Bruce Springsteen - TheWild, the Innocent andthe E Street Shuffle

Mon 17th Jul, 2006 in Music Reviews

The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle is a wondrous album, a timeless classic, a desert-island disc and another thousand clichés which will never be able to do proper justice to what this band ascribes. Even the term ‘masterpiece’ seems to be not enough of a title. I need something grander, something more poetic, something softer, something sweeter – something else. But for now, masterpiece will do.

For those who think of Springsteen as the pumped-up, flag-waving, head-banded guy from the eighties, I feel sorry for you. That is but one portion of the man’s career, a portion that happened twenty years ago, ten years after this album was made and to define a performer by one phase when there are many more to explore is unfair to the performer and the listener. This is a far different Springsteen, the bearded, skinny, quiet man with one unsuccessful album under his belt and a second on its way. He’s still over a year away from success. He’s nearly at the stage where looseness in his writing all but disappears. Even the album’s cover shows a pensive man, not smiling but seemingly lost in thought, with a thousand worries on his shoulders. This is Springsteen writing to get the girls, not for glory, but for appreciation and a quick lay. He’s writing for the romantics – and if it doesn’t reach anyone, at least it seems like he’s writing for the lover inside himself.

It begins with a wall of brass, tuning up to start the night, to welcome the boys in from out of the dark, dressed like cats eager to please, and as they walk in – “Sparks Fly on E Street”. They’re the kind of kids that would grow up in a few years to be Tony Manero (John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever character), those who would walk into a club and proclaim that they were the faces, those who everyone at the bar or club wanted to be seen with, those who no one could ever hope to compete with. They control the bar, charming the girls, plying them with (unnecessary) drinks, getting everyone to dance (“everybody form a line”) and carrying on as if they own the joint. But the bar isn’t their life; it’s but a portion of the night.

However, among the cats that dress in black, there’s one who longs for something else. By the end of the album we’ll know him as Johnny or Billy – no matter how many different names Springsteen comes up with, it’s still the same guy. He longs for love, for a life outside the routine of hanging in the “dusty arcades, banging them pleasure machines”, but he doesn’t let anyone know, except his potential love who goes by many names but I suspect are all the same girl. Call them what you like – Sandy, Puerto Rican Jane, Rosalita, it doesn’t matter – they’re all the same girl in a musical journey of a boy, barely a man who wants to grow up in the wider world.

And so, after entering the club with a shuffle, he sets about winning the girl, unsure whether it’s the girl he wants or not – but it’s a girl at least, different to those he’d known before, not one to “unsnap her jeans” under the boardwalk. But this boy’s desperate. Lines such as “love me tonight because I may never see you again,” or more optimistically, “love me tonight and I promise I’ll love you forever”, may accomplish the feat somehow. Actually, perhaps what he’s looking for isn’t the long-term love he so longed, rather the final hurrah before the personal journey he, (but no one else) knew he was about to embark upon.

It’s the flipside of the great Carole King/Gerry Goffin classic first sung by The Shirelles, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, in which the (female) protagonist sighs “is this a lasting treasure or just a moment’s pleasure”. The character at the center of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” (and the rest of the album) is exactly the person that The Shirelles sung to, the boy in search of the moment’s pleasure, content to search for the lasting treasure tomorrow (always tomorrow, never today).

Later, the night takes a serious turn. Gone are the carefree cats of the first few cuts, the boys who were out for some lust, replaced with warring youths straight out of West Side Story. Our man has found his love, Sandy (now Puerto Rican Jane), and he’d do anything for her, but just for this night – one last night – he needs to be with his friends as there are some battles to be fought.

Jane is upset. “Those romantic young boys,” she says, “all they ever want to do is fight,” and even after she’d given her love to Johnny, he still feels the need to sneak out into the night with his switchblade knife, seeking another kind of action that Jane can’t provide. It’s his last hurrah, one that normally ends in sorrow – but not tonight. Johnny arranges a rendezvous the next night with Jane so they can slip away into the night, walking away from the only life he knew how to live.

As Jane morphs into Rosalita, Johnny tries to convince his girl to come with him. He doesn’t know exactly what he will do, but he has a plan to play his guitar in a little café in California, as if anything other than the Jersey Shore would suffice, the further away the better. He isn’t liked by her parents, but his love for his girl is real, pleading to her “I want to be your man”.

But maybe California is too far. By the time they cross the river and see the empty New York streets – it all makes sense. He’s found their new home, new identities (Billy and Diamond Jackie) and more characters, not necessarily more exciting that those on the shore, but different. There’s the Jazz Man and the Fish Lady, alone with them on the midnight streets, as he dances, boogaloos, waltzes and serenades with his girl down the street. And they’re off, ready to start again, singing into the sunrise.

Then it stops with the fading out of a symphony. What started with a bang ends with a whisper, and the journey for our two lovers is just beginning. What would become of them is left to a thousand imaginations, each one more varied than the other. For me, what happened next isn’t important and it shouldn’t be for you either.

Eighteen months after this album was released (and fizzled – 23,000 copies sold initially), a different Bruce Springsteen simultaneously made the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines, being hailed as the next big thing in rock and roll. His Born to Run album has being described as an “intentional masterpiece”, which it was and still is to this day. However this is the album that I will always turn back to – the one Springsteen album I can listen to on any given day, in any given mood. It’s my favourite album of all time, and its relative obscurity means that I can call it that without any fear of having jumped onto some bandwagon.

Buy it, listen to it and re-listen to it. Love it. Treasure it. It’s more than worth it.