Pantagruel's Full Review: The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle by B...
When I was living in Kenya in the early 1990s, I would sometimes travel on holiday with John, a fellow American volunteer. Usually we would take long bus or train rides to get to wherever we were going, and, to pass the time by, the conversation would turn to sports or media, usually music. Sometimes we would combine the topics, like the time we pondered how The Beatles and The Who would have evolved if early on they made a straight-up trade of John Lennon for Pete Townshend.
One such trip found us killing time on an overnight train from Nairobi to Mombasa. After ranking our favourite TV comedies, trying to name all of The Beatles' songs in alphabetical order, then putting together a dream line-up of All-Time baseball franchise teams, John asked me to name Bruce Springsteen's most underrated album. I offered Nebraska, explaining that it was the one album most casual fans either dismiss or had never heard. John disagreed. He said that underrated as it may be, it fell in the midst of Springsteen's 1980s commercial height, situated in his catalog between The River and Born in the U.S.A. so enough fans would have had the opportunity to hear it. No, he believed that Springsteen's most underrated album was his second album, The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle, made before he blew up big.
Well, he had me on two counts. He argued his case well, and he chose an album with which I wasn't very familiar. I admitted this to him as I stared out the window and into the dark African night. At first he responded sarcastically by saying that no true Springsteen fan would be unfamiliar with the album, then said that I owed it to myself to give the album a chance.
Fortunately, before I left for Kenya I had made tapes of several albums recorded from my brother's collection so that I would have some 'fresh' music to listen to, and The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle just happened to be one of them. Though it never made much of an impression on me before, I made a promise to myself that after my safari with John I would listen to it again.
Unfortunately, The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle never sank in with me. Not then, and not now. Maybe I just can't see beyond it as anything more than a precursor to Born to Run.
Musically, the album is very sharp. The as-yet-unnamed band plays by turns as a spirited Salvation Army band, a jazz-oriented rock band, and as "Wow, what must these guys sound like live" club circuit veterans. basically, they play whatever the charts call for and are intent on showing their chops. The band, of course, evolved into the E Street Band, minus David Sancious on keyboards and Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez behind the drums.
The opening track "The E Street Shuffle" finds the musicians at their most funky with Springsteen shreiking and howling around them like a hep jive cat. "Kitty's Back" is a jazzy, swinging number where the members are given short, succinct instrumental room (check out the 17-minute version on Hammersmith Odeon, London 1975 where they really get to stretch out on their solos). And "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" puts it all together, culminating in a raucous R&B revue. No, musically I find little with which to fault The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle.
The problem I seem to have is with Springsteen's lyrics. He seems to still be finding his way as a songwriter, a propos the cover shot of Springsteen as a contemplative street poet. He hasn't yet learned to pace his stories. (Kind of like me with my story at the top of this review!) Instead, he wants to appear as a wordsmith, cramming as many words into each line as possible. (Some 20 years later, the situation would reverse itself, like onThe Ghost of Tom Joad, where the music would struggle to keep up with his poignant lyrics.)
While on his debut it sounded like he was striving to be Bob Dylan, here his muses appear to be Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and West Side Story. For example, take "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," which is arguably the best and certainly the best-known track off the album. The song is about an up-and-coming rock singer who courts a Latina against her parents' wishes, where Springsteen assumes the role of Tony and the title character is his Maria.
The stories Springsteen tells, and the characters he infuses into those stories, are small-time hustlers and circus performers, or street hoods and local legends whose names resonate in their own neighborhoods but do not carry weight elsewhere. Springsteen tries to breath life into his characters, building them up to appear more important than they are, perhaps even wanting to immortalize the real-life characters in song.
At times this works, like on "Incident on 57th Street." Despite the Dylanesque title, it's a grittier version of West Side Story, complete with the obligatory Romeo and Juliet reference, wherein a street-smart john (Spanish Johnny) has a fling with a hooker with a heart of gold (Puerto Rican Jane). The story seems fleshed out enough so that when Johnny leaves Jane to go out on a midnight hustle, you understand that he may not return for various reasons.
But at other times I simply shrug at the character names. They are faceless nobodies in whom I have no particular investment. He's better when he sticks to generalities. For example, "The E Street Shuffle" is more vivid when he sings of the kids dancing in the street and less memorable when he names one of them, Power 13, specifically. Power 13? Who the hell cares? A similar thing can be said of "Kitty's Back." It is the music, not the storyline, that carries the track.
Maybe it's an East Coast thing. My buddy John grew up in Philadelphia, and he is not alone in telling me that the scenes and people Springsteen describes are vivid recreations of life along the eastern seaboard. But I grew up 3,000 miles from there. Maybe I just don't get it because I never lived it.
Another problem I have with the lyrics is trying to determine what, if any, theme they have in common. It appears to be a celebration of that life. Sometimes, they look toward the future, like the singer who propostitions Rosalita to go away with him to San Diego, or the barker in "Wild Bill's Circus Story" who is on the lookout for freaks for his travelling sideshow.
The spokesperson for these characters' dreams to escape their current existence can be found on "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)." Against a mid-paced tempo, Springsteen's average Joe reminds Sandy that "This boardwalk life for me is through/You know you ought to quit this scene too." However this track, the second on the album, is followed by "Kitty's Back," in which the title character returns to the old neighborhood from where she married to get away.
What made Born to Run such a monumental album is its universal appeal. Springsteen wrote character-pieces there, too, but the struggles they faced and the dreams they had were common to average listeners. Here the stories get bogged down in their own myopia. It's like he took one small slice of Americana, the Jersey boardwalk, and wrote an album's worth of songs around it. Granted, it may have been the life that the 24 year-old New Jersey native felt most comfortable portraying, but it feels so small in comparison to the body of work to come. And for better or worse, that's what I measure this album against--those golden years between 1975 and 1987 when you could count on an album by Bruce Springsteen to really speak to its audience. The Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle falls short of that lofty goal, unless the intended audience was a select group of rough but lovable East Coasters.
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