Word: springsteen
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Dates: during 1974-1974
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...Springsteen is more confused about his role, and as a result seems to be living in the same world as the rest of us. He sets his songs in a mildly romanticized street semi-underworld somewhere in between New York and his hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey, and the music, at least the best of it, is suitable raucous and scruffy. Unlike his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, where the descriptions bristled with enough Dylanesque alliteration to make them look like typing exercises ("Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat"), on E Street...
...Springsteen's fresco of muscle and dope is not the revelling in machismo that it might be (i.e. J. Geils), although clearly anybody who has proclaimed in song that "I had skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra" is to be watched closely. But even when a chorus of women sing "Those romantic young boys, all they ever want to do is fight," it conveys a soft ironic criticism which runs through the whole album, up to the point where Springsteen tells a girl friend "you oughtta quit this scene...
...FINAL cultural force which Springsteen defies might be called the Cult of Authenticity. As the principle of division and specialization takes hold, it is not enough merely to be into "rock" music. It seems there are various types of music--blues, country and western, hard rock--each with its own little rules and traditions which were emphasized by knowledgeable critics and advertising men as the massive rock audiences of the '60s were weaned away from the Beatles and introduced to more exotic American musical cultures. Within each of these specialities the quest for the "good" consists mostly in a search...
There was a blues man, Mighty Joe Young, on before Bruce Springsteen at Charlie's Place two weeks ago, and in a moment of insecure generosity, after the audience had feebly said that it could dig the blues, he said "And believe me, we got dynamite comin' on after us." He was right. Springsteen explodes every rock type there is. It's not that he has his own completely new personal style, like Stevie Wonder for example. He is a borrower, and he takes other people's styles and explodes them, and picks up the pieces and puts them back...
...good A.M. song will have a verse, a chorus, and then, if we're lucky, a break--a middle part where it gets slow or bridges and changes keys, or something so it doesn't get boring. Do Springsteen's songs have breaks? How many commercials can fit in between acts on the Mid-night Special? I mean, there are breaks within breaks within breaks on this album. Even when all the music sounds like it is just good A.M. material, there is so much of it, and Springsteen's construction of his songs is so ambitious that...