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All rights reserved.The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle - Springsteen, Bruce (CD 1986)
GROWIN' UP SPRINGSTEEN II: "for me this boardwalk life's through, babe"Review created: 04/16/05
by: Stairway2Drew-- a member of Epinions and Advisor in Music
Pros:
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Cons:
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Retrocrush.com, which bills itself as the "world's finest pop culture site," recently pulled off an idea that I've wanted to run with for some time now. They have compiled, complete with song clips for each entry, a list of "The 50 Coolest Song Parts"; when i stumbled across the list, I thought, "How cool! Somebody who knows what I'm talking about!"
A list of the coolest song parts ever could be totally different from a list of the coolest songs ever, because a cool song part can exist in an uncool song (although an uncool song part cannot, conversely, exist in a cool song). Retrocrush's list features accepted cool songs like the Stones' "Sympathy For the Devil" (Mick Jagger's line "I shouted out who killed the Kennedys/ when after all, it was you and me!" makes the list at #7), the Isley Brothers' "Shout" (#28, the gospel-like breakdown), and the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" (Roger Daltrey's "YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!
The Retrocrush list also only features one Bruce Springsteen song; it's the intro to "Born to Run" and it sneaks in at #44. Hey, different strokes; these things are subjective anyway. But, for my money, there is no other artist bigger on cool song parts than Bruce Springsteen.
People have their favorite songs, and then they have their favorite song parts. As the Retrocrush list illustrates, were the same person to compile two seperate lists, that's exactly what they'd get: two separate lists. There are a lot of things that amaze me about Bruce Springsteen's second album, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, but the thing that really gets me is that not only are all the songs great, each song features at least one (and more often than not, more than one) of my coolest song parts ever.*
**
Released mere months after the young singer/songwriter/Dylan heir apparent's Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey, one thing becomes immediately clear: unless you were keeping up with Springsteen from the absolute beginning, there's no way you can comprehend the magnitude of the artistic jump from Greetings to the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Both albums are in our past, now over thirty years removed. Unless you were a cogent adult buying Springsteen's albums as they came out - and, since Greetings peaked at 60 on the Billboard charts, I'm doubting anybody that wasn't a relative of one of the band members really bothered at first - you're ill-informed as to exactly what Springsteen accomplished in a matter of months. Greetings was a good album, little more; Shuffle is a masterwork, titanic, soulful, and infinitely more accomplished than its predecessor.
I, like, Springsteen, am a songwriter, and that's about all we have in common (unless you count that we're both from New Jersey, both enjoy being wordier than necessary at times, and both enjoy playing "For You" in concert). Despite the fact that I'm totally confident that my band will be moderately famous one day, I realize that the first Bohemian Man Fair album, while an artistic achievement in its own right (mainly in the sense that we ever got around to recording it at all), won't contain any songs quite as memorable as Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey, which is a fine and all album by normal standards but slightly subpar by Springsteen standards. In the coming months I can't fathom any situation, save perhaps the fortunate discovery of a genie in a bottle of Vanilla Coke, in which we'd write seven songs that are even half as stellar as those on the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Hell, I don't think we'll be even up to Greetings From Asbury Park status by then.
And why *is* E Street Shuffle so much more accomplished than Greetings? That is the question. Greetings was an establishing album (as all debuts are), so Springsteen, naturally looking to find his footing in an industry eager to brand him Bob Dylan's uncool nephew, overcompensated with reams of words and words that sounded awesome together but never made any sense; kind of like a recording of E Street Band instrumentals collided with Bruce's rhyming dictionary, and bam. The job of the sophomore album is to expand on the idea of the debut and sharpen it - a fine example is Pearl Jam's Vs, which polished and streamlined debut Ten's endearing-but-kinda-sloppy approach to hard rock, and was arguably much better than its predecessor, although some people (we PJ fans call them "wrong") prefer the former - and the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, much like Greetings, spews forth spools of words that, again, sound really cool. The key difference is that the songs on E Street Shuffle are totally coherent.
And not only coherent, but totally narrative in nature. We all know that E Street Shuffle is a great album - a work of musical art, full of the rich, soulful, and lyrical rock'n'roll that is kind of the natural bridge between Dylan and, say, another r&b loving rock star, Van Morrison, and arguably better than either one for it - but what is discussed less often is that it's also quite the literary accomplishment. These ain't songs, they're short stories, full of glittery, nostalgic reminisces, and characters as psychologically complex as ourselves; the fact that the music that happens to support these stories is excellent just means Springsteen receives my highest praise as a writer AND as a musician.
Actually, come to think of it, maybe Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey actually makes total sense in the retrospective context of the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. After all, since when does youth make sense? I, while two decades into life, am arguably still a youth, or at best straddling the chasm between youth and manhood, and let me tell you, not a damn thing makes sense. Greetings From Asbury Park is Springsteen's reminiscence of the spunk and spontanaeity of adolescence; E Street Shuffle is his ascent (descent?) into manhood, still living out the wild nights of his adolescence but without the same off-the-cuff abandon and in-the-moment immortality, already nostalgic and keenly aware that sometime, probably soon, he's probably going to have to pack it up and move on. And so E Street Shuffle becomes totally applicable to real life, where Greetings From Asbury Park is more of a soundtrack to some summer college fantasy, of bouncing down the beach to "Growin' Up" and trying to pick up chicks to "For You". But, still, it's not as yearning as Born To Run, and therefore not quite as dramatic, which means that, as an album, the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is Springsteen's best, not only in music and lyrical content and narrative instinct but even in tone. Then again, i'm on the cusp of real adulthood myself, making E Street Shuffle so much more substantial to me. Ask me again in ten years; maybe then I'll prefer Born in the U.S.A.
Nowhere is these theme more clearly illustrated than in "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)." Acoustic and reflective and with some really pretty organ-sounding thing coming to the foreground in the chorus and making it absolutely soar, it's the detailed account of a beach-bum loser looking to get out; musically, it's the farthest thing from "Born To Run," but lyrically it bears the most comparison:
Sandy, that waitress I was seein' lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore
..
for me this boardwalk life's through, babe
you oughtta quit this scene too ..
It's all fond memories growing sour in the end, suffocating, and necessitating escape. When you think about it, it's not far removed from "it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap/ we gotta get out while we're young."
But - and here's where that balance thing comes in! - Bruce weighs it out. That's the point: his memories _are_ found, vivid, bright, and more than a little bit hazy in the rearviewmirror of lots of time and probably lots of beer. The album's opener, "The E Street Shuffle," is a downright party tune, and kicks off:
sparks fly on E street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot
all the little girls' souls go weak when the man-child gives them a double shot
the schoolboy bops pull out all the stops on a friday night
the teenage tramps in skintight pants do the E street dance and everything's all right
And while I didn't grow up in Bruce Springsteen's particular corner of New Jersey, I get it. I'm an export from the ghetto, and if there's one thing about kids who grew up in a neighborhood generally considered to be, eh, less than desirable, it's this: we always wanna go back. Yeah, I came from there, but I don't remember guns and drugs and biitchslaps and muggings and pregnant teenagers; I remember colorful characters and adventure and dancing, late nights and joyrides and every now and then a scuffle just to remind us of where we were. I didn't grow up where Bruce did, but I get it.
Elsewhere, Springsteen weaves an upbeat, raucous fiesta from a tale of classism and, possibly, racism (although nowhere is it expressly said that "Rosalita" is a Latina woman) in "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," possibly the quickest seven minutes ever put to wax, celebratory and bursting with frantic percussion and joyous saxpohone squeals. Seedy, downtrodden city loners are romanticized in the impossibly beautiful "New York City Serenade." "Wild Billy's Circus Story," bittersweet and funny (and the most Dylan-esque song here, instrumentation-wise), describes a big-top family embraced by a potential escapee enticed by the nomadic nature of its endearing freaks. "Kitty's Back" is jazzy and explosive, the natural flipside to Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back In Town." On the album's best song, "Incident on 57th Street," gangland drama gains perspective in the form of star-crossed lovers Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane; it builds to an astonishing round of bellowed choruses followed by a Springsteen guitar solo, one of those solos that almost dares you *not* to make passionate love to your stereo. And not only is "Incident on 57th Street" an incredible album centerpiece, it's the album's turning point. Not only that, but I can pick out the exact moment in "Incident on 57th Street" where the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle ceases to be merely "awesome" and moves on to "transcendent". It's the third verse, where everything drops out but the bassline, Springsteen's voice, and some light cymbals in the background:
Johnny was sittin' on the fire escape watchin' the kids playin' down the street
he called down, "hey little heroes, summer's long but I guess it ain't very sweet around here anymore"
Janie sleeps in sheets damp with sweat, Johnny sits up alone and watches her dream on, dream on
and the sister prays for lost souls, then breaks down in the chapel after everyone's gone..
And then all the instruments slowly come back in, and Janie starts singing about "those romantic young boys" that only want to fight, and is left to sleep in those damp sheets and cuddle up all alone to Johnny's pillow, not sure where he's going or even if he's going to come back, but understanding exactly the way these young men romanticize their conflict, which is never expressly discussed but I imagine is that kind of impeccably coreographed gangfight, kind of like West Side Story or the "Beat It" video... but those four lines, and the way Bruce delivers them and the way they ride the bassline and the total clarity of the images conjured when you're listening to that verse in the dark... I mean, damn! THIS IS WHY PEOPLE USE MUSIC TO TELL STORIES. In case they can tell a story like this.
Moreover, the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is simply everything a rock album should be. It's nostalgic and soulful and beautiful and glorious and any number of lauding adjectives I could thesaurusize for days; whatever. It's kind of the best album ever, and that's only hyperbole because U2's Achtung Baby exists on the same earth.
TO BE CONTINUED...
**
* BONUS FEATURE: TOP FIVE COOLEST MUSICAL MOMENTS ON THE WILD, THE INNOCENT, AND THE E STREET SHUFFLE:
5. "The E Street Shuffle": Just as the song seems to be winding down, the band, apparently having been lit afire at this point, start to play a dance breakdown as if they need to impress God into making it rain.
4. "Incident on 57th Street": The Guitar Solo.
3. "New York City Serenade": After singing about the fish lady that baits them tenement walls, the mournful acoustic guitar drops out and the band launches into a foot-stompin', hand-clappin' gospel breakdown, repeating over and over "no she won't take the train" before going back like nothing ever happened.
2. "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)": As if to illustrate exactly why Rosalita's snooty papa doesn't want his daughter dating a rock musician, all the instruments drop out except for percussion and what sounds like a million clapping hands and Springsteen leads the band in an exultant, almost-mocking catcall: "Now you're sad, your mama's mad, and your (DROP INSTRUMENTS) papa says he knows that I don't have any money, papa says he knows I don't have any money, papa says he knows I don't have any money!" It's one of those smirking, totally-cool moments of musical smartasss brilliance that just makes the song that much better.
1. "Incident on 57th Street": Verse Three; as if it could be anything else?
**
GROWIN' UP SPRINGSTEEN REVIEWS:
- Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ
- The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
- Born to Run
- Darkness on the Edge of Town
- The River
- Nebraska
- Born in the U.S.A.
- Tunnel of Love
- Human Touch
A list of the coolest song parts ever could be totally different from a list of the coolest songs ever, because a cool song part can exist in an uncool song (although an uncool song part cannot, conversely, exist in a cool song). Retrocrush's list features accepted cool songs like the Stones' "Sympathy For the Devil" (Mick Jagger's line "I shouted out who killed the Kennedys/ when after all, it was you and me!" makes the list at #7), the Isley Brothers' "Shout" (#28, the gospel-like breakdown), and the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" (Roger Daltrey's "YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!
The Retrocrush list also only features one Bruce Springsteen song; it's the intro to "Born to Run" and it sneaks in at #44. Hey, different strokes; these things are subjective anyway. But, for my money, there is no other artist bigger on cool song parts than Bruce Springsteen.
People have their favorite songs, and then they have their favorite song parts. As the Retrocrush list illustrates, were the same person to compile two seperate lists, that's exactly what they'd get: two separate lists. There are a lot of things that amaze me about Bruce Springsteen's second album, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, but the thing that really gets me is that not only are all the songs great, each song features at least one (and more often than not, more than one) of my coolest song parts ever.*
**
Released mere months after the young singer/songwriter/Dylan heir apparent's Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey, one thing becomes immediately clear: unless you were keeping up with Springsteen from the absolute beginning, there's no way you can comprehend the magnitude of the artistic jump from Greetings to the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Both albums are in our past, now over thirty years removed. Unless you were a cogent adult buying Springsteen's albums as they came out - and, since Greetings peaked at 60 on the Billboard charts, I'm doubting anybody that wasn't a relative of one of the band members really bothered at first - you're ill-informed as to exactly what Springsteen accomplished in a matter of months. Greetings was a good album, little more; Shuffle is a masterwork, titanic, soulful, and infinitely more accomplished than its predecessor.
I, like, Springsteen, am a songwriter, and that's about all we have in common (unless you count that we're both from New Jersey, both enjoy being wordier than necessary at times, and both enjoy playing "For You" in concert). Despite the fact that I'm totally confident that my band will be moderately famous one day, I realize that the first Bohemian Man Fair album, while an artistic achievement in its own right (mainly in the sense that we ever got around to recording it at all), won't contain any songs quite as memorable as Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey, which is a fine and all album by normal standards but slightly subpar by Springsteen standards. In the coming months I can't fathom any situation, save perhaps the fortunate discovery of a genie in a bottle of Vanilla Coke, in which we'd write seven songs that are even half as stellar as those on the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Hell, I don't think we'll be even up to Greetings From Asbury Park status by then.
And why *is* E Street Shuffle so much more accomplished than Greetings? That is the question. Greetings was an establishing album (as all debuts are), so Springsteen, naturally looking to find his footing in an industry eager to brand him Bob Dylan's uncool nephew, overcompensated with reams of words and words that sounded awesome together but never made any sense; kind of like a recording of E Street Band instrumentals collided with Bruce's rhyming dictionary, and bam. The job of the sophomore album is to expand on the idea of the debut and sharpen it - a fine example is Pearl Jam's Vs, which polished and streamlined debut Ten's endearing-but-kinda-sloppy approach to hard rock, and was arguably much better than its predecessor, although some people (we PJ fans call them "wrong") prefer the former - and the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, much like Greetings, spews forth spools of words that, again, sound really cool. The key difference is that the songs on E Street Shuffle are totally coherent.
And not only coherent, but totally narrative in nature. We all know that E Street Shuffle is a great album - a work of musical art, full of the rich, soulful, and lyrical rock'n'roll that is kind of the natural bridge between Dylan and, say, another r&b loving rock star, Van Morrison, and arguably better than either one for it - but what is discussed less often is that it's also quite the literary accomplishment. These ain't songs, they're short stories, full of glittery, nostalgic reminisces, and characters as psychologically complex as ourselves; the fact that the music that happens to support these stories is excellent just means Springsteen receives my highest praise as a writer AND as a musician.
Actually, come to think of it, maybe Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey actually makes total sense in the retrospective context of the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. After all, since when does youth make sense? I, while two decades into life, am arguably still a youth, or at best straddling the chasm between youth and manhood, and let me tell you, not a damn thing makes sense. Greetings From Asbury Park is Springsteen's reminiscence of the spunk and spontanaeity of adolescence; E Street Shuffle is his ascent (descent?) into manhood, still living out the wild nights of his adolescence but without the same off-the-cuff abandon and in-the-moment immortality, already nostalgic and keenly aware that sometime, probably soon, he's probably going to have to pack it up and move on. And so E Street Shuffle becomes totally applicable to real life, where Greetings From Asbury Park is more of a soundtrack to some summer college fantasy, of bouncing down the beach to "Growin' Up" and trying to pick up chicks to "For You". But, still, it's not as yearning as Born To Run, and therefore not quite as dramatic, which means that, as an album, the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is Springsteen's best, not only in music and lyrical content and narrative instinct but even in tone. Then again, i'm on the cusp of real adulthood myself, making E Street Shuffle so much more substantial to me. Ask me again in ten years; maybe then I'll prefer Born in the U.S.A.
Nowhere is these theme more clearly illustrated than in "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)." Acoustic and reflective and with some really pretty organ-sounding thing coming to the foreground in the chorus and making it absolutely soar, it's the detailed account of a beach-bum loser looking to get out; musically, it's the farthest thing from "Born To Run," but lyrically it bears the most comparison:
Sandy, that waitress I was seein' lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore
..
for me this boardwalk life's through, babe
you oughtta quit this scene too ..
It's all fond memories growing sour in the end, suffocating, and necessitating escape. When you think about it, it's not far removed from "it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap/ we gotta get out while we're young."
But - and here's where that balance thing comes in! - Bruce weighs it out. That's the point: his memories _are_ found, vivid, bright, and more than a little bit hazy in the rearviewmirror of lots of time and probably lots of beer. The album's opener, "The E Street Shuffle," is a downright party tune, and kicks off:
sparks fly on E street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot
all the little girls' souls go weak when the man-child gives them a double shot
the schoolboy bops pull out all the stops on a friday night
the teenage tramps in skintight pants do the E street dance and everything's all right
And while I didn't grow up in Bruce Springsteen's particular corner of New Jersey, I get it. I'm an export from the ghetto, and if there's one thing about kids who grew up in a neighborhood generally considered to be, eh, less than desirable, it's this: we always wanna go back. Yeah, I came from there, but I don't remember guns and drugs and biitchslaps and muggings and pregnant teenagers; I remember colorful characters and adventure and dancing, late nights and joyrides and every now and then a scuffle just to remind us of where we were. I didn't grow up where Bruce did, but I get it.
Elsewhere, Springsteen weaves an upbeat, raucous fiesta from a tale of classism and, possibly, racism (although nowhere is it expressly said that "Rosalita" is a Latina woman) in "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," possibly the quickest seven minutes ever put to wax, celebratory and bursting with frantic percussion and joyous saxpohone squeals. Seedy, downtrodden city loners are romanticized in the impossibly beautiful "New York City Serenade." "Wild Billy's Circus Story," bittersweet and funny (and the most Dylan-esque song here, instrumentation-wise), describes a big-top family embraced by a potential escapee enticed by the nomadic nature of its endearing freaks. "Kitty's Back" is jazzy and explosive, the natural flipside to Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back In Town." On the album's best song, "Incident on 57th Street," gangland drama gains perspective in the form of star-crossed lovers Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane; it builds to an astonishing round of bellowed choruses followed by a Springsteen guitar solo, one of those solos that almost dares you *not* to make passionate love to your stereo. And not only is "Incident on 57th Street" an incredible album centerpiece, it's the album's turning point. Not only that, but I can pick out the exact moment in "Incident on 57th Street" where the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle ceases to be merely "awesome" and moves on to "transcendent". It's the third verse, where everything drops out but the bassline, Springsteen's voice, and some light cymbals in the background:
Johnny was sittin' on the fire escape watchin' the kids playin' down the street
he called down, "hey little heroes, summer's long but I guess it ain't very sweet around here anymore"
Janie sleeps in sheets damp with sweat, Johnny sits up alone and watches her dream on, dream on
and the sister prays for lost souls, then breaks down in the chapel after everyone's gone..
And then all the instruments slowly come back in, and Janie starts singing about "those romantic young boys" that only want to fight, and is left to sleep in those damp sheets and cuddle up all alone to Johnny's pillow, not sure where he's going or even if he's going to come back, but understanding exactly the way these young men romanticize their conflict, which is never expressly discussed but I imagine is that kind of impeccably coreographed gangfight, kind of like West Side Story or the "Beat It" video... but those four lines, and the way Bruce delivers them and the way they ride the bassline and the total clarity of the images conjured when you're listening to that verse in the dark... I mean, damn! THIS IS WHY PEOPLE USE MUSIC TO TELL STORIES. In case they can tell a story like this.
Moreover, the Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is simply everything a rock album should be. It's nostalgic and soulful and beautiful and glorious and any number of lauding adjectives I could thesaurusize for days; whatever. It's kind of the best album ever, and that's only hyperbole because U2's Achtung Baby exists on the same earth.
TO BE CONTINUED...
**
* BONUS FEATURE: TOP FIVE COOLEST MUSICAL MOMENTS ON THE WILD, THE INNOCENT, AND THE E STREET SHUFFLE:
5. "The E Street Shuffle": Just as the song seems to be winding down, the band, apparently having been lit afire at this point, start to play a dance breakdown as if they need to impress God into making it rain.
4. "Incident on 57th Street": The Guitar Solo.
3. "New York City Serenade": After singing about the fish lady that baits them tenement walls, the mournful acoustic guitar drops out and the band launches into a foot-stompin', hand-clappin' gospel breakdown, repeating over and over "no she won't take the train" before going back like nothing ever happened.
2. "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)": As if to illustrate exactly why Rosalita's snooty papa doesn't want his daughter dating a rock musician, all the instruments drop out except for percussion and what sounds like a million clapping hands and Springsteen leads the band in an exultant, almost-mocking catcall: "Now you're sad, your mama's mad, and your (DROP INSTRUMENTS) papa says he knows that I don't have any money, papa says he knows I don't have any money, papa says he knows I don't have any money!" It's one of those smirking, totally-cool moments of musical smartasss brilliance that just makes the song that much better.
1. "Incident on 57th Street": Verse Three; as if it could be anything else?
**
GROWIN' UP SPRINGSTEEN REVIEWS:
- Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ
- The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
- Born to Run
- Darkness on the Edge of Town
- The River
- Nebraska
- Born in the U.S.A.
- Tunnel of Love
- Human Touch
Review ID: 10000000000234233
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