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Song of the Day #4,122: ‘Spirit in the Night’ – Bruce Springsteen

Last week I featured a song from Bruce Springsteen’s 1973 album The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle. That classic album was Bruce’s sophomore effort, and amazingly he had released his debut the very same year.

In January of 1973, Springsteen hit the scene with Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, an ambitious collection of wordy Dylan-esque folk songs sped up and set to a beat. Right out of the gate, Springsteen cast himself as a sensitive poet for working class dreamers, a mantle he would carry for more than five decades.

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Song of the Day #4,121: ‘Simple Man’ – Lynyrd Skynyrd

Lynyrd Skynyrd is another band with which I am mostly unfamiliar. Sure, I know ‘Free Bird,’ mostly as a jokey thing to shout out at the end of a concert, but I’ve never heard one of their albums in full.

It appears the one to start with is, appropriately, their 1973 debut, helpfully titled Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd. This album, along with its follow-up Second Helping, are considered not just the band’s best work but among the best works of Southern Rock ever recorded.

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Song of the Day #4,120: ‘Dancing with the Moonlit Knight’ – Genesis

My familiarity with Genesis is based almost entirely on the band’s output in the 80s, when drummer Phil Collins took over the reins from the departed Peter Gabriel and steered the band away from prog rock and into pop and soft rock.

Selling England by the Pound (1973) is a great example of what Genesis was before that happened, when Gabriel blended folk and prog elements into an ambitious, if slightly goofy, mix.

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Song of the Day #4,119: ‘The Real Me’ – The Who

Continuing my look at the albums released in 1973, I’ll now cover records with which I’m either passingly or not at all familiar.

Initially, I expected to put The Who’s Quadrophenia in the latter category. I remember my high school friend’s were big Who fans, and this was an album they loved, but I never really got into the band. I loved ‘The Kids Are Alright‘ (still do) and the Who’s Next album, but the “rock operas” Tommy and Quadrophenia never stirred me a bit.

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Song of the Day #4,118: ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ – The Rolling Stones

Between the Buttons, released in 1967, was the seventh Rolling Stones album and the second (following the previous year’s Aftermath) to feature only songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

As was the custom back then, a separate American version was released, swapping out two tracks for two songs released in England as a double-A single: ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday.’ While I generally hate the concept of different UK and U.S. releases, there’s no question that the addition of those two songs make the American version of this album a bona fide masterpiece.

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