'Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.' by Bruce Springsteen - Track-by-Track (50th Anniversary)

Julian Spivey Photo

by Julian Spivey
Today is the 50th anniversary of the release of Bruce Springsteen’s debut album Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. So, it’s pretty much a holiday for a Springsteen fanatic like me. Though reviewed very well by critics at the time the album didn’t sell very well and didn’t spawn any hits. It would eventually be found by many fans after the star-making release of 1975’s Born to Run or even when kids of the ‘80s fell in love with 1984’s Born in the U.S.A. Rolling Stone magazine would rank it as the No. 379th greatest album of all-time in their initial 2003 list and it will often be found among the five favorite albums of Springsteen fans. At the time, many believed Springsteen could be the next Bob Dylan, but ultimately it marked the beginning of a legendary rock musician and singer-songwriter of his own right.

Here's my track-by-track look at Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. …
 
Blinded by the Light

If you were to pop on the vinyl of Bruce Springsteen’s debut Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ on January 5, 1973 (which based on sales at the time not a whole lot of people did) the very first song you would’ve heard was “Blinded by the Light,” a wordy, Dylan-esque folk-rock number that sounds like it was written by going through a rhyming dictionary (and it actually was!). “Blinded by the Light,” was one of two songs (the other being “Spirit in the Night”) specifically written after the rest of the album when Columbia Records president Clive Davis felt the album lacked a potential single. Springsteen’s single wouldn’t do much, but it would become his first and only No. 1 single as a songwriter when Manfred Mann’s Earth Band spiced it up a bit with a more progressive rock sound in 1976. Even though it’s likely the wordiest song Springsteen ever wrote it’s still a helluva lot of fun to sing.

Growin’ Up

“Growin’ Up,” the second track on Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, is a sign of things to come later for Springsteen, in my opinion, in its adolescent rebelliousness. Springsteen was 22 when he wrote the song in 1971 and it has all the gusto and bravado of one ready to break out of his own little world into something bigger with a bang. David Sancious, who was only 18 at the time, gives the album its first great E Street Band flourish with his piano solo. Like the first track on the record “Blinded by the Light,” “Growin’ Up” is wordy, but with more of a storyline and point to hit home.

Mary Queen of Arkansas

I must admit “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” the album’s third track, is one of two tracks on this album that I will frequently skip over when listening to the record. It hasn’t to this point in my adult life ever really spoken to me all that much, even though I’m Julian Citizen of Arkansas. That’s not all too uncommon. It was one of three songs initially played by Springsteen to Columbia Records’ John H. Hammond, and the one Hammond was least impressed with. Played with acoustic guitar and a faint harmonica in the background, it’s a slow and quiet love ballad. It wasn’t until a May 2014 concert in Pittsburgh that Springsteen revealed the song is about a man who’s fallen in love with a drag queen.

Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?

“Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street,” track number four, is loosely based on a bus ride Springsteen once took to visit a girlfriend in uptown Manhattan, essentially set in Spanish Harlem, according to Rob Kirkpatrick’s The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen. It may just be a sketch of what Springsteen saw on this bus ride, but it’s a ton of fun in its fast-paced beat with no chorus. I love the flow of lyrics like: “wizard imps and sweat sock pimps/interstellar mongrel nymphs” and “Mary Lou, she found out how to cope/she rides to heaven on a gyroscope.” Who the hell knows what they really mean, but they’re a blast to sing!

Lost in the Flood

“Lost in the Flood,” the final track on side one of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., might be the most Springsteen-esque song on the track, meaning it’s the song that most resembles what The Boss’s music would come to sound like on later records. It’s Springsteen’s first foray into writing about veterans returning from the war in Vietnam and the toll it’s taken on him. The sparse basic piano-only (likely Springsteen himself) performance works terrifically for the track’s first verse and a half until the epic entrance on the second verse about the stock car racer when Springsteen sings “Jimmy the Saint.” In one of Springsteen’s most cinematic tracks, the song comes to a full-on violent finale in the final verse when a New York City gang gunfight involves the cops. You’d see this Springsteen more beginning with 1975’s Born to Run.  

The Angel

I can say with complete certainty that “The Angel,” the side two opener of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., is the track on the album I’ve listened to the least. Honestly, I haven’t ever given it much of a shot. It’s the slowest, most droning song on the album, and I guess it never spoke enough to me in its performance to pay a lot of attention to what it says. One of his first car songs, he said in a 1974 interview he considered it “one of the most sophisticated things I’ve written.” I wonder if he still believes that. It’s an unusual way to begin a side of the record, but at least it’s side two and not the initial track you hear from Springsteen.

For You

In his 2019 book Bruce Springsteen: The Stories Behind the Songs writer Brian Hiatt says “[‘For You’] feels inappropriately frantic on the album, but I must disagree with that summation. After all, what’s more frantic than young love ending in suicide? The franticness in the performance – both the barely time to breath vocal from Springsteen and the fast-paced drums by Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez and organ playing by David Sancious, gives the song a yearning that feels realistic for a 22-year old who’s heart has been broken. If you prefer a slower version there are more solo piano-driven live versions out there for you. Springsteen wrote in his 2016 memoir Born to Run of the heartbreaker who inspired the song as a “drug-taking, hell-raising wild child … so alive, so funny and broken … She stirred up my Catholic school-bred messianic complex.”

Spirit in the Night

“Spirit in the Night,” the penultimate track on Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., is the quintessential early E Street Band sound for me – the more R&B, soulful, even jazz-tinged performing with Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez on drums, David Sancious on organ and piano (although it’s apparently Harold Wheeler credited on piano on this track) to go along with guys who would last past the first two albums in saxophonist Clarence Clemons and bassist Garry Tallent. The song, one of two written and tacked onto the album late in the recording process when Columbia Records president Clive Davis didn’t hear single material, is so infectiously fun and loose. The song tells the tale of a wild band of teenagers who drive out to a nearby lake and just screw around and there’s so much young, dumb, rebellious awesomeness in the whole performance. I wish I could bottle up the “Spirit in the Night” sound and wear it as cologne.

It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City

“It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” the final track on the album, is a fantastic way to end Bruce Springsteen’s debut. Few songs have ever had as much swagger as this song. Just check out the coolness of lines like: “I had skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra/I was born blue and weathered but I burst just like a supernova/I could walk like Brando right into the sun/then dance just like a Casanova.” That’s just the beginning too. It pretty much keeps up that badassery for just over three minutes.

---