Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., Bruce Springsteen, 1973, :37
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
I've always been a lukewarm Springsteen fan. He has some undeniably brilliant songs, even two or three on each one of a long spate of consistently good albums, but... his down-home, working-man earnestness has typically left me indifferent. In this, his first album, he comes out swinging, young and brash and voluble. These songs sound like Lou Reed and Bob Dylan had a baby and he was raised by steelworkers in a small town he couldn't wait to get out of, just as soon as he memorized this rhyming dictionary. These songs come in a flood of words, of characters and scenes, stories of the street and of disaffected youth. I mean, come on, "I had skin like leather and the diamond-hard look of a cobra / I was born blue and weathered but I burst just like a supernova." A debut like this pays a lot of debts forward. Maybe a five-star album? Favorite tracks: "Blinded By the Light," "Growin' Up," "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City." I'd heard all three of these in various forms or via covers (I love Bowe's "Saint"). Favorite tracks I hadn't heard: "Spirit in the Night," "Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?"
