Word: wilding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...just in the past few weeks, the rock dream came true for him. ("Man, when I was nine I couldn't imagine anyone not wanting to be Elvis Presley.") But he is neither sentimental nor superficial. His music is primal, directly in touch with all the impulses of wild humor and glancing melancholy, street tragedy and punk anarchy that have made rock the distinctive voice of a generation...
Springsteen first appeared in the mid-'60s for a handful of loy al fans from the scuzzy Jersey shore. Then, two record albums of wired brilliance (Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle) enlarged his audience to a cult. The albums had ecstatic reviews - there was continuing and talk of "a new Dylan" growing - but slim sales. Springsteen spent nearly two years working on his third album, Born to Run, and Columbia Records has already invested $150,000 in ensuring that this time around, everyone gets the message...
Even the most laid-back easy rocker would find it tough to resist his live performance. Small, tightly muscled, the voice a chopped-and-channeled rasp, Springsteen has the wild onstage energy of a pinball rebounding off invisible flippers, caroming down the alley past traps and penalties, dead center for extra points and the top score...
...once cautioned in a song that you can "waste your summer prayin' in vain for a savior to rise from these streets," but right now Springsteen represents a regeneration, a renewal of rock. He has gone back to the sources, rediscovered the wild excitement that rock has lost over the past few years. Things had settled down in the '70s: with a few exceptions, like Paul Simon, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt, there was an excess of showmanship, too much din substituting for true power, repetition-as in this past summer's Rolling Stones tour-for lack...
Born to Run is a bridge between Springsteen the raffish rocker and the more ragged, introverted street poet of the first two albums. Although he maintains that he "hit the right spot" on Born to Run, it is the second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, that seems to go deepest. A sort of free-association autobiography, it comes closest to the wild fun-house refractions of Springsteen's imagination. In Wild Billy's Circus Song, when he sings, "He's gonna miss his fall, oh God save the human cannonball," Springsteen could...