November 5, 1973—Bruce Springsteen’s second album, The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, featured rambling song structures and sometimes ragged
sounds that at first didn’t attract enough buyers, putting him on the brink
with label Columbia Records. But the LP from the New Jersey rocker generated
adherents over the years, especially for tunes that became showcases for all-stops-out interplay with his backup group, the E Street Band.
Springsteen and his musicians trooped up to 914
Studios in Blauvelt, NY, a good ride up from their Jersey Shore homes.
Recording often took place after midnight, when it could be done for free, when
the studio owner was asleep (a particular brainstorm of chief engineer Louis
Lahav). The hope was that the album would fulfill the promise of the rookie
effort by The Boss, Greetings From Asbury
Park.
In some ways, it did. The new album (which took the
first two-thirds of its long name from a 1959 Audie Murphy western) was more of
a straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll LP than its predecessor (which, beneath the
veneer of its rhythm section, evinced its acoustic folk origins).
The songs
Springsteen brought into the studio were already, to some extent, road-tested,
as he had tried them out on audiences.
The style of the new work was richly
idiosyncratic, too, with lyrics rooted in Springsteen’s Jersey Shore milieu and
musicians who could be jazzy (pianist David Sancious) or just listening to their own drummer (the appropriately named Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez).
Problems remained, however:
*Not one of
the songs was single-ready: The shortest, “The E Street Shuffle,” was four
and a half minutes, and four of the remaining six songs ran over seven minutes.
*Springsteen
continued to be painstaking in the studio: A perfectionist, he tossed aside
entirely serviceable tunes (notably “Thundercrack,” later to show up on Tracks in 1998) because they did not fit with his concept for the album: what Peter Ames Carlin, in his biography Bruce, termed “a series of songs about
liberation: through music, through friends, through lovers.” Just when it
seemed finished, he’d want to make more changes.
*Springsteen
refused to print the lyrics to the LP: Eric Alterman, in It Ain’t No Sin To Be Glad You’re Alive,
ascribed it to “a fit of ‘stop comparing me to Dylan’ pique." Whatever. It still
left many listeners scratching their heads over what he was singing.
*Springsteen
lost his biggest boosters: Legendary talent scout John Hammond had reached
retirement age, and Columbia President Clive Davis lost a power struggle over
allegations of financial wrongdoing.
Sales continued to be lackluster, then, and now
Springsteen would be placed in a position vis-à-vis Columbia where his next LP
had to be a homer, or he would be dropped by the label.
The following year would witness the departures
of Lopez (who tangled one too many times with saxophonist, Springsteen foil and
“Big Man” Clarence Clemons), Sancious (who preferred jazz to rock ‘n’ roll),
and Jim Cretecos, the producer partner of Springsteen’s bulldog manager, Mike
Appel (for reasons never really explained).
They were replaced, respectively,
by Max Weinberg, Roy Bittan, and when Springsteen and Appel found themselves
making little progress in the studio on what came to be Born To Run, Jon Landau.
But we come back to the crux, and the glory, of the
matter in regard to The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle: those songs.
Two were
recognized as classics, by his growing fan cohort, as soon as they were heard: “Fourth
of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” a kaleidoscopic valentine and farewell to his
boardwalk life, and “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” which Springsteen has viewed
as a kind of musical autobiography (not to mention a rejoinder to anyone who
tries to step on someone else’s dreams).
In a way, the musical textures from The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street
Shuffle found their way onto the tighter Born To Run (e.g., when she briefly joined the band in the fall of
1974, violinist Suki Lahav’s lyrical work on “Incident on 57th
Street” would be echoed in the opening of “Jungleland”).
The rest of the LP has remained, over the years,
like buried treasure, delighting anyone who rediscovers it, either on CD or in
concert, when The Boss brings it to the surface again, all fresh and new.
I was reminded of this in the last year, when he and
the E Street Band—now enlarged with a full horn section—played a blistering
version of “Kitty’s Back” on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. (You can get a rough approximation of the
full-bodied sound in this clip from 2012.) In Ireland this summer, he even
played perhaps the most obscure cut from the LP, “Wild Billy’s Circus Song.”
In recent years, Springsteen and his band of
brothers have even taken to playing the whole album through. In one of the
first times he did this, he announced:
“This was the second record that I made.
It didn't do that well, but it was an interesting record. Half of the songs are
set in New Jersey, around our little street corner. The other half was sort of
my romantic ideas and fantasies of New York City."
“An interesting record.” Many fans have thought it’s
a whole lot more.
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