My Back Pages, Vol. 8: Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, The Innocent, The E Street Shuffle

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

This week we have a double feature on deck for you, and yes we're talking about Springsteen--if you know anything about either of us you knew it was coming eventually. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Springsteen's first two albums, which both came out in 1973, yesterday we discussed Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, his debut, and today we're taking on The Wild, the Innocent, the E Street Shuffle. As always, there's a full Rdio stream of the record below, as well as a link to check it out on Spotify. Enjoy!

Craig Manning: I graduate from college tomorrow. I finished classes yesterday afternoon and started packing up my room last night. And on Sunday, I’ll move out of my apartment, drive away from this town, and close up this chapter of my life for good. As a guy who constantly finds new ways to soundtrack his life, there are a lot of albums that are going to be a part of that. The new Jimmy Eat World, for one, is connecting in all the right ways at the perfect time; Japandroids’ Celebration Rock, too, because there’s nothing like screaming along to “The House That Heaven Built” as the world begins to shift around you. But when I leave this town in my rearview on Sunday afternoon, my buddy Bruce is probably going to be my most significant companion. One of the reasons for that, obviously, is Born to Run, my favorite album of all time and a record that’s been there for a lot of major changes in my life over the past few years. Hell, that’s the album that was playing as I drove to my high school graduation four years ago. But the other is the album we’re talking about today, and you can rest assured there’s a reason Bruce came up this week: I wanted to write about this record at this moment in my life, and I’m gracious to get the opportunity.

One of my best friends on the forums, the other Chris (cshadows, raise your hand, I know you’re reading) wrote a pretty remarkable blurb about this particular Springsteen record a few years ago, when he and a bunch of us in the General Forum put together a list of albums that needed to be heard, and I’m going to quote that now because I think it perfectly captures what The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle, as an album,is all about:

“The Boss hit his first stroke of genius on this jazz-infused, street-poet block party of a record,” Chris wrote. “The joy and danger every teenager hopes awaits them each Saturday night have never been better captured than in Springsteen’s portraits of small-town Jersey, just before the darkness appeared on the edge of town. The characters love, fight, joke and live like they have only that one night, and the listener gets a front-row seat. The closing three-song suite is perfection, with especially “Incident on 57th Street” being as much cinematic (i.e. West Side Story) as musical.”

What Chris didn’t include in that lovely paragraph, though, is the bit that he mentioned to me in one of our first Springsteen conversations, the bit that has stuck with me through every listen I’ve given this record since. For a long time, I had some trouble getting into this one, in the same way that I struggle to hold Greetings in the high esteem that I hold the rest of Bruce’s heyday work. As I noted in yesterday’s write-up, the production here is already a massive step up from where it was just eight months prior (Greetings dropped in January of 1973, while Wild released in September), and the E Street sound has exhibited remarkable evolution as well. But for a guy like me, a guy who built his Springsteen love on the anthemic pillars of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge, Wild felt almost alien on first listen. The song structures are longer, more meandering, and far more freewheeling than anything Springsteen did on his debut or anything he’s done since. Just listen to late-record shape-shifters like “New York City Serenade” or “Incident on 57th Street,” and you’ll see that Bruce was writing songs here in a way that, beyond a few exceptions, he never would again. But then I met Chris (cshadows, not Collum; I can already see how this is going to be confusing), and he told me that The Wild, The Innocent was one of his five favorite albums of all time and that it was tied with Born to Run at the top of Springsteen’s oeuvre, and I was probably shaking my head at my computer screen until he delivered the key words that changed my perception of the album forever.

“Dude, it’s the perfect record to inaugurate summer.”

Well hot damn, he was right. And just like that, the album clicked. I saw these songs in a new light. I heard the groovy synth beeps at the top of “The E Street Shuffle” and saw a thousand booze-fueled barbeques; I heard the line “Hey little heroes, summer’s hot but I guess it ain’t very sweet around here anymore” on “Incident” and it sounded like gospel; and when I finally listened to “Sandy” on a sweltering, muggy summer night...well, I don’t think I have to explain that one. Of course, when Chris actually told me this, it already was summer, and I had already inaugurated the season (memorably, I might add, with Jack’s Mannequin’s Everything in Transit), but blaring songs like “Rosalita” as I drove around my hometown was still nothing short of transcendent. In fact, I probably would have gotten noise complaints for how loud I played this record in my car on late night drives back to my house, but of course, I was driving much too fast for anyone to pin me down. Born to Run may have nailed the redemptive escapism of youth, but this is a record for the moment before that escapism feels necessary; it’s for that time in your life when nothing sounds better than bumming around with your friends on the same old beachside streets you grew up on, or courting that girl from high school who you missed your chance with the first time around. And since I was in that exact moment during the summer in question, this album became my Bible.

Every year since then, the first day the sun breaks through and the temperatures go above 50 (which, since I live in Michigan, might never happen again), I roll down my car windows and take this thing for a ride. And in that moment, it feels like nothing has ever sounded better. Springsteen fans may consider Born to Run as the quantum leap forward, but I think the jump had already happened here. Just listen to Greetings and Wild back to back: where most of Greetings sounds like a demo tape, Wild is crisp, clean, and explosive; where the first record couldn’t quite capture the electricity of a Springsteen live show, the second one does arguably the best job of any entry in Springsteen’s catalog at doing just that. Born to Run sounds grander, but it was really a piece of studio audio art. We’ve all heard the tales of all the overdubs that went into “Born to Run,” or of how Clarence would work meticulously on the “Jungleland” solo for hours on end—sometimes straight through the night. But on songs like “"The E Street Shuffle” or “Kitty’s Back,” it sounds like the band could be improvising their parts right on the other side of the stereo. And if “Born to Run” is Springsteen’s most potent anthem, then “Rosalita” is his most spontaneous, a rock ‘n’ roll rave-up that builds to a loose and irresistible climax section. If you’re not shouting along by the end of that song, you might not have a pulse.

The other big thing about The Wild, The Innocent is that, where Greetings sounded like an artist who didn’t quite know who he wanted to be (or, as I mentioned yesterday, one who’s label wasn’t quite on the right page yet), this one is about as distinctive and directional as sophomore albums come. The fact that this set of songs even exists blows my mind, because today, if an act sold as poorly their first time out the gate as Springsteen did with Greetings (that album peaked at 60 on the Billboard 200), they would be lucky to even still be on the major label circuit, let alone making the most adventurous album of their career. But the last three songs of this record—which may constitute the single greatest side of any record ever pressed on vinyl—display just how much faith label president Clive Davis and manager Mike Appel had in Bruce. Not only do all three songs stretch on for more than seven minutes (“Rosalita,” the album’s only prayer at landing anything on the radio waves, was the shortest at 7:04), they also largely eschew the standard verse-chorus dynamic. Again, “Rosalita” is the closest, with its shout-along chorus and romantic sweep. “I'm coming to liberate you, to confiscate you, I want to be your man!” Springsteen bellows to the title character, telling her to forget about her disapproving parents and just escape with him: for the night, maybe even forever. And the thing is, it's impossible to imagine her saying no. One listen to the song’s blistering, climactic breakdown and it’s not hard to see why this was the de-facto Springsteen show closer for a long, long time.

“Incident on 57th Street” has, over time, wormed its way into my top five Bruce songs (seeing it live last spring certainly didn’t hurt). Chris mentioned yesterday that the characters on Greetings weren’t yet fully formed, but in this song, they spring from the texture like operatic heroes. On both “Incident” and grand finale “New York City Serenade,” Springsteen dabbles in the realms of extended track lengths and fully-formed story worlds that he first visited on “Spirit in the Night” and “Lost in the Flood.” “Serenade” isn’t even a cohesive narrative—Springsteen pieced it together from shards of earlier songs—but it still works as a collision of lovely vignettes. And when set against a backdrop of glorious strings and Clarence’s virtuosic sax (not to mention the song’s near-baroque intro, courtesy of pianist David Sancious), it becomes staggering: equal parts “Jungleland” and “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Bruce would perfect the epic story song with Born to Run—“Jungleland,” in essence, was the realization of everything the E Street Band tried to achieve across their first three records—but he hasn’t really gone back to that style of songwriting since. We’ve gotten long songs (“Drive All Night”) and plenty of story songs (pretty much everything on the three acoustic records), but the one time Bruce seemed to really attempt a return to this form—on Working on a Dream’s “Outlaw Pete”—it came across almost like self-parody, like his heart wasn’t in it. I don’t need him to get back to that either, since I’d rank Wrecking Ball in my top five Springsteen albums and since The Rising and Magic are both unqualified successes in my book, but you have to wonder what happened within the arc of The Wild, The Innocent, Born to Run, and Darkness on the Edge of Town that completely changed the way he wrote songs.

In our first installment of this feature, we discussed Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs, and I concluded that part of the reason for the album’s classic status was its ability to construct a complete world around its listeners. The Wild, The Innocent does the same, building a luminous environment of innocence, love, and riotous nights out on the town, a world where summer lasts forever and outfits like the E Street Band play at boardwalk bars for a two buck cover charge. When I get in my car on Sunday and hit the highway, college will be just a memory. I’ll be driving away from the last bastion of my youth and into the great unknown. But albums like this one, they endure. They’re comfortable reminders of where we came from and of what life can look like on those summer evenings when you’re young and in love and you’ve got the whole night ahead of you and it feels like anything could happen. And albums like that, they keep you young, no matter where you go in life.

Chris Collum: Much like Craig, despite being a lifelong Springsteen fan, I too am a latecomer to this record. In fact, I don’t believe I heard the thing all the way through until four or five years ago, although I’ve been familiar with most of the songs on it for ages. And when I first heard The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle I must admit that it didn’t really blow me away. Sure songs like “Sandy,” “Rosalita” and “Incident” are all top-notch, but most of the songs on here were far too long for my tastes, and some of them didn’t really do much for me at all.

I expressed these misgivings about the album in a Springsteen thread on this site a few years ago, and mentioned that it’s probably my least favorite of his first eight records and well…”other” Chris went off, I backed down, and we went our separate ways. One of my chief complaints about this album was the closer, “New York City Serenade,” which I said dragged on and on and on and was actually kind of boring.

I regret that now, and I stand before you today a changed man. “Serenade” is perfect; it’s a marvelous way to end this record. It’s a masterful study in gradual build-up, release and catharsis, and it needs all of the nine minutes and fifty-five seconds that it gets to do that. It also is the final farewell for jazz-trained pianist David Sancious, who would leave the E Street family after this record.

In fact, the last three songs on this album (the B side in other words) comprise twenty-five of the best minutes in popular music history. From “Incident” through “Rosalita” on to “Serenade,” this is, in my opinion, the beginning of Bruce Springsteen the master storyteller. And oh my how he tells these stories. The imagery is unparalleled: “Spanish Johnny drove in from the underworld last night / With bruised arms and broken rhythm / In a beat-up old Buick / But dressed just like dynamite,” or “Well my tires were slashed and I almost crashed but the Lord had mercy / My machine she’s a dud, she’s stuck out in the mud / Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.” One of my beefs with Greetings was that the songwriting was not quite on the same level as Bruce’s later work; on the last three songs of this record, that could not be farther from the truth.

The record sounds great as well, not only due to a higher production quality but also because--appropriately enough, given the album’s title—this is the first true E Street record. And they bring down the house, all the way through. Also, this features some incredible lead guitar work from Bruce—I’m not a big fan of “Kitty’s Back” (I’ll get to that soon), but the solo that starts that song is absolutely blistering. Same goes for his lead work on “Incident,” and finally, I’ve been playing guitar for fourteen years but I have no idea how somebody puts so much into and gets so much emotion out of the instrument like Bruce does in the acoustic bit that starts about a minute and a half into “Serenade.”

The E Street Band is remarkable for their musical skill certainly, but they also were remarkable in 1973 for another reason. Rock ‘n roll was becoming an increasingly segregated world in the early 70s, but the band that Bruce assembled on this record included two African-Americans (and actually would later include three for a brief period when Ernest “Boom” Carter replaced Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez). We don’t even think about a musician’s race today, but back in the 70s, race was a very real factor in the music industry, and I’m sure Springsteen pissed some very important white people off at Columbia with the band he assembled. God bless him.

You might notice that so far I have really only talked about the last three songs on this album. There’s a reason for that, and it’s why this album will forever remain somewhere in the middle of Bruce’s discography in terms of quality, at least in my mind: the A side is not that remarkable. The bustling title track kicks the record off well enough, but in my opinion, the version of “Sandy” that’s on this album feels neutered and lifeless compared with the way Bruce has performed it live in the forty years since. That being said, it is a fantastic song even if the performance isn’t my favorite.

However, next after “Sandy” are my least-favorite twelve minutes of music on any Bruce album up through Tunnel of Love. “Kitty’s Back” drags on and never catches my attention, and “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” calls to mind The Beatles’ “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” in the worst of ways. Sure it’s well worth it to sit through these songs just to get to the pure bliss that is the B side, but much like with my criticisms of Greetings, I expect more from Bruce.

With time I have grown to love the good parts of this record more and more, and while I initially viewed it simply as a primer for what was to come in 1975, I now think the B side stands out in its own right as some of the finest music Bruce has ever recorded. As Craig alluded to in his piece, it is simply not fair nor accurate to regard Born to Run as the quantum leap forward. With Greetings we got our first glimpse into the world of Bruce Springsteen, but with the latter half of The Wild Bruce truly came into his own, and made us fall headfirst into his world and never want to leave, even more so a few years later when a certain screen door slammed and a dress swayed to the tune of Roy Orbison singing for the lonely…

PS--Craig, you're wrong. "Outlaw Pete" rules.

My Back Pages, Vol. 7: Bruce Springsteen - Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

This week we have a double feature on deck for you, and yes we're talking about Springsteen--if you know anything about either of us you knew it was coming eventually. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Springsteen's first two albums, which both came out in 1973, today we will be discussing Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, his debut, and check back tomorrow for The Wild, the Innocent, the E-Street Shuffle. As always, there's a full Rdio stream of the record below, as well as a link to check it out on Spotify. Enjoy!

Chris Collum: It’s hard to imagine now, forty years, seventeen studio albums and thousands upon thousands of shows into his career, but once upon a time Bruce Springsteen was nothing more than another wayward musician in his mid-20s, a Jersey shore beach bum bouncing from band to band and club to club hoping to hit it big with the right group of musicians—or at least sell enough tickets to buy lunch. In 1972, he finally got his first break, a record deal with Columbia. After his manager Mike Appel had badgered Columbia so much the label literally could no longer say no, in May of that year Springsteen auditioned with John Hammond, the famed talent scout who “discovered” Bob Dylan. Hammond was impressed, Appel and Springsteen booked studio time for later that year, and Columbia began a PR campaign heralding Bruce as the second coming of Dylan.

However, despite some obvious similarities (verbosely poetic lyrical style, white boy fro, etc.), Springsteen was not the new Dylan. While he auditioned as a solo artist, performing on acoustic guitar or piano, when it came time to record his debut album, Springsteen showed up at 914 Sound Studios with a band of fellow Jersey shore drifter musicians in tow. After a lot of back-and-forth with Appel and Hammond about whether the songs that were being recorded sounded better as solo or full-band numbers, a compromise was reached in the end and so Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ has two solo songs (“Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “The Angel”) and seven full-band ones.

Springsteen was right. These songs sound better with a full band. Those two aforementioned songs are easily the two least-memorable songs on the album, and feel strangely out of place alongside the lush instrumentation of songs like “Blinded by the Light.”

Given the rushed nature of the recording (all of the songs were recorded in a week), the fact that not all of the musicians who sat in for the record had played with one another before, the behind-the-scenes dispute about how the record should be made, and the fact that Springsteen was absolutely still finding his feet as an artist, this is a fantastic album. However, if you ignore all of these extra-musical factors, it is undeniable that while this is a great, great record and would be the highlight of many lesser artists’ careers, it is not of the same caliber as Springsteen’s later work. The songs by-and-large do not pack the same carefully executed emotional punch that he is so good at exacting, and the characters that inhabit said songs do not spring to life from the pages of the lyric booklet the way that the Magic Rat, Spanish Johnny and the couples who inhabit the world of “Racing in the Street” and “The River” do.

Perhaps the reason why the characters in these songs are not as lifelike as the ones in his later ones is because this record is the beginning of the story—where the characters first start to take shape. You certainly can see flashes of what was to come in the likes of Hazy Davey in “Spirit in the Night” or Jimmy the Saint in “Lost in the Flood.” Springsteen introduces us to the street empire that he would immortalize with his next two records, and comes tantalizingly close to fully fleshing out the songs, but there’s something intangible missing from almost all of them. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but if you’ve heard Bruce’s later stuff you know that there’s something that’s missing.

Furthermore, while the band sounds very good, you will find nothing more than basic rock ‘n roll backing tracks. Clarence’s saxophone is used mainly for color and not allowed the spotlight it deserves. Likewise, David Sancious is not allowed to cut loose and show off his jazz chops in the way he is on the other Springsteen record on which he is featured (The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle). The production on this record is certainly pretty good by 1972 standards, but it certainly could be a whole lot better—it was recorded in very cheap studio in one week. By way of comparison, Shuffle was recorded less than a year later and sounds much, much fuller than this album does.

Okay enough that about does it for the things that are “wrong” with this record, and I put that word in quotations because like I said, one can only find issues with Greetings if it is judged side-by-side with Springsteen’s later work. There are plenty of things to love here.

First of all, this was the world’s introduction to Springsteen as a lyricist, and while I know some fans aren’t that huge on his incredibly wordy style on this album, I think it’s fantastic. “And the sages of the subway sit just like the living dead / As the tracks clack out the rhythm their eyes fixed straight ahead/ They ride the line of balance and hold on by just a thread / But it's too hot in these tunnels you can get hit up by the,” he sputters on “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” in a rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness yet still quite soulful style. Additionally, “Growin’ Up” has some of my favorite lyrics he’s ever written—“I swear I found the key to the universe / In the engine of an old parked car” is just the greatest line. Finally, the internal rhyming and giddy wordplay of “Blinded,” the opening song, never fails to bring a smile to my face—it’s an incredibly fun song (and one that was horribly neutered by Manfred Mann).

Springsteen’s voice and vocal delivery sound pretty great here too, especially for someone with no training at the beginning of their career. As I’ve mentioned, the rapid-fire style that he utilizes so often on this record works very well for these songs in my opinion. This style, which certainly calls to mind Dylan, also was a pretty obviously huge influence on Craig Finn of The Hold Steady (arguably the master of the “talk-singing” style) and I adore The Hold Steady so I’m grateful this record exists if only for that reason. Beyond that unique style though, there are also some great vocal melodies—the chorus of “For You,” for example, is incredibly catchy, and something about that “hey bus driver” bit that begins “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” giddily infectious.

Greetings is memorable simply by merit of the name that graces the cover certainly, but there’s plenty to love here even if Bruce had never made another record. The gritty street characters portrayed here and the Jersey shore fusion of R&B and rock ‘n roll that is the soundtrack to their lives grabbed the attention of the few people who initially heard this record. It’s not a perfect record and it’s not on par with his later work, but it is a very, very good album and the world’s first glimpse into the creative mind of Bruce Springsteen.

Craig Manning: Greetings is my step dad's favorite Bruce album. I’ve met a lot Bruce fans over the years, and I think he’s the only one of them who’s ever given that answer. It means one thing though, and that’s that, even though Born to Run was the first Springsteen album I fell in love with, Greetings might be the one I remember hearing first. I have vivid memories of him listening to this record when I was a kid, of the jazzy strains of “Spirit in the Night” floating out of my parents’ bedroom while he was getting ready for dates with my mom, or of the ringing piano chords of “Growin’ Up” blasting from our home stereo system while he was cooking dinner. So while, for me, Greetings would probably land in seventh place out of Bruce’s near-flawless seventies and eighties run (Nebraska would be last; I know, blasphemy), to say this album has a near and dear place in my heart is probably an understatement.

There are two primary criticisms levied against Greetings, and probably the loudest is that, as an album, it’s not quite cohesive. There are two possible reasons for this. The first is that Bruce didn’t know who he wanted to be as an artist yet; the second is that he actually did know, but his label wasn’t quite ready to let him be that artist yet. I tend to lean toward the latter option, especially after an enlightening read through the latest Springsteen biography this past winter. (The book, penned by Peter Ames Carlin, is simply called Bruce.) As Chris discussed above, this album is often regarded as Bruce’s “trying to be Dylan” album, but I don’t necessarily agree with that assessment. Sure, if you’re reading through the lyrical flurry of “Blinded by the Light” in the album’s liner notes, the comparison is an easy one. But actually play the song (preferably at full volume) and the parallel doesn’t fit so well. And it never really would fit well, either, even though Bruce’s label, as well as manager/producer Mike Appel, wanted so desperately for Bruce to be the next Dylan.

Part of the reason for the inequity is the loose, spontaneous blast of the E Street sound, which was already beginning to take form on the album’s best songs. Bruce liked the full band texture he was cultivating on songs like “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street” and “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City,” but the higher-ups—Appel and John Hammond, a producer and talent scout at Columbia Records who had actually signed Dylan—liked his more stripped-down singer/songwriter stuff. And so the three came up with a compromise: the record would be ten songs: half full-band, half acoustic solo material.

But as we all know, the record actually ended up only having nine songs, and the division didn’t quite work out the way it had been planned. I’ll be the first person to defend the two acoustic songs that actually survived the record’s last minute revisions—“Mary Queen of Arkansas” and “The Angel” are often derided as weak points, but I think that both, especially the former, are haunting, hypnotic, and gorgeous gems that hint at what Bruce would do on his later, stripped-down records—but it would be hard to argue with how the rest of the sessions worked out. When the record reached the desk of Columbia Records president Clive Davis, it had three additional solo songs—“Arabian Nights,” “Jazz Musician,” and “Visitation at Camp Horn”—but, as Davis noted, it also didn’t have a single.

So Springsteen went back to the drawing board, trying to scramble his band back together for a quick recording session. Bassist Garry Tallent and keyboardist David Sancious, both of whom had played on the five previously recorded full band songs, were unavailable, so Bruce went in a different direction to fill out the sound. And that direction changed everything. Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez stuck around on the drums, sessions man Harold Wheeler added some piano on “Blinded by the Light,” and Springsteen even strapped on an electric bass for good measure, but the major addition, of course, was Clarence. Any Springsteen fan worth his or her salt has heard the mythical story of how the Boss and the Big Man met, but for the uninitiated, it’s worth relaying the images here. The tale is one of hurricane gales and buckets of rain, of rattling Jersey boardwalks and trees bending at the force of the tempest. It’s a tale of a small, dimly-lit club, where Bruce and a few of his band members were weathering the storm and making some noise in the name of rock ‘n’ roll. And it’s a tale where, suddenly, the door tears open, lifts off its hinges, and goes barreling down the street, leaving a massive silhouette framed in that doorway instead, a man who seemed to stroll out of Springsteen’s dreams and into that noisy room. And it’s a tale of the big, booming voice that cut through the din and changed the E Street legacy forever.

“I want to play with you,” Clarence said.

He got his first chance, at least in the studio, on the two new songs the band cut at Davis’s suggestion. And while my loyalties will probably always fall with “Growin’ Up” and its poignant, powerful lyrical imagery as the album’s definitive track, it’s impossible to imagine Greetings without highlights like “Blinded by the Light” or “Spirit in the Night.” The former is the album’s liveliest cut, a rough-hewn folk-rock tour-de-force that did end up being the single Davis wanted, just not for Springsteen. British prog-rock band Manfred Mann would hit number one on the charts with the song five years later (even though it sounded like they were singing “douche” instead of “deuce” during the chorus), a feat that, to this day, remains Springsteen’s only number one single on the Billboard Hot 100. The latter, meanwhile, is one of Springsteen’s jazziest numbers, with a Van Morrison-esque groove that sounds as good today as I’m sure it did 40 years ago.

In fact, “Spirit” and “Blinded” are probably the two songs on here that don’t really sound at all dated, and that brings me to the second primary criticism of this record. Chris mentioned that the sound here is kind of thin, and there’s really no better way to describe it. I truly love this album, and I think Springsteen was already in top form as a songwriter, but damn, I wonder what would have happened if these songs had gotten the production value Born to Run had—or, for that matter, the production that The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle displayed only half a year later. Listen to a song like “Lost in the Flood”: here, it sounds like a demo. It’s lyrically resplendent, and Bruce’s narrative gifts have rarely been better, but the song doesn’t have the level of punch or polish that it should. In comparison, listen to the song in a modern live setting. When the E Street Band played through the whole record in 2009 to celebrate the end of the Working on a Dream tour—and the final show Clarence would ever play with the group—“Lost in the Flood” sounded remarkable, building to the kind of visceral, incendiary guitar solo it deserves. The arc on record is fine, but with better production, the song could have been one of Bruce’s best.

Still though, for a debut album, Greetings serves as a solid mission statement for the rest of Bruce’s career. He’d reach much greater heights only a few months later (more on that tomorrow), and it would be just a couple years before he entered the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll legends (and, in my opinion, made the greatest album of all time), but at the beginning of 1973, Greetings displayed an artist who knew where he wanted to go and had all the tools to get there. His band might not have officially had their name yet, but at its best moments, Greetings From Asbury Park is E Street splendor (almost) all the way through.

Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run (40-Year Retrospective)

Today, Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run has officially been around for 40 years. It's only had a huge influence on my life, though, for about seven. For a considerable amount of my personal musical growth, I was aware of "the Boss" and his work, but it didn't really resonate with me on a personal level. Born to Run, along with Born in the USA, Greetings from Asbury Park, and The Rising, were among the first albums I ever put on my first iPod back in 2004, as I looted my parents' CD collection looking for more tunes to stock my brand new 20 gigabyte device. But while I loved hearing the title track pop up on shuffle during runs, and while later songs like "My City in Ruins" always struck a chord with me, it took another four years for Born to Run to really become that album in my life.

The thing is, before I really dove into Born to Run and the rest of Springsteen's catalog, I can't recall ever having a favorite album. Butch Walker's Letters would probably have been the obvious candidate, but I genuinely don't remember ever even thinking about all-time favorites—let alone trying to rank them in any official capacity. I would make year-end lists of the albums I loved, sure, but I think my perspective on music was still so narrow at the time that any "favorites" list I made would have been almost completely comprised of 2000s albums, with a few old '90s favorites thrown in for good measure.

Born to Run changed everything. To paraphrase a quote Springsteen once used to describe Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," the day it clicked was like somebody kicking open the door to my mind. There had been important musical moments for me before then—the moments with The Wallflowers and Counting Crows and Jimmy Eat World and Green Day and Butch Walker that had really made me love music in the first place. But this, that first listen where I really got "Thunder Road," that moment informed just about everything I've done since—and not just in relation to music, either.

It was a weird genesis moment, too. It was the morning of December 21st, 2008, and I was lying on the pullout couch of a hotel room in Naperville, Illinois. I was a senior in high school, and two days before had marked the final day of school before Christmas break. My family had traveled from Michigan to Illinois for my uncle's 50th birthday party, and the weather had subsequently turned fierce. Outside, it was something ridiculous like -30 with wind chill, plus some pleasant whiteout conditions. (I'd learn this the hard way later, when I walked outside with damp hair and was quickly rewarded with a frozen block on my head that inflated into an afro after it thawed out.) The previous night had been the party, and in a few hours, my family would brave the elements and head back home for most insanely punishing road trip I have ever experienced. For now, though, I didn't have to get out of bed or go anywhere, so I pulled out my iPod, cycled to "Thunder Road," and pushed play.

There was a reason for this sudden urge to revisit an album that had been sitting on my mp3 player for four years. The previous night had brought one, but not two mentions of Springsteen. First, my brother, after over-imbibing just a bit, made the loud proclamation that "Thunder Road" was "One of the best songs EVER." Second—and much later on in the night—one of my cousins regaled the family with stories of his half dozen experiences seeing Springsteen live, describing it as a religious experience, and talking fondly about the crazy things he'd done (or, more often, the crazy amounts of money he'd spent) just to be in the audience at different E Street shows. It all sounded so mythic and romantic to me, and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be a part of it.

After those five minutes in that Naperville hotel room, I was.

It's not uncommon to see albums and songs described as "growers," records that open up and increase the hold they have on you as you continue to spend more time with them. I myself have probably used the term "grower" in a few of the reviews I've written for this site over the years. But when it comes to my all-time favorite albums, there's never been anything gradual about the way I feel about them. Butch Walker's Letters, Jimmy Eat World's Futures, Jack's Mannequin's Everything in Transit, Green Day's American Idiot, Noah Gundersen's Ledges: these are all albums that were favorites from the first time I heard them. There's an electricity that I feel throughout my whole body on those kinds of first listens that's hard to describe, but that also lets me know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I've just found something that will be a part of my life forever.

Born to Run was unique, in that I'd already heard it many, many times before that date in late 2008. But listening to "Thunder Road" that morning, I felt the electricity, perhaps greater than I'd ever felt it before. Over the course of those five minutes, "Thunder Road" jumped from "song I respected" to "favorite song, period," and it hasn't left that spot since.

In the next few months, Born to Run would become my go-to answer to the "favorite album of all time" question. Based on the Springsteen fans I've encountered since, that quick infatuation wasn't unusual: the songs on Born to Run have meant many things to many people of the years, and they continue to evolve to fit new situations. Just one example is the way that "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" became the eulogy and celebration of life for Clarence "Big Man" Clemons after the legendary sax man passed away in 2011. For me, Born to Run became the soundtrack to my final five months in high school. I performed "Thunder Road" at my choir's year-ending pop concert; I played "Born to Run" at maximum volume as I drove to graduation; I can't tell you how many times I sat up late into the night listening to "Jungleland," forgetting the idea of a "bedtime" as I felt the first hints of summer on the evening breeze.

A lot of people my age have difficulty connecting with older music, just because they don't relate to the themes or the subject matter in the lyrics. But on Born to Run, Springsteen seemed to tap into something so fitting for the end of my time in high school, with the group of friends I'd been with for years. Songs like "Thunder Road" and the title track communicated the excitement of it all: the yearning for escape, the promise of unbroken dreams, the unbridled ecstasy of youth. But then there was the anguish and regret coursing through "Backstreets," the guy who talks big but gets cut down to size in "Meeting Across the River," the cast-off heroes left broken and defeated at the end of "Jungleland." The "Jungleland" sax solo by itself even seemed to convey the entire experience of life, capturing euphoria and disappointment and heartbreak and resilience, all in the space of two and a half minutes. Born to Run was just the album I needed at that moment in time, the only album that seemed to speak to the complex mix of emotions I was feeling as the clock ran out on my high school years.

Even after I left home and went to school, the lessons hidden in these eight songs weren't done with me. Nine years after he finished working himself and his band to exhaustion in order to make this record, Bruce would write a breezy pop-rock song that proclaimed, "We learned more from a three minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school." Little did I know, whilst I was off spending my parents' money on a college education—as a classical voice major of all things, because that was going to be lucrative—that I really would learn more from the dusty old copy of Born to Run I'd pilfered from my step dad than I did in the first two and a half years of college combined. The album, it turned out, had this hidden map of life tucked away in its songs, and it was meant to prepare me for all of the experiences that were coming down the pipeline. "Born to Run" taught me that love and a fast car could conquer anything—a lesson that got me through three years of a long distance relationship without ever losing sight of the endgame. "Backstreets" prepared me for the sad but inescapable fact that I was going to lose friends on the journey from boyhood to adulthood. And "Thunder Road" taught me that, some days, the best course of action for dealing with all of the bullshit in the world really is to get in a car, break the speed limit, roll down the window, and let the wind blow back your hair.

When I said Born to Run changed everything for me, I meant it. Musically, discovering my love for this record was like discovering a whole new world. It unlocked the rest of Springsteen's catalog, which in turn shed new light on a ton of my favorite artists who had borrowed and learned from him extensively—from Butch Walker to Counting Crows to Jack's Mannequin. It sent me digging into older music and gave me appreciation for records and artists I would likely never have given much of a chance otherwise. It spun me down a path toward Americana, folk, and country music—genres that, while seemingly far from this album's big "Wall of Sound" rock 'n' roll—often embraced similar themes and explorations of character. And it made me want to always keep pushing to have music be a part of my life—even after a shitty experience as a music major in college would have made it so, so easy to just give up on that part of my life entirely.

Born to Run also just has this tendency to be a part of big moments in my life. My final high school concert; my high school graduation; all the road trips I took in college with this album in the CD player—many of them as part of that aforementioned long-distance relationship; seeing Springsteen and the E Street Band play the album in full in 2009, feeling tears sting my eyes at the first harmonica burst of "Thunder Road," or getting chills down my spine as I watched Clarence Clemons play that "Jungleland" solo in concert for literally the fourth-to-last time ever; getting up and karaoke-ing the shit out of "Born to Run" somewhere around the 10-beer mark during my bachelor party night; using "Thunder Road" as the mother-son dance at my wedding, and seeing it evolve into this huge celebratory sing-along with all of my family and friends on the dance floor; my brother closing out his Best Man speech, fittingly with the words "On the backstreets, we'll take it together"; having my wife know me so well that her gift to me on our first wedding anniversary was a clock carved out of a vinyl Born to Run record. Heck, if it hadn't been for this album, I never would have gotten into The Gaslight Anthem, which means that I never would have blogged the review of Handwritten that got me a job writing for this very website.

I know that there are people who have loved this album for far longer than I have: people who bought this record in the days, weeks, or months after it was released, people who have been learning its lessons and reaping its rewards for 40 years. But when I listen to Born to Run, it doesn't feel like a universally known work from one of the biggest stars in the history of music, and it doesn't feel like I missed out on it's first three and a half decades of existence. Instead, it feels personal, like the Boss wrote this album with me in mind. No one was ever better at tapping into the psyches and situations of his listeners than Springsteen was, and on this album, he perfected the art. From the slamming screen door of "Thunder Road," to the anguished wails of "Jungleland," Springsteen not only realized the depths of his characters—of his narrators, of Mary and Wendy and Cherry, of Eddie and Terry, of the Big Man, of Barefoot Girl and the Magic Rat, and of all those gang members out beneath that giant Exxon sign, flashing guitars like switchblades—but he also realized the depth of the American Dream, and of the different things it can mean for so many different people. The result may or may not be the greatest album in the history of rock and roll, but it's certainly the most important album in my history.

Bruce Springsteen - High Hopes

Between 2002 and 2012, Bruce Springsteen released five full-length studio albums, each completely different from the one that had come before it. In 2002, he resurrected the E Street Band for The Rising, a stirring eulogy for those who had lost their lives in the 9/11 tragedies. In 2004, he stripped his arrangements back to the lush, acoustic folk of Devils & Dust, an album that addressed everything from the futility of the Iraq war to the plight of the modern immigrant. In 2005, he threw a major curveball, bringing together an old-time folk band and re-arranging a slew of public domain songbook classics for the celebratory Seeger Sessions. In 2007, he reassembled the E Street Band once more for Magic, a potent and musically nostalgic burst of anger, dissatisfaction, and conflict at the political state of the country. With 2009’s Working on a Dream, he was uncharacteristically content, employing Phil Spector’s legendary “Wall of Sound” production technique on a set of bright and happy rock songs. And in 2012, the anger and dissolution had returned in the form of protest rock on Wrecking Ball, an astounding collection of songs that simultaneously struggled to find hope in America’s second Great Depression and fought to give a reason for Bruce to carry on after the loss of Clarence Clemons, E Street’s greatest contributor.

Those five disparate records would alone be enough to make the 2002-2012 run a strong contender for the most productive and prolific decade of Springsteen’s career. And Bruce has always been prolific. He’s one of those guys who never stops writing songs and never stops looking for themes to explore in his music. But since the new millennium started, the Boss has seemed hell-bent on giving his fans as much material as possible. Between 2002 and 2012, interspersed with his five studio records, Bruce released three live albums (Hammersmith Odeon London '75, Live in Dublin, and London Calling), numerous Greatest Hits packages, and full-scale reissues of both Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. The latter even included a sprawling two-disc collection called The Promise, which meticulously culled all of the B-sides, outtakes, and alternate versions that Springsteen and the E Street Band had written, recorded, and cut during the sessions for the legendary 1978 album. Add numerous marathon tours, faithful full-album concerts, and the single longest show Springsteen has ever played (a four-and-a-half hour, 38-song concert he presented to Helsinki on July 31, 2012), and it’s clear that the Boss is not slowing down or becoming less hungry with age.

So why was the 2002-2012 period such a fruitful time for Bruce Springsteen and why does this 64-year-old rocker seem to be immune to the effects of aging? For one thing, the Boss has learned to loosen up with age. Springsteen used to be almost the ultimate perfectionist, so much that the number of overdubs, takes, tweaks, and flourishes that went into Born to Run are industry legend. Since he reconvened the E Street Band, Bruce has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts, and that’s because he figured out a way to sit back and enjoy the ride. That’s why his concerts continue to be communal experiences the like of which no one else in the music industry can muster. That’s why his recent albums have lost some of the lean concision of his older work. Where Bruce used to cling to notebooks full of songs for years because they weren’t good enough for his albums, he’s now decided that fans should have a chance to hear that material, and while such decisions lead to albums full of songs that probably just could have been B-sides (see Working on a Dream), it’s still a trend that has made Springsteen more lovable, present, and relevant in the post-millennial music scene than any of his 1970s or 1980s contemporaries.

Which brings me at last to the album I’m actually writing about in this review: High Hopes, Bruce’s latest release, and technically, the 18th entry in his storied discography. No one expected this album, at least not now. Let me explain: Wrecking Ball was the record that Springsteen fans needed in 2012. Not only was it the kind of late-career masterpiece that could reinvigorate Bruce’s fanbase after the disappointing Dream, it also got the E Street Band on the road at a time when their fans desperately needed a chance to commune with them. Clarence had passed away the year before. Fans were looking for ways to mourn him, finding solace in his powerful saxophone solos, from the tearful bursts of “Jungleland” to the gleeful pomp of “Born to Run.” But it wasn’t enough. Wrecking Ball not only gave Clarence the recorded eulogy he deserved, but it also sparked the tour that brought tens of thousands of people together each night to bid him a proper farewell. When Bruce bellowed “the Big Man joined the band” line from “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” during the show’s climactic moments, rasing his microphone to the sky in tribute to his fallen brother, many fans were hit by such a powerful wave of emotion that all they could do was stand there and take everything in. It was the sort of catharsis that remains with you long after the music has ended and the house lights have gone down.

In fact, the Wrecking Ball tour proved to be such a celebratory and invigorating time that Bruce wanted to capture a bit of its spirit on record. Inspired by guitarist Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave), who stepped into the E Street Band for the Australian leg of the tour, Bruce began pulling old songs out of the vault and adding them to his setlist. The first of those – and the spark of creation for High Hopes as a whole – was the title track, a cover of an obscure Havalinas song that the E Street Band had originally recorded back in the nineties for the (first) Greatest Hits collection. The song didn’t make the cut, eventually turning up on the Blood Brothers EP instead, but Morello sensed potential in it, and when Bruce saw his stand-in guitarist “burn the house down with it” in Australia, he glimpsed that potential too. The song, a rollicking, horn-blast number marked by Morello’s helicopter guitar style, was worlds different from the Irish-folk-inspired Wrecking Ball, but audiences loved it, and Bruce began wondering what other gems he had left collecting dust in his vault.

So began the creative process for High Hopes, which consists exclusively of covers, outtakes, re-recordings of old live tracks and B-sides, and other assorted “odds and ends.” From that description, it would be easy for Bruce to have classified High Hopes as a B-sides record in the vein of The Promise. However, as Springsteen cut this material on the road, booking studio time with the E Street Band between Australian shows, he realized that the songs were too good and the performances too vibrant to be relegated to B-side status. He saw A-list material here, and he wanted to give that material its proper due in the spotlight.

As a result of that desire, High Hopes will be known now and forevermore as Springsteen’s 18th studio record. It will also probably go down as his weirdest full-length album – or at very least, tied for that title with The Seeger Sessions. It’s not that the material is particularly risky: on the contrary, most of these songs were written for previous records, and traces of Bruce’s older music are all over the place on this record, from the haunting world music influence of The Rising (“Down in the Hole”) to the slow-burn folk of The Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust (“The Wall”). Rather, it’s that High Hopes is neither really an outtakes collection (since most of the songs were recorded during the same sessions), nor a studio album in the sense of Springsteen’s previous work (since the songs all come from different musical places and address wildly different themes). It’s a whirlwind of a listen, but the dichotomy keeps things interesting.

Of course, many listeners and critics will use the album’s origin story as a reason to write it off. Already, dozens of reviews and essays have hit the web begging the question, “If these songs weren’t even good enough to make his albums, then why should we want to listen to them?” But the answer to that question is that it’s Springsteen: this is a guy who has always had way more great material than would fit on his studio records, a guy who relegated some of his best songs to B-side status (“The Promise,” “Take Em As They Come”) and gave away some of his most surefire hits (“Because The Night,” “Fire”) because he didn’t think they quite fit the thematic or sonic vision he had for certain albums. Put simply, an album of Bruce Springsteen B-sides deserves our ears quite as much as an album of a less accomplished artist’s A-sides.

High Hopes makes that point clear. There is no way a song as poetic and devastating as “The Wall” – written for a friend and mentor of Bruce’s who went missing in action during the Vietnam War – should remain unreleased, no way that something as potent and insightful as “American Skin (41 Shots)” should only exist as a live recording. The latter was a bona fide centerpiece on Springsteen’s last tour, a song originally written over a decade ago about the controversial, racially motivated shooting of Amadou Diallo, but one that gained a whole new life when Springsteen repurposed it in the wake of the Trayvon Martin tragedy. It’s the kind of societal injustice song that made Springsteen famous to begin with, addressing the “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality that many American police officers often adopt when driven by fear and discrimination. Here, marked by atmospheric production and a searing guitar solo from Tom Morello, the song finally takes its rightful place as a staple of Bruce’s recorded output.

Also given new life by this collection is “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” the defining track from Bruce’s 1996 acoustic album of the same name. “Joad” was always a notable song, finding compelling inspiration in John Steinbeck’s seminal novel, The Grapes of Wrath, and using it to – in the words of author Jeffery B Symynkywicz – “give voice to the invisible and unheard, the destitute and disenfranchised.” As a full record, The Ghost of Tom Joad was too long, repetitive, and humorless. Where Nebraska had used its stripped-down conceit to build tension, The Ghost of Tom Joad felt like one dull dirge after another, regardless of the fact that there were numerous great songs (or songs that had the potential to be great) interspersed throughout the tracklist. Here, freed from its long-winded thesis of an album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad” feels renewed, bursting with explosive vocal harmonies and incendiary guitar work from Morello. It begs the question of what kind of album Joad may have been if it had been conceived as an electric, full-band record.

Even beyond its core tracks, High Hopes never lapses in enjoyable spirit. “Harry’s Place” takes us back to the gangster-infested territory of “Atlantic City,” reminiscent of both Darkness on the Edge of Town and The Rising in feel, mood, and sonic structure. “Frankie Fell in Love” rollicks along like one of the country-infused bar-band throwaways from The River, filtered through the massive Spector-ish production techniques of Working on a Dream. “This is Your Sword” and “Hunter of Invisible Game” carry a bit of the Irish-folk-inspired sound of both The Seeger Sessions and Wrecking Ball. Even “Heaven’s Wall,” the album’s most superfluous cut – and the closest Bruce has come in ages to sounding like his early nineties self in quite awhile – makes big strides thanks to Morello’s underbelly guitar work.

As for the covers – takes on songs by forgotten punk bands like the Saints and Suicide – they remind us of just how much Bruce can do with a song that isn’t his own. The first, “Just Like Fire Would,” is a live sing-along staple in the making, while the latter, “Dream Baby Dream,” is entrancing and organ-drenched, utilizing minimalism and repetition to lay the album to rest in satisfying fashion. It’s not Bruce’s best way to close a record, and High Hopes certainly won’t go down as his finest work. However, for a stopgap release that no one expected, assembled from outtakes, B-sides, and covers that all but the most ardent Bruce followers would call inessential, High Hopes is still a remarkably cohesive and consistent record, and serves as a wonderful way to kick off 2014.

No Retreat, No Surrender: Learning Life's Big Lessons from Bruce Springsteen's Live Show

Bruce Springsteen's The River was the first album I ever owned on vinyl. As a record collector, I'm still something of a novice. I got started in the summer of 2014, after my brother got my wife and me a turntable for our wedding. By that time, though, I'd already had The River in my possession for over a year. In April 2013, when I was serving as Arts & Entertainment editor for my college newspaper, one of my writers surprised me with a used copy of The River as a gift. For him, I imagine the gift was too perfect to pass up: as with everyone in my life, my fellow editors and writers at Western Michigan University's Western Herald were well aware of my love for Bruce Springsteen. So when this particular writer went shopping for Record Store Day and found a Springsteen LP, he grabbed it for me as something of a "bon voyage" gift. (I graduated and moved on from the paper just a few weeks later.)

Looking back, that gift feels nearly prophetic to me—even if it was probably almost random for him. My friend had thought of me when he'd seen a Springsteen album in a used record shop. But the album he'd gotten me was arguably the perfect one for the occasion. Sure, Born to Run would have been more celebratory, and The Wild, The Innocent—which I wrote about, passionately, just days before I received my diploma—would have fit the almost-summertime mood better. But in Springsteen's catalog, The River is really the album where the characters come into adulthood. As I wrote in April 2013, Born to Run "nailed the redemptive escapism of youth" and The Wild, The Innocent was "a record for the moment before that escapism feels necessary." Darkness on the Edge of Town, meanwhile, found Springsteen's characters mired in the realization that the American Dream isn't always what it's cracked up to be, but with plenty youthful romance, exuberance, resilience, and angst left to burn. The River is the first record where matters of adulthood are the core point of focus.

Bruce put it a bit different when he stopped at Louisville's KFC Yum! Center on Sunday night, for the 13th stop of his second tour in support of the 1980 LP. "I wanted to make a big record, a record that felt like life," he said. "I wanted the record to contain fun, dancing, laughter, jokes, good comradeship, love, faith, sex, lonely nights, and of course, teardrops." He also said that the record was about choosing your partner, choosing your work, and making life worthwhile. In other words, while Bruce may have sang about "Growin' Up" four LPs previous to this one, The River is where he really allowed his characters to grow up. How fitting, then, that my first graduation gift and my first piece of vinyl was a record about moving into the real world and reckoning with all of the joys and heartbreaks that entails.

When I first saw Springsteen live, in 2009, I was still just embarking upon my college career. That was the year that Born to Run really came to mean the world to me. It was my "end of high school" album, a record that connected perfectly with all of the hopes, dreams, and optimism I had in my heart at the time. Seeing the E Street Band play that whole record front to back that November, just a week before my 19th birthday, was life affirming. It made me dream that much bigger about my hopes for some sort of career in music. It made me love music that much deeper, from the moment I shouted "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night" with thousands upon thousands of other fans. It made me cherish how my brother and I had found incredible bonding experiences like this one by going to concerts and sharing our love for the bands and artists whose music meant the most to us.

In a way, each time I've seen Springsteen has aligned perfectly with a different moment in my life. That first concert was the perfect Springsteen live show experience for a teenager who was just falling in love with the world and all of its promise. When I saw him again in the spring of 2012, there was still a lot of hope there, but things had changed. The E Street Band had lost Clarence Clemons, a presence too big to ever replace, and while the show that spring was still life affirming, it reached that note of uplift differently. Instead of celebrating a classic album, the band was celebrating their fallen brother. The messages were clear: cherish the moments you have with your loved ones; make the most of your time here; don't waste your life with people or things that don't make your heart feel full.

At the time, those were all messages that I needed to hear. The spring of 2012 was a crossroads in my life. The first time I saw Springsteen, I was the picture of optimistic youth: one week left as an 18-year-old, in the midst of a great first semester at college, and thinking my music major was going to someday carry me to some big stages of my own. Fast forward two and a half years and I was 21, disenchanted with college, and pretty certain that any dreams I'd had about performing music for a living were just that: dreams. The music school had let me down and screwed me over, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be at that university at all anymore—let alone majoring in something as utterly useless as classical voice. When the Springsteen date came up that April and my brother asked if I could make the show, the text I sent him in response said everything: "Well, I think I have a choir concert that weekend, but they can go fuck themselves: I'm not missing Springsteen."

The show was on a Thursday night, and it reminded me in the first 30 minutes just how powerful music could be. I did make it to the aforementioned choir concert on Sunday—albeit, with my voice blown out from screaming along to Springsteen songs for three hours a few nights before. But being with those people and performing music in such a dry, mathematical, passionless environment forced me to take the message of Bruce's show to heart. For every minute of Thursday's concert, you could tell that everyone on stage was playing for something higher: for Clarence; for Danny Federici; for lost friends and loved ones not in the E Street Band, but a part of the mythology they'd been spinning for 40 years. For every minute of Sunday's choir concert, I felt nothing. I was wasting my time on something that didn't make my heart feel full, at least not anymore, and I wasn't about to disregard the advice of my idol. Making music should be a safe haven, and when it wasn't anymore, it was time for me to go.

How can one person teach you so many lessons about life, even if you never meet them personally? How can a collection of songs and a guy up on a stage have such a massive impact on your life? These questions I pondered as I stood on the floor of the KFC Yum! Center on Sunday night, waiting for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band to take the stage. It had been almost four years since I'd seen them last, and my world had changed so much since then. I'd shifted my career focus; I'd graduated from college; I'd moved away from my home state and moved back again; I'd said goodbye to friends as we scattered across the country; I'd gotten a brief, brief taste of how bad life can feel when you're working a job that seems hopeless; I'd found my way into a work path I could feel proud of; I'd gotten married; I'd reckoned with the death of a loved one; I'd started writing songs of my own; I'd bought a house. In short, I'd grown up. I'd reached that mysterious frontier of adulthood that you can only really recognize when you take a moment to compare your life to how things used to be.

But for all of the things that change, others stay the same. One thing that will never change is how much the music of Bruce Springsteen means to me, and for every minute of the three and a half hours he played in Louisville on Sunday night, I was thankful for that fact. His 2009 show had inspired me to push harder for my dreams; his 2012 show had helped me realize when it was time to let them go. Sunday's show made me see that, while I let go of some dreams, I got to keep the most important ones. I got to make a life with someone I love. I got to keep my family close. I figured out a way to make a living and be comfortable and happy.

Listening to the E Street Band put the 20 songs from The River through their paces gave me a better sense of how lucky I am to have the life I have. That record is about adulthood, but it's also about people: about the people who got their dreams and the people that didn't, and perhaps most of all, about the people who adjusted their dreams as time went along. Born to Run was the fantasy; Darkness on the Edge of Town was the gritty nightmare; The River is reality. It's celebratory one minute and brutally crushing the next, as we all know life can be. But it's also defiant and resilient, a record about how, no matter how bad things get, there's (almost) always a light at the end of the tunnel. For every guy who ends up out on that lonesome highway in a stolen car, wishing to get caught, there's 10, 20, 100 others out there driving all night to see the girls they love. For every wreck on the highway of life, there's a thousand teenagers out in the street making romantic proclamations like "two hearts are better than one" and "little girl, I wanna marry you" outside the windows of their crushes.

Over time, my feelings on The River have shifted possibly more than with any other Springsteen record. At first, when I was delving into the catalog, I left The River alone, finding it too daunting to tackle after Born to Run, Darkness, and Born in the U.S.A.—not to mention Bruce's shinier latter day work. Once I'd finally taken time to listen and unpack the songs, I fell in love with The River but still wondered if it might have made a better single-disc affair. I figured that if Bruce had trimmed the record to it's best songs—which, at the time, I mostly deemed to be the slower, sadder, more serious cuts—it could have been his best record. Song-for-song, I might have been right: a 10 song record that includes "Independence Day," "The River," "Point Blank," "Stolen Car," "The Price You Pay," "Drive All Night," "Wreck on the Highway" and a few others could certainly stand up there with Born to Run in terms of wall-to-wall perfect material.

But that record would miss the point of what makes The River great. The songs would all be amazing, but the record itself would be too harrowing; too sad; too isolating. The sad songs are the soul of The River, but the mirthful rock songs are the heart. They're what makes this record "as big as life," and that fact was on full display on Sunday night. Sure, my favorite moments of the set were probably still the slow songs. I got choked up during "The River"; I was entranced by "Point Blank"; I felt my soul lifting heavenward during "The Price You Pay" and "Drive All Night." But hearing those songs alongside the stirring mission statement of "The Ties That Bind," the riotous block party of "Sherry Darling," or the loud crowd sing along on blistering bar band rockers like "Two Hearts" and "Crush on You" sold The River for me in a new way. Some nights, life is defined by heartbreak or family strife or fears of fading away. Other nights, it's about nothing more than drinking at a bar with your friends. Few albums encompass both sides of the coin quite like Springsteen's fifth.

I'm already at 2,000 words on this long, rambling piece and I haven't even encapsulated all of the amazing things about this concert, so let's go to bullet points for the big finish. Here are just a few memories from Sunday's show that I will never forget.

• Showing up way too early, missing out on the front pit lottery by less than 50 people, but still ending up at the very front of the general admission section, less than 50 feet from the stage.
• Being witnesses for the wedding of two people who got married on the concert floor, just so they could say that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played their reception.
• Knowing within the first two minutes of "Meet Me in the City" that the long road trip from Michigan had been worth it to be in attendance.
• Shaking Bruce Springsteen's hand (!) when he walked by our spot during "Hungry Heart."
• Seeing all of the E Street players at the top of their games, with specific notices for: Jake Clemons nailing his uncle's sax solos with newfound charisma; Nils Lofgren slaying the guitar solo during "Because the Night"; the Mighty Max Weinberg doing things at the drum kit that my non-percussionist mind can't even comprehend; Roy Bittan playing a piano solo ahead of "Point Blank" that was instilled with both a regal grace and a palpable sense of dread.
• Getting to scream the line "We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school" with my arm around my brother—probably the most apt lyric in the English language to describe our relationship.
• Shredding anything that was left of my vocal cords during a visceral, off-the-cuff rendition of "Born in the USA."
• Once again hearing all-time favorites like "Thunder Road," "Badlands," "Born to Run," and "Rosalita," sneaking glances back at the area towering around me and seeing every single person singing in unison.
• Ending the night on the bittersweet "Bobby Jean," the 35th song of the set, to officially make the Louisville show the longest of the tour so far.

Look, there will never be a better live act than Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. No one can match his passion, his mirth, his spontaneity, or his sheer stamina. This guy is 66 years old and he's be taking his shows past the 200-minute mark consistently every single night of this tour. It took me two to three days to recover just from having been in the audience. My voice was still a little groggy yesterday. How can a human being do what the Boss does up on that stage and not collapse from sheer exhaustion? This question is surely one of the great mysteries of the universe, but here's a non-mystery: The River tour is the year's must-see concert event and if you can get tickets, you should.

Gonna Walk Around and Drink Some More: The Legacy of The Hold Steady and the Stirring Rock and Roll Momentum of "Teeth Dreams"

“Before she figures out what’s wrong, they put another record on,” Craig Finn sings in “Spinners,” a poignant mid-tempo rocker from the latest Hold Steady LP, Teeth Dreams. It also more or less functions as a one-line approximation of exactly how Teeth Dreams is going to be perceived by the Hold Steady fanbase and by the critical music community as a whole, but in order to understand why that is, we have to venture back to 2010’s Heaven is Whenever, the most poorly received album in the band’s storied catalog, and the only one that most cred-obsessed hipsters wouldn’t want in their record collections. Prior to Heaven, this band was on the hottest of streaks. The middle two albums in the band’s initial four-disc run, 2005’s Separation Sunday and 2006’s Boys & Girls in America, arrived to rapturous reviews and Pitchfork “Best New Music” notices, their boozy swirls of anthemic E Street keys, blazing guitar riffs, and Finn’s barfly narratives simultaneously positing the Hold Steady as the drunkest and most literate rock band on the scene. Naturally, that fact made them a musical outfit rife for cult appreciation.

And cult appreciation is precisely what they’ve earned. I’ve never been to a Hold Steady show, but I can imagine the whole thing – from the sweaty hole-in-the-wall venues they play to the comfortable, intoxicated atmosphere of the enterprise – and it’s fucking majestic. These guys, the way they make music and the way they present it to their audience, it’s like they’re your brothers or the guys you went to college with. They make this loud, roof-raising rock ‘n’ roll, but when a show ends or an album stops spinning, you still feel like you could just sit down and have a beer with them (or better yet, help them pack up the gear and then head out to an all-night rager). And maybe that’s why the Hold Steady’s records have always appealed to me (though I was, admittedly, a little late to the party).

My first connection with this band came in late 2009, when I was a freshman in college and crashing my buddy’s radio show to raid the station’s extensive CD library. One of the spoils of that evening was Boys & Girls in America, partly because the colorful cover caught my eye and partly because another friend of mine had always recommended the Hold Steady based on my love for the Counting Crows. A cursory listen told me that the comparison to the Crows wasn’t on point enough to make me fall instantly in love, but not off-base enough to have me grimacing and shaking my head either. The same root elements were there: the Springsteenian songwriting styles, the classic rock arrangements, the emphasis on roaring guitar solos. But the moods were where things differed. Where August & Everything After – Counting Crows’ most seminal LP – opened in desolation on “Round Here,” Boys & Girls in America exploded out of the gate with “Stuck Between Stations,” this raucous, barnstorming rock song that was meant to be played in late-night bars. Yes, these two bands may have shared similar roots, but their ideologies could hardly have been more different. The Hold Steady wrote music for the party, while the Crows wrote music for the guy who didn’t get invited to the party. And as someone who has in turns been on both sides of that interchange, the dichotomy between those two ideas has never stopped fascinating me.

Of course, the Hold Steady had some catching up to do with the Crows if they were ever going to be one of my favorite bands. By the time I first pushed play on Boys & Girls in America, I’d been a fan of Counting Crows for as long as I could remember – so long, in fact, that “Mr. Jones” may be the first rock song I remember hearing. But as I went forward in college, I became more and more drawn to the music of Craig Finn and company. Though I discovered it in the fall, Boys & Girls didn’t get much play, predictably, until Michigan’s interminable winter broke. But man, do I remember when that happened, and I do I remember when the Hold Steady finally clicked. There’s something magical about spring on a college campus. Walking to class suddenly becomes a pleasure instead of a chore; students decide to let out all of the restlessness they’ve been building for months by staying out later, getting drunker, and making more noise and bad decisions than they have all year; and everyone throws their dorm/apartment/car windows open and blares the loudest music they can find to mark the occasion. For me, in my freshman year of college – and in every year after it – the loudest music I could find was always Boys & Girls in America.

That became the legacy of that record for me, and of the band as a whole. Even though the Hold Steady were never getting as much year-round play as a lot of my other favorite bands, when spring rolled around, there was nothing I wanted to hear more. The sound of this band became synonymous with the infectious feel of springtime on a college campus. Its absence was another negative factor surrounding my dreadful sophomore year, when it stayed snowy and fucking cold until the day I drove home at the end of April – obviously offering no space for a record like Boys & Girls to shine. It became the sound of my reward the next year, though, when temperatures soared into the 70s in March, convincing me to skip studying for a test one Thursday night to drink beer with my roommates on the porch. (Spoiler alert: this did not turn out well for me.) And the band also served as soundtrack for my surprisingly bittersweet senior year, when songs like “The Sweet Part of the City” and “Southtown Girls” rang through my car on warm, dusky drives home from campus during the last weeks of college, or when “Stuck Between Stations” became my “Let’s hit the Beer Exchange* and drink until 2 a.m.” anthem.

To put it simply, this band and their records – probably more than any other musical entity – encompassed the experience of my college years. That might explain why I have more attachment to Heaven is Whenever than just about anyone else, since that album pretty much became symbolic of the limitless possibilities I was feeling when I went home for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. To me, that record and the way it shed the meticulous characterizations and lyrical depth of the Hold Steady’s earlier music, felt like the band’s take on Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. Musically, it was more streamlined and conventional than anything the band had ever written, a fact helped along by the way Finn spoke in briefer and more generalized statements. The band’s decision to move away from detail was meant to facilitate greater relatability and to focus more on melody, and on pile-driving rockers like “The Weekenders” and “Hurricane J,” they certainly succeeded. To this day, Heaven is probably my second or third favorite Hold Steady record.

By the time Heaven is Whenever was out, though, it seemed like people were ready to stop showering the Hold Steady in critical accolades. The band had had a run of four great albums that just about everyone appreciated, and now, with album number five, it was time to start ascribing them the “past their prime” narrative. They were getting older; they were becoming fathers; they were toning down the partying and writing songs in a more conventional manner. For many people, those things meant that the Hold Steady were also done making transcendent music, which frankly, wasn’t the case at all. But once critics have locked into a narrative, it’s incredibly difficult to shake them from it. With Heaven, many wrote this band off, whether because Craig was losing touch with characters like Holly and Charlemagne or because keyboardist Franz Nicolay, a key player for most of the band's career, had decided to depart. And four years later, those same people are still writing the Hold Steady off, even though Teeth Dreams is every bit the stellar record that these guys have built a career out of making.

Part of the problem, of course, is the time gap, which brings me (at last) back to the line I used to start this essay. “Before she figures out what’s wrong, they put another record on.” That line from “Spinners” could have been the band’s mantra if it had truly wanted to reverse the less-than-flattering critical narrative given to Heaven is Whenever. The band could have immediately piled back into the studio, hired a keyboardist to replace Franz (which frankly, they should do anyway, preferably with Rami Jaffee of Wallflowers fame), and banged out a quick, rough, raw, and spontaneous record to restore the faith that the critical community once had in them. Instead, the band broke for four years, sending different members off on solo project exports, and giving fans and critics plenty of time to pick apart everything they thought was wrong with Heaven is Whenever.

The release gap between Heaven and Teeth Dreams, which stretched from May 3, 2010 to March 25, 2014, was by far the longest wait between Hold Steady records, and for a band that had started its career with three consecutive shots in 2004, 2005, or 2006, the extended delay made all the difference. Suddenly, Teeth Dreams was expected not only to shoulder the burden of following up the band’s least beloved album, but it also had to bear the weight of four years of expectations and doubts. I myself wondered if the album could possibly be able to handle the near-mythical legacy the band’s music now has in my life. But then I pressed play on Teeth Dreams for the first time, and instead of shaking my head and writing missives about how things just ain't like they used to be, my biggest complaint was that this record didn't drop a year ago to soundtrack one last college campus springtime for me.

Indeed, Teeth Dreams fits squarely in the band’s wheelhouse, generating the same sundrenched feel as their past records while simultaneously cultivating a sound and direction that is new for the band. The first half of the record is positively bulletproof, raging from the echoing, effect-laden first single (“I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You”) to the cryptic teeth dream musings of album highlight “The Only Thing.” Finn’s lyrics, while they still haven’t returned to the specificity of the first four records, are as good as ever,  dreaming up philosophical poetry about “the American sadness” (the rousing “On with the Business”) or drawing up relatable characters whose stories are as worth hearing as ever (the divorcee in “Spinners,” who heads to the big city hoping to find a new life, the weatherworn road warriors of the dusky “Ambassador,” or the idiosyncratic love interest in “The Only Thing,” who lives in her storage space out by the airport and only talks about TV). Collectively, the first five tracks on Teeth Dreams might actually make up the strongest song-by-song run on any Hold Steady record, which is clearly no small feat.

The second half of the album isn’t nearly as strong. Of the three consecutive classic rock throwbacks that kick off side two (“Big Cig,” “Wait A While,” and “Runner’s High”), only the first makes something of its high-wattage Rolling Stones esque riffage. “Runner’s High” is innocuous, a decent enough album track that probably could have been a b-side, but works well enough here. “Wait A While,” on the other hand, is a jaunty but rather dull rocker that suffers from being a thematic retread of the far superior “You Can Make Him Like You” from Boys & Girls in America. Teeth Dreams still goes out on a high note, though, with the spooky acoustics of “Almost Everything” striking a different chord than the double-lead-guitar bombast of the rest of the record, and the canyon-sized “Oaks” stretching on for nine minutes of gorgeous, slow-burn majesty.

Is Teeth Dreams as good as Boys & Girls in America or Separation Sunday? No, not quite. The slick radio rock production (courtesy of Foo Fighters veteran Nick Raskulinecz) will turn a lot of people off, with ample vocal effects and excessive sonic compression that don’t do a lot to display the band’s live bar-band roots. The decision to add another lead guitarist will also earn mixed reception, not because Lucero veteran Steve Selvidge lacks chops (he's great), but because his presence turns Teeth Dreams into such a guitar rock record that it ends up being more repetitive than any of the Hold Steady’s previous work. It goes without saying at this point that Nicolay’s keyboard flourishes are missed. But the more adventurous elements the band explored on Heaven is Whenever to replace the keys, from the slide guitar of “The Sweet Part of the City” to the rollicking clarinet solo of “Barely Breathing,” are absent here as well, and as a result, Teeth Dreams feels considerably safer and more stagnant than its predecessor. The songs are still aces though, and with the weather finally heating up for the spring, I anticipate that this record will only continue to open up. After all, I haven’t even gotten to take it for a windows-down drive yet, and that's the essential rite of passage for any Hold Steady record.

*The Kalamazoo Beer Exchange is the best college bar in the country. 

Blood Brothers Against the Wind: A Tribute to Clarence Clemons

Yesterday, January 11, 2014, was Clarence Clemons' birthday. Were the legendary saxophone player still alive, he would have been 72 years old. Sadly though, Clemons passed away over two and a half years ago, leaving behind the band he had helped build - Bruce Springsteen's iconic E Street Band - in a loss that still feels as heartbreaking now as it did then. Appropriately, Bruce will release his 18th studio album, titled High Hopes, on Tuesday, a belated birthday gift for the gone-but-never-forgotten Big Man. 

I wrote the following piece during my last semester of college, in a class called "Writings in Creative Nonfiction." I had no idea what the hell creative nonfiction even was prior to that class, but I got an A and my professor - and my fellow students - were always complimentary of my work, so I'd say I did alright. The class gave me a chance to discuss things in writing in a way that I haven't really gotten a chance to do anywhere else, either in my other music criticism work or in my English classes. It was illuminating, one of my favorite classes I took in all of college, and the follow piece is something of which I am very proud. In honor of Clarence's 72nd birthday and of Bruce's latest album, I figured it was time to put it out there for the world to see. Thanks for reading.

Blood Brothers Against the Wind

When the sun rose over the teeming streets of New York City on June 19, 2011, there was no indication in the atmosphere that it was anything other than a mundane Sunday morning. Families poured into the streets, making their way to the churches and synagogues where they would share in their weekly worship. Cafes and restaurants filled with patrons, plates of cinnamon rolls, eggs, sausage, bacon, and other mouthwatering brunch foods flying off their menus like they never did on any other day of the week. Teenagers lay in their beds, many of them enjoying the final bastion of their weekends before they were forced back into the hollowed halls of NYC’s public schools for the week-and-a-half long slog that still separated them from their coveted summer vacations. For all intents and purposes, the scene in Manhattan that day was a normal one, a portrait of normal people going about their lives in completely normal fashion. There was no sign that, for many people across the country and around the world, the landscape of pop culture, of rock ‘n’ roll music history, had just been immeasurably changed.

Beneath the city, though, the darkness had a different tale to tell. Where Manhattan’s above-ground residents were busy making their way toward a series of spiritual cathedrals and bursts of communal song, the subway tunnels were already ringing with a different kind of religious experience. The sound was a soaring force of nature, a spider-web of brassy bombast; it was one swift, triumphant burst of musical nirvana after another, each ricocheting from wall to wall, echoing off the gilded caverns of concrete, tile, steel, stone, and historical ingenuity that collectively make up New York City’s connectivity; it was the sounds of Motown, Nashville, Liverpool, and both American coasts, all rolled up in one; it was operatic in scope, baroque in emotion, and dripping with every vestige of rock ‘n’ roll salvation that had converted so many skeptics into believers over the past five decades; it was the perfect collision of virtuosic skill and visceral emotion; and for the people bearing witness to its melodic splendor and musical invulnerability that morning, it was the sound of life, death, and everything in between.

The music belonged to “Jungleland,” a nine-and-a-half-minute behemoth of a song that, in 1975, had served as the grand finale for Bruce Springsteen’s magnum-opus, Born to Run. Just under four minutes into its runtime, following a scenic violin intro, a pair of poetic verses, a searing guitar solo, and a shimmering piano backdrop, the song bursts apart into an exhilarating, soul-raising saxophone solo, and it was precisely that solo that was making such a sonic scene throughout Manhattan’s subway system on that Sunday morning in mid-June. The real question, of course, was why?

Later, when the disciples of that tunnel-bound church service tried to explain what they had seen and heard, they found themselves hard pressed to relate the sheer emotion of the thing to anyone who hadn’t been there to experience it firsthand. After all, how could a single three-minute burst of music convey so much? How could something that was, essentially, a glorified saxophone interlude encompass nearly every corner and expanse of the human condition? For the witnesses, describing how it felt to hear those notes brought something akin to the speechless disbelief that accompanies a religious epiphany: it was, quite simply, as if a Godly presence had descended upon those dark and decrepit old halls and graced them with a glorious gift. But even if those who had heard the music, bouncing along the railway lines and colluding with the howl of the subway trains or the buzz of human interaction, couldn’t quite explain its power, the newspapers and web communities could at least offer the key.

***

They called him the “Big Man,” and for anyone who met him or saw him stalking the stages of the Jersey shore (or later, of nearly every major venue on the planet), it wasn’t hard to figure out why. He spent his life playing rock ‘n’ roll beside some of the biggest giants in pop music history, beside Bruce Springsteen and his legendary E Street Band, but if there was a legitimate “giant” anywhere in sight, it was him. Standing at six feet, five inches and built like a linebacker, it seemed like destiny that he would carry the moniker of “Big Man” throughout his entire adult life. If his parents had different plans when he was born—and it would appear they did, naming him Clarence Anicholas Clemons, Jr., a designation more grounded in regal eloquence and Southern Baptist gospel than on the football field—Clarence was having none of it. Showing athletic talent early on, the prodigious African American seemed poised for a life in the NFL, a career that would doubtlessly bring both the spoils of wealth and the plagues of endless injury. As fate would have it though, the injury came early, putting an end to his sports dreams within the blink of an eye. But that setback wasn’t the end of Clemons’ promise. Instead, it was a serendipitous miracle, an occurrence that would set Clarence upon a new path and turn him into an icon; a defeat that would, eventually, leave his spirit wandering the corridors of the Manhattan underground on that June morning in 2011.

***

Bruce Springsteen had told the tale hundreds, maybe thousands of times before. It was a story as old as his music, as old as his band, as old as all of the questions, themes, and ideals that had defined his rock ‘n’ roll persona ever since he made his first album back in 1973. In many ways, it was the story that held the key to everything, to all he had achieved and everything he had become over the course of his career. It was the stuff of legends, the narrative that had given so many of his songs their heartbeat, the piece of history that had carried him through innumerable tours and concert after concert—even as they stretched well into the night and well past the three-hour mark that generally signified the last encore exit for even the most dedicated music professionals. But Bruce was different: at 60 years old, he still had the vigor of a man half his age, a man as eager to give his fans their money’s worth as he had been in the early days. James Brown may have already earned the title of “the Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” but as Springsteen would jokingly quip later in his career, he was “the hardest working white man in show business.” And that statement, as much as it was meant to incite laughter and cheers from his fans at the start of a show, probably held an awful lot of truth.

Tonight’s concert was a special one, though. As Bruce gazed out from the stage, over the mass of expectant audience members gathered on the arena floor or rising in the bleachers around him, everything felt like it was coming full circle. The date was November 22, 2009; the venue, the HSBC Arena in Buffalo, NY. And the occasion was one of closure: the final stop on a marathon world tour that had stretched on, with few breaks, since the fall of 2007. Over the past couple of months, Bruce and his familial E Street Band had marked the dwindling string of concert dates as a celebration, playing their most beloved albums front-to-back for audiences in America’s biggest cities. Tonight, for the first and only time, they were going all the way back. Back to the beginning, to 1973 and Greetings From Asbury Park, the album that had kick-started Bruce’s career and brought the band’s inaugural members together for the first time. And for a night that was going to function, ultimately, as one big career retrospective, Bruce felt moved to tell his most legendary story at least one more time.

“There I was,” Bruce muttered into his microphone, the nostalgic piano riff of “Growin’ Up” shimmering beneath his rich and weather-beaten baritone. “It was a stormy, stormy night in Asbury Park, New Jersey...”

As the crowd exploded in euphoric cheers and long, drawn-out cries of “BROOOOOCE,” Bruce spun a tale rich in detail and mythic in proportion. He spoke of hurricane gales and buckets of rain, of rattling boardwalks along the Jersey shore and trees bending at the force of the tempest. He spoke of the small, dimly-lit club where he and a few of his band members were weathering the storm and making some noise in the name of rock ‘n’ roll. He spoke of the door that tore open, lifted off its hinges, and went barreling down the street. And he spoke of the massive silhouette now framed in that doorway instead, of a man who seemed to stroll out of his very dreams and into that noisy room, of the big, booming voice that cut through the din and changed his life forever.

“I wanna play witchoo,” it said.

That was all he needed to say. Everything else was conveyed the moment the man placed a tenor saxophone to his lips and began to play. In a romance, they call this kind of connection love at first sight; here, it was brotherhood at first note, an instantly unconditional bond that would carry both musicians—frontman and sideman—to the heights of rock music royalty. In the post-Beatles world of the 1970s, a world where Bob Dylan’s best days were behind him and where legends like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Elvis Presley had or would soon depart forever, listeners were searching for new rock ‘n’ roll heroes. And these two men, this street-rat Jersey poet and this towering sax man, were about to apply for the job and make music history in the process.

Back in Buffalo, back in 2009, where all of that history had already played out, where time had whipped through and taken too much, Clarence Clemons stepped up to the microphone to recreate that fateful stormy evening in Asbury Park. For a moment, it felt as if no time had passed at all. As the crowd watched these two men glance back at their legacy, their bond was as palpable as it had ever been. So much love, so much mutual respect, so much reverence for the power of rock ‘n’ roll and its ability to “save your soul,” it was all flashing across the stage that night. And not just between Clarence Clemons and Bruce Springsteen, but between every member of that fabled E Street Band. From the 40-year veterans to the more recent additions, from Bruce’s beloved wife all the way to the spirit of fallen brother Danny Federici, the organist who had given his life to the band until his life quit giving in 2007, the stage was like a reunion of heroes, all of them finally reaching their promised land.

As the band played on for nearly three-and-a-half hours, making their way through greatest hits, deep cuts, covers, and fan favorites, the audience collectively felt as if they were witnessing something straight out of the rock ‘n’ roll history books, something as poetic as it was mythological. And through it all, Bruce stood at the epicenter, hoisting his guitar to the sky like a talisman to former glories and a challenge to whatever the future might bring. He was a rebellious hero, an elder statesman raging on, a parallel Ulysses rallying his aging ranks for one last charge into the breach. One could almost hear the words of Tennyson echoing through the escapist gospel of songs like “Born to Run” and “Thunder Road,” or through the rousing build of “Rockin’ All Over The World,” the John Fogerty cover that served as the tour’s prophetic bookend:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The E Street Band always strove. They always found. They never gave up. And even though the future that night in Buffalo looked an uncertain one, even as speculation shot from one end of the arena to the other—that this could be the end, the grand finale, the last hurrah for the world’s biggest rock ‘n’ roll family—no one onstage even acknowledged the assumption. Cowards yield before their time has come, and no one could call anyone in this band a coward. Not Max Weinberg, who furiously drums himself into a stupor of arthritic pain each night, only to get up and do it again the next day; not Nils Lofgren, who walks around on two artificial hips and still plays the guitar with incendiary vigor. And certainly not Clarence Clemons who, throughout this seemingly endless tour, took to using a golf cart to get from his dressing room to the stage and a mechanical lift to hoist him up into the spotlight.

On that last night in Buffalo, the Big Man almost looked humbled and weak, huddled resolutely on a stool at the far left-hand side of the stage. Every few moments, his yearning eyes would glance toward the spot next to Bruce where he used to stand tall and proud in his younger days, wishing only to be there again. But his youth was fled and his body was breaking. Years of living hard, Hollywood partying, and self-abuse had taken their toll, and Clemons, the victim of both a knee replacement surgery and a mild heart attack, could feel the weight of all the late nights and the road-bound life tearing away whatever health remained. But when the moment came for Clarence to pull himself to his feet, set his shoulders back, and blow into his saxophone, all vestiges of weakness were removed. The sound was as forceful and poignant as ever, a testament to a man who would never stop giving to or living in the music. Right to his last moments with the E Street Band, Clarence remained loyal to the first words he had ever spoken to Bruce: “I wanna play witchoo.”

***

Clarence certainly never yielded, not while he still had strength left in him. Even as he passed his 69th birthday, the “Big Man” couldn’t be troubled to slow down. It was 2011: Bruce was writing new material. Clarence had a prime guest spot on Lady Gaga’s newest album and was even on-hand to perform with her on the season finale of American Idol. On May 25, Clarence blasted into the saxophone solo from Gaga’s newest hit, “The Edge of Glory,” and the sheer media glitz and glam of the event faded away. Everyone fell silent to watch him, this pilgrim of rock ‘n’ roll history, as he left yet another mark on the tapestry. He had given so much of himself to music over the years, and yet, somehow, he still had just a little bit more left in him.

It was the last time the Big Man would ever perform in public.

***

“The record was pretty much done, except that I wanted to get Clarence on it,” Bruce said later, referring to the set of songs that would eventually form the backbone of his fantastic 2012 release, Wrecking Ball. “The week before he died I called him to come in and record on his way back from Los Angeles, where he'd worked with Lady Gaga. He was having problems with the feeling in his hand. He was worried and asked if he could go home to Florida first and have it checked out. It was the only time Clarence passed on a recording session, so I said sure, we'd catch it later down the road.”

But then the road ran out. Clarence’s body betrayed him on June 12, just a week after his retreat to Florida. A stroke wafted through the cracks that had spread in his physique, cutting him down and silencing his grand saxophone forever. Six days later, after a laborious stay in a hospital where he never fully regained consciousness, after a myriad of goodbyes from his blood brothers and sisters, after squeezing Bruce’s hand one last time, their bond still alive even as the bodily vessel carrying half of it sputtered to its final resting point, the complications from the stroke overcame him. On June 18, Clarence’s family turned off the machines, took the Big Man off life support, and let his soul float off into the ether.

“Let your mind rest easy, sleep well my friend. It’s only our bodies that betray us in the end.”

***

It broke Bruce’s heart to lose Clarence, just as it shattered the hearts of everyone hanging out on E Street and all those who had ever been moved by his unparalleled musical ability. The death left Jersey reeling; it radiated through the music community, silencing compatriots at some turns and inspiring them to pay tribute at others; and it shook the very foundations of New York City, where street musicians retreated to the subway tunnels and exploded into their saxophones with the same furor and force that had so defined Clarence. Other passionate fans offered an assist, grabbing their boom-boxes, cranking them up to maximum volume, and keeping “Jungleland” and its master-of-the-universe sax solo ringing on repeat. From all corners and sources, Springsteen devotees were there beneath the city on that June morning in 2011, making sure the strains of Clarence Clemons would never stop echoing—even if his heartbeat already had.

Online fans dealt with things differently, heading to the message boards to pay their respects. “The Sax Solo in Jungleland,” a Facebook page classifying itself as a “Local Business,” got a boost of likes and R.I.P. posts from listeners, many of them weaving anecdotes of how those sublime three minutes of music had changed their lives, or in some cases, saved them. Of how it was still impossible to listen to that song without feeling shivers down your spine or tears stinging in your eyes. There are songs that are considered greater than “Jungleland,” songs that more people claim to love or that more people have heard. But on that Saturday evening or throughout the following day, as friends, family, and fans heard the news and worked through their own spells of grief in their own unique ways, it was difficult to recall any song that had ever inspired such fervent and passionate adoration. Clarence was gone, yes. But within the confines of recorded media and memory, he would forever stand immortal. He even made it onto the new record, which repurposed some old E Street Band songs, previously only heard live, into a lively and resilient high fidelity setting.

“After the funeral, I returned to the studio to finish the record,” Bruce told Jon Stewart in 2012, in an interview the two were sharing for Rolling Stone. “[Wrecking Ball producer] Ron Aniello greeted me, and as we sat at the control board he said, ‘I'm so sorry about Clarence. I didn't know what to do when I heard, so I went home to Los Angeles and put this together from one of the live takes of the song.’ He played me ‘Land of Hope and Dreams,’ and when the solo section hit, Clarence's sax filled the room. I cried. So he's there...through a little technical magic. But he's there.”

***

“And of course, we're here to tell you a story, as always. And tonight's story is a story about hellos and goodbyes, and things that leave us, and things that remain with us forever. So let's get started.”

Bruce Springsteen was back.

Standing on the stage of Michigan’s Palace of Auburn Hills and once again gazing out over the ranks of thousands of fans, the Boss was in top form. His new record had landed at number one on the charts, reviews had been generally rapturous, and reception for this new world tour was as stratospheric as ever. But that didn’t mean Bruce wasn’t feeling the weight of all the things that had left him over the years. It was April 12, 2012, ten months to the day since the stroke that had torn his greatest blood brother to the ground, and that wound still felt fresh.

A few minutes later, Bruce cascaded into his customary E Street roll call, introducing each member of his band to the appreciative roars of the crowd. For this tour, he had chosen to structure the signature moment within “My City of Ruins,” a song that had, at different times, addressed both the downfall of his beloved hometown—Asbury Park, NJ—and the crushing tragedy of September 11th. On both disparate occasions though, the music and lyrics had functioned in the same way, creating a hymn to the power of human resilience, evoking and inspiring the ability to “rise up,” rebuild, and “begin again,” and all of those themes were going to be prevalent tonight as well.

“Are we missing anybody?” Bruce bellowed into the crowd, a mournful lilt evident in his voice. “Are we missing anybody, Detroit?!”

The explosion of noise from the audience was almost deafening, a roar so potent it could have turned stone to dust. “Clarence!” most of them shouted, though intermittent cries of “Danny” proved that E Street’s long-time organist had not been forgotten. Bruce nodded along sadly.

“That’s right. Do I have to say the names?!” he continued, the reaction immediately informing him that he didn’t. “The only thing I can guarantee is, if you’re here, and we’re here, then they’re here with us tonight! So...raise your voices!”

The crowd complied, screaming, shouting, and singing along with as much passion as Bruce had ever seen at a concert. The explanation was simple: tonight was a communion, a catharsis, a funeral, and a farewell; this concert was a chance for these fans to say goodbye to Clarence in a very public and emotional venue, just as the rest of the concerts on this tour would be. Jake Clemons, Clarence’s nephew, had taken over sax duties, channeling his uncle like a true spiritual successor. Every time he took a solo, the audience erupted in enormous raves of approval, all of them grasping for some connection, however fleeting, to the enormous presence they had lost. And Jake was the corporeal realization of that ghostly presence, nailing his uncle’s works with passion and note-perfect accuracy. Throughout the night, Jake’s solos brought extra emotion to Springsteen favorites like “Badlands,” “Thunder Road,” “Born to Run,” and “Dancing in the Dark,” though “Jungleland,” the Holy Grail of Clarence’s legacy, remained retired for the time being.

Later, as the set finally segued into its final number, the tribute to Clarence hit a new height. The song was “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” a semi-autobiographical favorite from the Born to Run days whose lyrics recall the forming of the E Street Band. When Bruce reached the beginning of the second verse, he shouted out for his followers to pay attention.

“THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART!” he bellowed into the stands. He had made his way from the stage to a small walkway in the middle of the general admission section, crowd-surfing across the pool of adoring fans to get there. Now, he stood tall and powerful, surrounded by a sea of followers, and crooned the lines that would likely define tonight’s show for everyone in attendance.

“They made that change up town and the Big Man joined the band,” he sang, his backing musicians dropping out as his voice was joined by a chorus of the venue’s 16,507-person capacity crowd. The venue’s media screens flickered to life, burning with images of Clarence, and the song stopped in its tracks as the massive basketball arena became a cacophonous, cathartic cave of mourning and euphoria. In the earlier days, that line would have been followed by a potent blast from Clarence’s sax, but not tonight.

The band sat back, letting their instruments hang at their sides or lay dormant in front of them, and Bruce raised his microphone to the sky, smiling as he looked around at all of the people paying tribute to his old friend. The pause stretched on for two or three minutes, acting as Bruce’s version of a “moment of silence” for his fallen comrade, even if it was significant specifically for its absence of silence. The crowd rallied with higher decibels than they had exuded all night, but then again, it was only appropriate that a man who had spent his life “bringing the noise” be honored by a profusion of it. The grin spread even wider across Bruce’s face, tears sparkling in his eyes as he looked around remembering the old days.

“We swore blood brothers against the wind, now I’m ready to grow young again.”

The pause was a bizarre meeting of time and timelessness. In the moment, it seemed to stretch on for days, but in retrospect, it was all too fleeting. Eventually, Bruce gave his horn section the cue and they erupted back into the texture, carrying Clarence’s melodic line with boisterous reverence. But as the concert finally dwindled and dissolved into memory, as the E Street Band lined up at the front of the stage to take their bows, and as Bruce gave a cursory “Thank you Detroit!” to conclude his rock ‘n’ roll sermon, one thought was left hanging in the air, something that Bruce had written in the liner notes of Wrecking Ball that had never felt more true than it did right in that moment.

“Clarence doesn’t leave the E Street Band when he dies,” Bruce had mused.

“He leaves when we die.”