Might as well tackle the bull by the horns, as they say. Though who in their right mind would want to tackle a bull at all, let alone by the pointy end. Probably the same person who’s trying to find a ‘least’ track on a pretty-much faultless album. I reckon this is more one for Tom Cruise and his IMF team than it is for me. I don’t grin “like an idiot every fifteen minutes” though.

Put simply The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle is the beginning of Springsteen’s unimpeachable run of albums. It delivers on a promise that wasn’t all too apparent on his debut released just eight months prior. After plenty of shows with the fledgling E Street Band and with keyboard player David Sancious as his first musical lieutenant, the songs on The Wild.. add strains of jazz and other styles to Springsteen’s street-life scenes and boardwalk characters and while the lyrics still feel like he’s falling through the pages of a thesaurus, they’re getting ever tighter and more evocative. The run of ‘Incident on 57th Street’, ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)’ and ‘New York City Serenade’ mean that Side B is easily the greatest second half of any album out there alone.

Given the sheer brilliance of these early albums, while I hope it’s not needed, I’ll add a caveat to this that I’d rather take these songs other plenty of others and that ‘least’ is meant only in a relative sense. Now, with that being said I’m also fully aware that I’m probably committing an act of Bossphemy when I say…

Least: The E Street Shuffle

That’s definitely the sound of ‘boo’s not ‘Bruuuuce’ I hear right now, I’m sure. Again: I fucking LOVE this album. But there’s something about the opener in comparison to everything that follows that feels a little, well; lesser. It feels a little like Bruce is trying too hard to get that live show stopper song into the mix that he’d perfect with ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze Out’ and ‘Out In The Streets’.

Lyrically…. it’s a jumble. While just one song later we’ve got pure evocation with “the fireworks are hailin’ over Little Eden tonight, forcin’ a light into all those stoned-out faces left stranded on this Fourth of July” on ‘The E Street Shuffle’ we’ve got a ‘man-child’ giving double shots to ‘little girls’ and some dude called Power 13 and his girl Little Angel? Again, this is only a relative ‘least’ because I’m comparing it to the utter ‘provoke a gold-rush and mass migration to the west’ level of quality the rest of the album has both lyrically and musically.

There, that’s the hardest ‘least’ I’ve faced while putting this together. I need a lie down. But before I do…

Most: New York City Serenade

I’m not one to reinvent the wheel or work too hard – or hard at all – when I don’t have to. As such I’m going to borrow from my Least to Most take on The Wild The Innocent.. and say “there’s a few, a small few songs that I’ll listen to where the opening bar is so immediately ‘right’, so ‘spot on’ and tuned to me that it affects me to the core. It’s like an instant high. ‘New York City Serenade’ is one of those. That hammer of the piano strings, the cascade of notes that follows. Sometimes you’ll hear an intro that’s perfect and you’ll think ‘ok, how’s this gonna get marred?’ because not everything that follows can be as good. With ‘New York City Serenade’ everything works beautifully, the arrangement is so perfectly put together that every element just flows into the next in a way that makes it seem like effortless poetry. There’s not a single bum note or misstep in the entire song. Bruce Springsteen was 23 when he wrote and arranged ‘New York City Serenade.’ When I was 23 I though it was a good idea to call a band ‘Wookie Cushion’”.

This isn’t just my favourite song on this album, it’s one of my favourite songs of all time.

What are you thinking? Should I be strung up for suggesting ‘The E Street Shuffle’ is lesser than ‘Wild Billy’s Circus Story?’