The River - Springsteen, Bruce (CD 1987)

Even though he had been simultaneously featured on the two infamous covers of Time and Newsweek five years previously and had been seeing steadily increasing record sales, in 1980 Bruce Springsteen was still waiting to become a household name. But with The River, his two-record release of that year, Springsteen would come a few steps closer to the superstardom that he would finally attain with the 1984 release of Born in the USA.

A near-great album in its own right, The River sees Bruce continuing to explore the themes that so obsessed him on his earlier albums: cars, hard work, partying, and especially, the desolation of broken love. Yet we see an evolution in his music, as he moves away from the epics that characterized his earlier albums (e.g., Lost in the Flood, Incident on Fifty-Seventh Street, Backstreets, Racin in the Streets) to tighter, more focused and frankly slicker songs. Whether one likes this is up to the listener. Critics have blasted this earlier work as self-indulgent and tedious ( There s an opera on the turnpike from Jungleland is a line that s taken more than it s share of potshots), yet listeners of a certain age like me love it. On the other hand, one school of thought is depressed by his apparently increasing commercialism as witnessed on Born in the USA and the lack of ideas evidenced on 1992 s twin CD s Lucky Town and Human Touch which, if folded together, would have made one decent album, and the less said about The Rising, the better.

But that was all in the future. With The River, Springsteen gave the increasing legions a strong dose of East Coast rock and roll, featuring some the 50 s and early 60 s influences along with his usual emotional, personal lyrics. The production meets his high standards, featuring the usual blend of guitars, keyboards, drums and sax from the E Street band which, at that time, was one of the best bands in the world and (on good nights with the better material) still is. The engineering is also great. Close attention rewards the listener with sometimes-wondrous interplays of Springsteen and Little Steven on guitar alternating with Federici and Bittan on keyboards.

The album opens with a hard-hitting rocker, The Ties That Bind, which features some nice dueling guitars from Bruce and Little Steven. Next up is the upbeat Sherry Darling, about Bruce s alter ego s problems with his girlfriend s mother. The song is driven by Clarence Clemons playing all four notes he knows on the sax and fake live applause. Two more songs of love are next, Jackson Cage and Two Hearts Are Better Than One. Both are rather average rockers, although the second became a crowd favorite at concerts when Springsteen performed a duet with his second wife, Patti Scialfa. The first side closes with the slow tempo drama Independence Day, about a young man who is finally leaving home. A critical favorite, I find it rather maudlin and a bit forced.

Side two is perhaps the weakest of the album. It opens with Bruce s first number one single, Hungry Heart, another perennial sing-along crowd favorite featuring Clarence s sax on the backbeat and Federici s organ smoking along on the chorus and bridge. A bit too slick for my taste. Out on the Street and Crush on You are a couple of rockers that sound right out of Bruce s early days, fully designed to be played live in some honky tonk, right after Thundercrack or Rendezvous (both found on the superb four-CD retrospective Tracks. Another crowd favorite, You Can Look But You Better Not Touch also sounds better live as a duet with Scialfa. Little Girl I Wanna Marry You, a slow tempo love song, closes out the second side. Here, we see Springsteen at his most maudlin, singing about true love in front of the E Streeters harmonies and a second-rate sax solo from Clemons.

(Off-topic story: I saw Springsteen on this tour at the University of Illinois. He was getting ready to play Sandy, one of my all-time favorites, when some ushers brought a couple in tux and wedding gown on stage, so he changed the play list from Sandy to this song, in honor of the couple, and had to be reminded of the lyrics in the middle of the song. Just goes to show you.)

Side three improves dramatically with the best songs on the album. The title track opens the side. It s a song about a young man who gets his girlfriend pregnant and ends up in a shotgun marriage in a dying industrial song. The harmonica work is plaintive, the tune lovely, and it s one of his best songs ever.

Next is the equally fabulous Point Blank. Here, a young girl who once had dreams and hope in her life is waiting on that welfare check. Roy Bittan s piano underlies the song in company with delicate electric guitar work. It s stunningly emotional work. Curiously, the lyrics were reworked from Springsteen s 1978 tour, when the song was about a gang member getting gunned down. (You can hear that version on live bootlegs and I heard it on that tour at Northwestern. Those bootlegs prove just how powerful this song is.) It s as good a song as he has ever written.

Two more rockers as next. Cadillac Ranch is another crowd favorite, despite the fact that it is a total fauxEddy Cochran throwaway. Even I have to admit it s a ton of fun. I m a Rocker is more of the same. It s another stand-on-your-seats and scream at the top of your lungs party tune. Fade Away is a down-beat tune, almost a rewrite of Little Girl I Wanna Marry You, except that the relationship is going south rather than north.

The fourth side gets more introspective. Stolen Car is a truly depressing song of despair as the protagonist sings of his dying marriage. The tempo changes radically with the party song Ramrod. One can almost see Springsteen in a 57 Chevy and driving around the town square looking for action. But it s back to what the hell is wrong with my life in Drive All Night, a reworking of the tune that Springsteen often played as live interlude in Backstreets between the chorus and the thunderous last lines. It was better, tighter, and more emotional in concert.

And the emotion doesn t get any more uplifting on the album s last song, Wreck on the Highway. Bruce, on his way home, sees a car wreck and a young man seeking help. Acoustic finger-picked guitar works underlies Federici s organ and occasional chords from Bittan. And the wreck brings back memories of the singer s own loss in a past car wreck. It s a fitting end to the song cycle that Bruce gives his audience in The River.

In listening to this CD as I wrote this review, two things really struck me. First, the clean engineering lets the listener hear every note that the band plays. It s quite different from the wall-of-sound that characterized so much of his earlier work. Second, it s eminently clear to me that most if not all of this album is meant to be played and consumed live. In particular, the rockers are far more effective when being cranked through stacks and stacks of Marshall amps, and the slow tempo tunes gained much more immediacy.

Yet, that s all a matter of taste. Yes, there are some clunkers on this CD and, yes, Bruce is sometimes sounding forced and a little thin. But while The River doesn t quite reach the mountaintops of Bruce s two previous albums, the better thing is to ask, just how many albums could? And the answer to that is not many , so one should just sit back and enjoy what is a very, very good series of songs about life in these United States.