I have a pretty good working knowledge of all of Bruce Springsteen’s albums, even the ones I don’t own, but 1980’s The River has always been a mystery to me. And reading up on it for today’s blog entry, I’m fascinated by what I’m missing.
The River is a double album that continues the working-class blues theme of Springsteen’s earlier work but pairs it up lighter fare more in the pop vein. Musically, those styles are joined with more somber tracks that nod toward his next album, Nebraska.
Bruce Springsteen’s fourth album, 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, was released three years after Born to Run, a period during which Springsteen was kept out of the studio due to a legal skirmish with his former manager.
Rather than capitalizing on his new-found fame by cutting a crowd-pleasing album, Springsteen decided to go darker (literally). Darkness on the Edge of Town follows the same sort of street smart characters as his early work but they are more often tragic than triumphant. These people might be born to run, but the circumstances of their lives have them cemented in place.
Bruce Springsteen’s first two albums were critical smashes but they didn’t reach a mainstream audience. Even ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),’ which has become a concert and classic rock radio staple, was ignored at the time.
But in 1975, all that changed with the release of Born to Run. Springsteen’s third album put him on the map, reaching #3 on the Billboard charts and quickly going Gold (it has since sold more than 6 million copies). Columbia Records promoted Springsteen and the album heavily, calling him “the future of rock-n-roll,” much to his chagrin.
My renewed interest in Bruce Springsteen dates back to that trip to the Spec’s used bins that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The fourth album I bought (for less than $5) was Springsteen’s sophomore release, The Wild, The Innocent and The E-Street Shuffle. I’ve been addicted to it ever since.
The album was released in 1973 just eight months after Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ. Imagine hearing those two bursts of creative genius from a new artist in the same year. Makes me wish I hadn’t been less than a year old at the time.
I enjoyed my three-week dive into Tom Petty‘s discography so much that I’ve decided to give it another shot with an American rocker whose star shines even brighter — Mr. Bruce Springsteen. As with Petty, I’ll dedicate a week at a time to The Boss with unrelated weeks in-between.
I’ve never been as big a Bruce Springsteen fan as I feel I should be, if that makes any sense. I love everything of his that I own and quite a bit that I don’t own as well, and by all rights he should be up there with the Elvis Costellos of the world in my estimation. The reason he isn’t — or at least isn’t yet — is that I’ve never taken the time to really explore his early work.
