It's hard to be a saint in the city (Bruce Springsteen) (LP 3868 - 3873)

Bruce Springsteen  Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (Vinyl, CBS Records, 1973) **** 

Bruce Springsteen  The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (Vinyl and CD, Columbia Records, 1973) *****  

Bruce Springsteen  Born To Run (Vinyl and CD, Columbia Records, 1975) *****

Bruce Springsteen  Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run (DVD, Sony Music, 2005) *****

Bruce Springsteen  Darkness on the Edge of Town (Vinyl and CD, Columbia Records, 1978) *****

Bruce Springsteen  The Promise (CD, Columbia Records, 2010) *****

Genre: Rock, folk-rock, jazz-rock, pop. 

Places I remember: Marbecks Records, JB Hi-Fi for Wings for Wheels

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: Thunder Road, Born to Run

Gear costume: Jungleland (Born to Run), Racing in the Street (Darkness...)

They loom large in his legend (The Album Collection playlists): Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6

Active compensatory factors: While I am not a completist, I do have a large number of Springsteen's albums, so this will be another multi-post effort on my part. 

First up will be the seventies albums, starting with his debut - Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., then the rest of the studio albums before the live albums. The compilations will be the final segment.

The debut is what it is - a start, a greeting, amid a rush of Dylanesque imagery. It was recorded in 1972 and included some terrific songs like Growin' Up, Lost in the Flood and For You. Two singles were released from it: Blinded by the Light and Spirits in the Night but both failed to chart.   

The album is a mixture of solo style songs and band songs which introduce Bruce's signature energy, his desire, his wide poetic vision, and romanticism for a mythic life. By so doing, it announced a major talent had kicked off a career that is still going. The rock'n'roll fire burns in Bruce Springsteen!

In many ways The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle is my favourite album. I'd first found Bruce via the Born to Run single that exploded out of my transistor radio in 1975 and when I bought the album it was so damned good that I had to do a catch up of the first two. The Wild etc was a revelation! Born to Run hadn't emerged out of nowhere!

My listening to the album coincided with seeing the boys doing a live version of Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) on TV. That was another musical epiphany for me - similar to see The Beatles on Ed Sullivan as a youngster. The album itself is one great song after another - like Born to Run. 

I'll need to quote the AllMusic review at length here because it perfectly described this album: His chief musical lieutenant was keyboard player David Sancious, who lived on the E Street that gave the album and Springsteen's backup group its name. With his help, Springsteen created a street-life mosaic of suburban society that owed much in its outlook to Van Morrison's romanticization of Belfast in Astral Weeks. Though Springsteen expressed endless affection and much nostalgia, his message was clear: this was a goodbye-to-all-that from a man who was moving on. The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle represented an astonishing advance even from the remarkable promise of Greetings; the unbanded three-song second side in particular was a flawless piece of music...The truth is, The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle is one of the greatest albums in the history of rock & roll.

Born to Run is another album that fits into that last description as well. Having just listened to it and rewatched the making of it film - Wings for Wheels, it really is a seminal album both for music generally and Bruce specifically. It certainly was a painstaking process that went into its production.

The band settled itself in with Mighty Max Weinberg and Professor Roy Bittan replacing 'Boom' Carter and David Sancious. The jazzy combination became the rock-solid Mighty Max and the different piano style of Roy Bittan.

The album celebrates friendship - hence that iconic cover, and songs that are about those bonds and the need to escape (for Bruce that was Freehold, N.J.). The film is cool in that it has Bruce being interviewed driving back to Freehold (the diner there is another great choice of location).

For me the album has some epic music and some romantic ideals that stay with me all these years later - Scooter and The Big Man, Thunder Road's pulling out of here to win and especially Jungleland. The Big Man's finest moment? For me it is.

What followed was Bruce appearing on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week, and being presented in London as part of the Born to Run tour as the saviour of rock'n'roll. Of course, his reaction was to back pedal on his next album - Darkness on the Edge of Town, which came out three years later.

From go to woh, it is a dark record. The cover says it all - a morose, haunted looking Bruce. When I bought it in 1978, I embraced that darker, raw side of his music. The three singles encapsulate that feeling: Badlands, Prove It All Night, The Promised Land.

The Promise is a double CD compilation which presents an alternative reality to the Darkness on the Edge of Town. It features 21 recordings from the sessions. Highlights for me are the alternative version of Racing in the Street plus his take on Because The Night (which became a hit for Patti Smith) and best of all - Talk To Me, a great song that he gave to Southside Johnny.

Where do they all belong? Next up - albums from The River onwards.