reached the same level as anything that followed for the next 10 years, and its successor The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle, released later that same year, already seemed more self-assured and better written. Part of this is the sense of Springsteen still being a young artist. He’s told stories of sitting on a hotel bed using a rhyming dictionary to write some of the lyrics, and though that’s a story relayed with a little smirk about the old days, it kind of shows in the music. “Blinded By The Light” might be the immediate and obvious example, a whimsical and over-stuffed rush of words lacking the cohesion that would make the material off of The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle similarly dizzying but more effective. Musically, it just sounds too restrained. As an album, it just feels like Springsteen was still figuring things out, and the final product is a bit unrefined.

But before all the old-school diehards cry sacrilege, let me return to my point from the first paragraph: While Greetings suffers in relation to his other ’70s and ’80s work by virtue of being less fully realized as an album, a lot of the songs here were incredible in a live setting. “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City” became a breakneck rock song, “Spirit In The Night” lost all the mid-tempo restraint of the studio and got upgraded with a lot more swagger, and the recorded version of “Lost In The Flood” seems a mere sketch compared to the bombastic drama the band would imbue it with onstage. So, maybe that’s always been my problem with Greetings. I came to it backwards, experiencing first the heights these songs could be taken to in a live setting, glimpsing what the E Street Band would go on to achieve later in the ’70s. Greetings is cool, but I’ll always see it as more of a template. As the Boss himself would later say: from small things, big things one day come.