Bruce Springsteen Box Set Gives Earliest Work New Immediacy — And Respect

The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (released Nov. 5, 1973)

Sparks fly on E Street when the boy
prophets walk it handsome and hot
All the little girls’ souls go weak when
the man-child gives them a double
shot.

Talk about opening salvos. Springsteen sang directly to our fevered teen-aged souls, capturing that restless time when all you could think about was sex—and getting out. Anywhere. Out of the house, out of school, out of town, out of that underage holding pattern and into the big life you just knew you’d find somewhere. The arrangements are more sophisticated here, permeated by David Sancious’ jazzy influence, and the remastered sound is so clean and crisp, elements that went unnoticed in the original jump out, from conga taps in “E Street Shuffle” to previously hidden piano fills and even some chunka-chunka guitar strums snuck inside “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).”

In the book Songs, Springsteen says he set out to write tunes that would leave both the band and potentially indifferent witnesses to his then opening-act performances equally breathless. He certainly succeeded, choreographing his own West Side Story in epic dramas like “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” “Incident on 57th Street” and the closer, “New York City Serenade”—on which Sancious’ gorgeous orchestral piano undoubtedly guaranteed his solo recording contract. Despite the album’s status as another commercial non-starter, it contains some of his most enduring, and beloved, work.

Born to Run (released Aug. 25, 1975)

As epic as The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle seemed, it was just the appetizer for Born to Run. From the minute that screen door slams in “Thunder Road,” the intensity builds, gearing us up for a fast ride toward “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” a flawless piece of musical momentum. “Night,” which follows, doesn’t quite hold up its end, feeling rushed. But then comes “Backstreets.” 

One soft infested summer
me and Terry became friends
Trying in vain to breathe
The fire we was born in. 

Yes, he was “the new Dylan.” But where Dylan gave us esoterica or challenged the status quo, Bruce gave us gritty reality wrapped in poetry. He wouldn’t find his social conscience for a while yet; he still had too much burning passion to sweat out on those backstreets. This song, with its thumping-heartbeat drumming and ragged-throated choruses, is sheer greatness. And we don’t even get to recover from it before the title tune comes careening at us. For city kids who did ride through mansions of glory on suicide machines, filled with dreams and visions and wondering if love was real, there was no option. “Born to Run” was written for us; it had to be our anthem—at least for a time.

Sometimes I wish this album had a bit less wall-of-sound grandiosity; it could use more of the rawness the first two share. But it’s understandable that Springsteen threw everything he had into it; it was his last-chance power drive toward stardom. Failure was not an option. Fortunately, he left space for the muted-horn minimalism of “Meeting Across the River,” a prelude to the grandest epic yet: “Jungleland.” Though Bruce’s imagery was already edging dangerously close to over-use by this album, he managed to make each character, each situation just distinct enough to keep us hanging on all their fates. And in this street opera, galvanized by Roy Bittan’s classical piano, Suki Lahav’s violin and one of saxophonist Clarence Clemons’ most soulful solos, the album’s themes of hope and despair reach a Shakespearean finale.

Darkness on the Edge of Town (released June 2, 1978)

Springsteen has written dozens of songs about desperation and longing, about fighting against suffocating stagnation while dreaming of salvation. On Darkness, he etches characters who scrabble hard, grabbing for whatever they can, only to learn attaining it—if indeed they manage to—can still leave them hollow and unfulfilled. And yet, there’s still room for optimism, for belief in the promised land—and whatever redemption it might hold, though as he pointed out in Songs, it would be a lot harder to come by.

“I was searching for a tone somewhere between Born to Run’s spiritual hopefulness and ‘70s cynicism. I wanted my new characters to feel weathered, older, but not beaten,” Springsteen wrote. He also began articulating issues biting at his conscience, particularly racial and socio-economic schisms—the latter driven by his struggle to reconcile his own financial success with his desire to remain true to his blue-collar roots. The first track, “Badlands,” hints at what’s to come, punctuated by drummer Max Weinberg’s thumping tom beats and staccato snare taps. In hindsight, Darkness hints at something else: on “Candy’s Room” and “Prove It All Night,” we hear the psychedelic-shredding guitar sound that, decades later, would turn Tom Morello into an honorary E Streeter.

By now, Springsteen had also mastered the one-two punch, pairing the album’s centerpieces, “Racing in the Street” and “Promised Land,” and using the energy of “Prove It All Night” to sharpen the contrasting resignation in the album-ending title tune.

The River (released Oct. 10, 1980)

Trying to capture the E Street Band’s onstage exuberance, Bruce seeks a bar band vibe for half of this double album, loading it with retro-rock party anthems and dance tunes: “Sherry Darling,” “Two Hearts,” “Hungry Heart,” “Out in the Street,” “Cadillac Ranch,” “Ramrod,” “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)”—which has such a speeded-up attack, it’s almost punk. Despite their not-always-cheery content (a trait often hidden behind his upbeat melodies), they likely helped to turn off those who dismissed him as a man with a formula. Yet he also goes deep, facing adulthood head on in the mid-tempo “I Want to Marry You” and “Fade Away,” and in his soul-wrenching ballads: “Independence Day,” “The River,” “Point Blank,” “Stolen Car,” and the paired finale, “Drive All Night” and “Wreck on the Highway.” They stop you in your tracks, forcing you to listen, and with Springsteen’s songs, it pays to really listen. To roll up inside those lyrics, perhaps even separating them from those sometimes-deceptive melodies. The River requires diving under the surface.

When considering whether itshould have been a single album, a common reaction, it’s worth asking what songs should go. There are a few. But not enough. It became his first No. 1 album, and “Hungry Heart” became his first top-10 hit.