Bruce Springsteen is the last of rock's great innocents. There can never be another quite like him. (pp. 6-7)

It was Bruce Springsteen's fate to become the key figure in the transition from hippie music and back toward a more naturalistic rock style. Springsteen writes of cars and girls, the key icons of this macho movement, the way the hippie writers wrote of drugs and universal peace/love—with commitment and passion…. In Springsteen's songs, a questing, romantic spirit is inevitably scorned and banished; he is torn between his own abandonment of the traditional values and his desire to seek them as a refuge. He is not a drop-out; he is an outlaw, in line with what Norman Mailer had written in 1960: "There was a message returned to us by our frontier that the outlaw is worth more than the sheriff." America had eclipsed its frontiers—Vietnam was a disastrous attempt to find a new one, the moonshot was a clownish one—but in Springsteen's songs that frontier made a reappearance, both everywhere and nowhere. It was the only thing worth seeking and an impossible goal, simultaneously a chimera and the most potent force in the world. The answer was personal; it had to do with style, give that style whatever name you will. (p. 22)

Whatever its flaws, Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey is one of the most ambitious debut albums of the Seventies. The problems are conceptual and technical; Springsteen's writing and performance are outstanding. (p. 42)

It was the lyrics that brought Springsteen the most attention and no wonder. The opening lines of the album—from "Blinded By The Light"—represent his tumble of images perfectly…. Greetings has ten songs, and, while none of them has the barrage of images of "Blinded By The Light," none of them is streamlined, either. On occasion, such verbose lyrics become cumbersome. "Mary Queen Of Arkansas," with its sexually ambiguous lover, demands more focused writing than this style can give it, and "The Angel," despite the fact that Springsteen praised it at the time as his most "sophisticated" number, now seems little more than the most pretentious song ever written about an outlaw motorcyclist. More than anything, however, these songs typify the conceptual inadequacy of the singer-song-writer approach: Rather than writing about motorcyclists as observed, Springsteen wandered off into a rather unremarkable fantasy about them. On the other hand, while equally indulging in fantasy, "For You," "Growin' Up" and "It's Hard To Be A Saint in The City," are more tightly focused, minutely observed; onstage, they've become rock classics. (pp. 42-3)

At their best, these scattershot lyrics are remarkably effective, flinging epigrams like artillery. The final lines of "Blinded" still stand as the test of Springsteen's ambition and motivation: "Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun/Oh, but Mama, that's where the fun is." When such phrases strike home full-force, they can freeze a moment or an attitude forever. Like Rod Stewart's "Every Picture Tells A Story," "Growin' Up" offers a marvelous capsule of that moment in adolescence when attitude and style are everything:

       I stood stone-like at midnight, suspended in my masquerade
       I combed my hair 'til it was just right
       And commanded the night brigade

As a whole, the song goes much further than Stewart's image of hair-combing and mirror-posing, which is soon dropped for a depiction of sexual exploits. "Growin' Up" is the ideal vernacular portrait of the young rebel outsider, lost in the crowd with an improbable vision….

Many better educated men have sought futilely to capture the magic of the teenage dream; Springsteen gets it all in a line. And he refuses to stop there. Most great rock writers are miniaturists, but Bruce reaches for the largest canvas of all—he wants to portray nothing less than existence itself, as seen at a certain time, from a certain perspective. In songs like "Growin' Up," he goes a long way toward achieving that goal, and in the process lends a voice to a group of people that generally go unheard.

Springsteen's concerns, from the beginning, have been with moral, ethical and spiritual dilemmas. "For You," for instance, is about suicide. (Oddly, it is also the one song on Greetings that heralds the style and concerns of Springsteen's later work.) It is among the best of his love songs, and, as a contemplation of death, Jimi Hendrix's "I Don't Live Today," Jackson Browne's "For A Dancer" and Paul Simon's "Mother And Child Reunion" are the only rock songs that can match it. But Browne, Simon and even Hendrix view death philosophically; Springsteen, while offering some philosophy, concentrates on the very human narrative. By any standards other than rock and roll's "For You" might be overwrought, but the sheer emotionalism of the performance sweeps such objections aside…. The story is pure melodrama—the singer is in an ambulance with his girlfriend, who is fading fast—like every corny rock death number since "Tell Laura I Love Her" and "The Leader Of The Pack." As life ebbs, we come to know both of them with a startling degree of intimacy, and to grasp the dimensions of their relationship. In the end, "For You" manages to bring the rock death song cliches to life.

As in "For You," the best of Springsteen's imagery is action and character oriented, rather than abstract. We care about the suicide victim not because she is a symbol of death—though we may come to care about the symbol too—but because the singer cares so completely about their lives together. (p. 43)

[The] best rock writing is authentically cinematic, suggestive rather than elaborate. And Springsteen's songs from the beginning, fit this pattern perfectly. By that measure his writing is a return to the roots of rock….

Raymond Chandler once wrote that the mystery novelist, Dashiell Hammett, had used his hard-guy realism to "give murder back to the people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse." Springsteen did something similar for rock, although Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey only hinted at it. Just as Hammett exposed the empty cliches of the drawing-room detective story, Springsteen's flood of images and characters were an assault upon the dry conventions of contemporary rock songwriting. Like Hammett,… Springsteen did not have to invent from scratch the reckless innocents of his songs. Because he lived among real people—rather than in the rock star jet set—such persons were his most natural material.

When Jon Landau speaks of Bruce having "roots in a place—coastal Jersey," he is suggesting that Springsteen's fantasies arise from a natural environment. But since there is little room for physical description in rock songs, Springsteen's eye can't linger on the landscape: The "Greasy Lake" of "Spirits in the Night" is his equivalent of John Ford's Monument Valley, but he celebrates its inhabitants more than its natural splendor. One understands Greasy Lake as an archetype of similar places the listener has known, just as one understands the characters to be universal versions of figures in real life.

"For You," however, attacks stereotypes with a degree of deliberation. Springsteen has compared his songs to the films of Sergio Leone, the great director of Italian Westerns. That is to say, he is a genre artist, but operating from the mise en scene of the hot rod exploitation picture, with its fast cars, easy women and melodramatic tensions. Thus, when critics speak of Springsteen's "over-reliance" on such images, they are missing the point…. As Bruce himself has noted, in genre writing it isn't the situation that makes the difference—that always seems to be the same—but the perspective from which that scene is shown. If Springsteen's achievement counts for anything, then, it is for taking the teen milieu of cruising cars and backseat passion out of the hands of outsiders and giving it back to the people who really live it….

"Spirit in the Night" established the genre in which Springsteen would work. Its story, while humorous, achieves some of its emotional resonance from its connections to the teen exploitation pictures of the Fifties and the Sixties….

[Those] early exploitation films [helped] to create the American rock audience's image of itself. And in the story of a one-night getaway to a lakeside fantasy paradise, Springsteen recalls the motiveless impulse of tales like The Wild One—only this time, the adults have been written out of the picture. "Spirit In The Night" is a moment that ought to be forever; the only authority on the scene is the bond of friendship and trust that holds these people together…. Unlike Bob Dylan's weirdly named denizens of the night, these kids are close to the sort of people any listener might know—they're dream, not nightmare, creatures. Their achievements are also exaggerated versions of our own. Like [Chuck] Berry, Springsteen creates characters with lives longer than one song. Under various guises, they have followed Springsteen through each of his albums.

The spirit of the night is the spirit of escape—that goes almost without saying. But it is also the spirit of unity, whether sexual or otherwise…. The drunkeness and lovemaking … are a form of ritual, which suggests the richest moments in lives that are otherwise banal. Anyone who has grown up in a small town knows that the goal is to get out, have some fun, seek The Promised Land—just as everyone knows how improbable it is that real fun, genuine escape, true promise can be found. Often, what seems from a distance to be improvement is, close up, much worse—even a trap. At Greasy Lake, Crazy Janey and her pals gain no permanent freedom; in the end, they must drive off to return to their drudgery. But what matters is the magic unity of this moment: The word in the out-chorus ("Together we moved like spirits in the night") is "together." (pp. 44-5)

The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle is a transitional record, serving for Bruce much the same purpose that albums like Revolver and Bringing It All Back Home did for the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In essence, the album consolidates Bruce's perspective on the best elements of rock's first twenty years, while making the first step toward a genuinely personal style.

In a way, the album's two sides seem like separate records. The first, "E Street," side is something of a holdover from Greetings, full of energetic songs whose potential has not always been fully exploited. But Side Two contains Springsteen's first fully realized thematic concepts—a three-song suite of tales about wild and innocent kids on the loose.

The themes of Side One deal with escape. (p. 64)

The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle's first side is characterized by a remarkable exuberance. Even the slower songs like "Wild Billy" and "Sandy" have a quality of release, a delight in the simple joy of existence. But Side Two is much darker—while it is never defeatist, it is certainly much more raw. All along, Springsteen has had a tale to tell, an epic of life as lived not so much by car crazy kids or the urban underworld, but on the rough edge, under the thumb of a system that beats back hope for sport. On the first LP, the celebration of the subway rider in "It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City," the shootout in the Bronx that's the peak moment of "Lost In The Flood," and here, Kitty's failed attempt to find a big city romance in "Kitty's Back" are all of a piece. The names change but the characters do not. And all of them point toward the narrative second side of The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle.

It's a story rich with lust and humor, of victory snatched from the clutches of defeat, of victories lost at the last moment, of life lived for thrills and lives that are barely lived at all. What's most remarkable is that Springsteen's view of this nightworld is, in the end, affectionate. He finds beauty in its empty echoes, in its milieu of dirty sheets and barren cupboards, trashy gutters and broken-down cars. As with any outsider, his belief in the City is stronger than a native could ever afford. (pp. 65-6)

Springsteen does not know the City well. These songs have less sense of place and physical detail than, say, the New York Dolls' demimonde epics. What he does know is the sort of person for whom the place has killer depths, for whom this town chokes off all that's young and beautiful, whom the town uses its own beauty to destroy. It's the same place that the Drifters found, uptown, "On Broadway." That story was too long for one song, or three. It would swoop over to the next album, and the next. A simple tale, it's a long way from "Sandy's" Little Eden—a world away, or a lifetime. (p. 66)

With "Incident On Fifty-Seventh Street," all the funny street names suddenly come to life, leaping from the earlier songs to swagger down boulevards and creep down narrow alleys. The names have changed again, but we recognize the same figures. In the end, these characters bring the teen exploitation era up-to-date, only this version is truer than ever before. Geographically, Bruce Springsteen is as far from Latin New York as he is from Leonard Bernstein. Spiritually, he has always been there, down with the losers and the hopeless, the not-quick-enough and the dead, where the margin of life is music.

It's the music that makes the difference. In other hands, Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane's love affair could easily have become maudlin. But Springsteen … makes the lovers triumphant….

The story itself is as old as Romeo and Juliet, but it is told with the passion of someone who must, sometimes in the dark of night, wish that he had lived it—or fear that he still might. This is rock not just on the edge, but over it. (p. 67)

There are a few precious moments in rock when you can hear a musician overcoming both his own limits and the restrictions of the form. At those times, the music flows into something so awesome that its force is undeniable…. For Springsteen, the watershed came on his second album. If he has already written greater music, explored the possibilities of his ideas more completely, made better recordings, none of it can ever sound quite this fresh. Neither he, nor we, will ever again be quite so astonished by the dimensions of his talent. (p. 69)

Bruce Springsteen's combination of showmanship and musicianship, his recklessness, and his dogged commitment to the pursuit of perfection, harked back to the Presley-led Fifties and to the Sixties when Jagger was really sashaying and the Beatles could spin the world with a nod of their heads. Audiences responded immediately because they had missed this combination, or else had never known it. In Springsteen, the Seventies had acquired their first complete star, one who did not have to compartmentalize his talents. (p. 83)

Born To Run was an instant classic. Anyone who loves rock and roll must respond to its catalogue of styles, the rough and tough music, the lyrics that sum up the brightest hopes—and some of the darkest aspects—of the rock and roll dream….

Born To Run makes no stylistic breakthroughs, as the fundamental Elvis Presley and Beatles recordings had done. But it does represent the culmination of twenty years of rock and roll, and when it was released in October, 1975, it was the strongest possible testimony to the continued vitality of that tradition. (p. 108)

[Born To Run] is a record that explores the horizon and examines people whose horizons are closing in….

Born To Run is as locked into an America of screen doors, fast cars and casual violence as the Beatles' "Penny Lane" is locked into the English everyday. To miss the point is to miss the reason why Bruce Springsteen is such a powerful influence on his fans. As the American Incarnate, he has become the first American hard rock hero since … well, I'll argue, since Elvis himself. (p. 109)

If the meaning of "punk" has changed drastically since 1975, Born To Run must be counted as the record that set the stage for its re-emergence at all. It was a record that took the music from the hands of craftsmen and profiteers and gave it back to the sort of people who loved it because they lived it.

But Born To Run is much more than a resurrection of the punk esthetic. It is also the story of where such people had been since the rocker became an artiste: truly Nowhere. Born To Run is a record for everyone who grew up during the heyday of Woodstock and peace and love and couldn't embrace such foppish trappings. Everyone in America with a chip on his shoulder can accept these stories. In fact, the little stories add up to one big story, one that simply follows a boy and his girlfriend through a long, tragicomic day, a bit like American Graffiti without the saccharine. In some ways, though, it is more like Mean Streets: There is a sense that every life we encounter has a half-realized potential not just for violence but for catastrophe….

The record moves through a series of encounters, some of which are flashbacks—"Tenth Avenue Freeze-out," "Night," "She's The One"—but all of which are harrowingly current in their emotions. "Backstreets" ends Side One evoking the heat of the afternoon; "Born To Run" begins the second side with the early evening mist. By the time "Jungleland" is over, we have reached dawn of the next day. Much has happened, here in Nowhere, but nothing is finished. There is the feeling that these characters may be condemned to repeat such days forever.

"Thunder Road" is a statement of purpose; in its way, it encapsulates the whole story of the album. It celebrates the virtues of day-to-day living and loving, while articulating the hero's deepest fears…. (p. 110)

This is not a story of salvation or heroism (searching for such imponderables is declared a "waste"), yet there's always a chance if the girl (here Mary, though she has other names) will only believe as deeply as the singer: "Roll down your window and let the wind blow back your hair/The night's bustin' open/These two lanes will take us anywhere."

Cars and guitars are not a panacea, of course—but they may be a way of escaping these cruel streets, of leaving the poverty and desperation of the empty lives around them. The singer has both car and guitar, and he's splitting; it's up to Mary (and to every listener) to take a chance with him, or to risk being trapped. To call this temptation isn't fair—anyone half-alive has to take the chance; this romantic ambition is too seductive to ignore. (pp. 110, 112)

"Backstreets" and "Born To Run" are alternate consequences of running away. (Perhaps "running away" is a bit extreme; as Pete Townshend has said, rock will not let you run away from your problems—but it will let you dance all over them.) Neither of the songs' locations is geographically far removed from the other, but psychically the distance is extreme. Taken separately, they are impressive. Taken together, these two numbers alone would be enough to make Springsteen's reputation as one of the great rock writers, singers and musicians….

There's something furious about ["Born to Run"'s] celebration of life; there's a sense of what price a man must pay to attain such peak experiences in this world. Even here Springsteen hasn't completely escaped the world of small town New Jersey—in fact, he doesn't seem to want to. Perhaps it's symbolic that Springsteen the man still chooses to reside there. As Jay Gatsby discovered (and as Magic Rat will learn in a few moments) there is no way out…. (p. 112)

"Born To Run" is a snapshot of this endlessly circled paradise, girls primping their hair, boys trying on hard faces. It is impossible to hear it without some apprehension—what might happen is anyone's guess: The place can explode at any second. In its way, "Born To Run," as lively a piece of music as anyone has ever made, is a song about death; consider the title's allusion to the old punk tattoo, "Born To Lose." It is a message of hope, but also a message of doom. Like the ghost-lovers of "Thunder Road," the heroes of "Born To Run" are condemned to roam the strip forever, seeking what cannot be found.

In "Backstreets," Springsteen's roving punk loses everything to love. In the midst of all this fantasy, the song serves as a blast of icy reality—a paranoid's reality, maybe, but real enough. "Backstreets" is a song in which innocence is not so much lost as discarded. But it is also a song about how even rebels try to hold onto their illusions. Its opening lines are ominous:

              One soft, infested summer
              Me and Terry became friends
              Tryin' in vain to breathe the fire
              We was born in

Those words come as close to poetry as any lyrics in rock but they have much more to offer than verbal felicity. "Backstreets" establishes a situation in which a man and a woman are not just lovers, but best friends; in which the lover's loss is not mourned because she is an idealized angel, but because it robs the singer of a special companion who shares what seemingly cannot be shared. In a medium that has been noted for its unyielding dominance by males, and for its callous attitude toward women, "Backstreets" is a landmark. Terry is neither Bob Dylan's goddess/angel "Isis," nor the "Stupid Girl" of Mick Jagger's and Neil Young's fantasies. If she seems a dream, that's only because she is an equal—something people rarely are in life.

But Terry leaves the singer, and he is crushed, bellowing his hurt and disbelief throughout the song. Without her, he may have to grow up—in the worst sense of that term—exchanging his dreams and hopes for "maturity," or whatever it is that society calls a life without prospects.

It would be a mistake to consider Springsteen the protagonist of these songs. The emotions are real, but the actions aren't his. The characters are idealized and universalized, and their function is to symbolize and develop the themes of the songs. In a sense, Springsteen is all of the men and most of the women on this album; but in that same sense, so is any listener.

This is never more clear than in "Jungleland," the miniopera that ends Born To Run. Springsteen is no more Magic Rat in this song than director Martin Scorsese is one of the crazy aspiring hoods in Mean Streets. But, like Scorsese's, Springsteen's remove is not the detachment of the exploiter; rather, he keeps his distance in order to maintain artistic perspective. And his ability to create dramatic situations and arresting characters is unparalleled in contemporary popular music. The links between his characters are by now patent—Magic Rat is Spanish Johnny, and Bruce has suggested that "Jungleland" might be what happened to Johnny after he left Puerto Rican Jane's bed and went out into the night at the conclusion of "Incident On Fifty-Seventh Street." (pp. 112-13)

Darkness on the Edge of Town is one of the most complex rock records ever made, a cycle of songs that continually turns back upon itself in obsessive pursuit of the Big Secrets. But the record's themes might be understood even without lyrics…. All of it points toward something—not the darkness per se, but what might be concealed there, discoverable only by those with immense vision and will.

You could say that this music is about survival, but not the easy kind that pop musicians and consciousness cults like to talk about. This sort of survival isn't about being "happy" or having "fun," or resolving the dilemmas of being sensually satiated. In this context, that kind of "survival"—in which demons are neither conquered nor conquering, but simply ignored—is far more meaningless than death itself could ever be. For Springsteen, survival is a matter of facing up to everything that saps psychic and physical strength: it means taking life on its own terms, and never giving in. (p. 152)

[For] all the cars, the violence and the searching, the dominant image of Darkness on the Edge of Town is labor. There are lines about working in "Badlands," "Adam Raised a Cain," "Racing in the Streets," "The Promised Land," "Factory," and "Prove It All Night" and in three of the other four songs, there are references to wealth or the lack of it. But Springsteen's art is not social realism; he speaks so much of working because jobs are the overwhelming concern of the lives he writes about. (p. 154)

[In a way, the most remarkable accomplishment of Darkness on the Edge of Town] is its spirit of compassion and reconciliation for everyone and everything that had ever been falsely blamed. The apex of that spirit is "Adam Raised a Cain," in which Springsteen sees himself not only as a product of a specific social situation, but literally as his father's heir….

[This] is the story of all sons, all fathers. And by telling it in terms of murder—the first murder, a fratricide—Springsteen makes all generations brothers, understanding once and for all that if there is an enemy, its face is not necessarily human. The fractured chords that lead into the song render the guitar a torture device and establish the motivation of the entire album: determination to break out of the vicious circle of pain and futility that robs people of the best parts of their lives….

Springsteen isn't only describing working-class lives at their bleakest, he is writing about people who are breaking through these barriers. (p. 155)

Dave Marsh, in his Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story (copyright © 1979 by Dave Marsh; reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.; lyrics reprinted by permission of Bruce Springsteen), Doubleday, 1979, 176 p.