In 1979 Springsteen set about making the follow up to The Darkness on the Edge of Town. He had some hold overs from that album’s sessions (‘Sherry Darling’, ‘Ramrod’ and ‘The Ties that Bind’ for starters) but at this point he was  writing songs at the same frequency most pass gas.

It was meant to be a single album that lead away from the more severe sound and approach of its predecessor and showcase the breadth of styles and joyousness of his band’s live sets of the time. Ten tracks, in, out and released late 1979 with a tour to follow, of course. And it almost was. A ten song album, The Ties That Bind was prepared and ready but then… Bruce held back. Because perched at the end of that single album was ‘The River’.

It’s a monumental song. When I got into Bruce via the 1995 Greatest Hits it was this one that caught my ear and made me pay attention. It still does. As with most of the more serious songs on The River the lyrics and themes aren’t as poetic as he’d written before but it’s the belief with which he sings them, the genuine investment which he puts into them that makes them so essential – these aren’t pop songs that can just be sung or waltzed trough, the material demands presence over phoning it in and if you try to sing these songs without giving it your all it will tell. From ‘The River’ to ‘Point Blank’ there’s no argument for a second that he isn’t 100% IN these songs and even after performing them countless times, live it’s clear that this is still the case . That’s why they reverberated at the time and why they continue to do so.

Writing what would become the title track of the eventual double had opened a new avenue, and Springsteen would go on to write more songs about men and women, their relationships and coming to terms with life’s hardships and would develop a much larger album to contain what he saw as the paradoxes of life; the joy and celebration of rock ‘n’ roll, but also its hardness. He wanted an album that continued the stories and themes he’d begun writing about on Darkness but one that didn’t wallow in them and would let in the light with the music that made his concerts such a revelation. He wrote so many more songs that three of those from the original single album were consigned to vaults (including ‘Loose Ends‘ much to Van Zandt’s chagrin). *

For my money it’s a good thing Springsteen did pull back the single album. That first one didn’t contain tracks like ‘Point Blank’ or ‘Independence Day’ (both further holdovers from The Darkness on the Edge of Town) and those other songs like  ‘Fade Away’, ‘Drive All Night’ and ‘Wreck on the Highway’ rank among his finest. I’ve already said that ‘Point Blank’ is one of my favourites elsewhere so will instead leave ‘Drive All Night’ here, one that I discovered via the underrated film Copland.

As important as I think those more serious songs are, the album’s duality is what marks it out in Bruce’s catalogue. There’s nothing really like it in terms of the full-spectrum or in terms of its sound. After years of sessions, agonising over track listing and capturing the right sound in the cavernous room they were recording in, the album that arrived was something much rawer than its predecessor. Gone were the wall-of-sound theatrics of Born To Run or the tense energy of Darkness.. in their place was a looser, more raucous garage-rock style (Van Zandt with a much larger production role) with a raw, jubilant sound and some of Springsteen’s finest vocals.

While there’s a couple of less-than-classics on the first half,  (but even Crush On You has a catchy-as-a-cold riff)  kicking off with ‘The Ties That Bind’ there’s a run of pure gold on it: ‘Jackson Cage, Two Hearts, Independence Day, Hungry Heart, Out In The Street (“oh oh oh oh oh!”) that makes for a near unbeatable half-hour of listening and was his most unabashed run of rock music to date.

Even the second half of the album, home to some of Springsteen’s heaviest material (just look at the lyrics to the closing ‘Wreck on the Highway’), features some of his most out-and-out direct rock music. From ‘Cadillac Ranch’ to the most obvious, daftly joyous and infectious mission-statement he’s made:

Whenever you read those stories about Bruce turning up at local shows and getting up on stage to cut loose, you know (hope) it’s going to be with those songs that represent the lighter half of The River and his catalogue. He’s not going to get up draw out ‘Point Blank’ or ‘Ghost of Tom Joad’ he’s going to strap on the guitarist’s spare and blast through those straight-ahead, life affirming songs that he does so bloody well like ‘You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)’ or he’ll give it the “let’s roadhouse” and kick into ‘Ramrod’ and the place will go fucking nuts.

So with so much pure Springsteen gold, why doesn’t it sit at the top? Personally, I think Bruce is at his best when focused. A double album is a lot to give attention to – twenty tracks doesn’t necessarily make for one session and the jarring nature of it can at times mean a slight stumble in flow. It’s a sod on vinyl but even when playing it in the car on CD, by the time I’ve made it through to the end of the second disc, the start of the album all the way back at ‘The Ties That Bind’ seems like a long time ago and isn’t as fresh in the ears as, say, ‘Radio Nowhere’ is come ‘Devil’s Arcade.’  However, it’s easily Top Five (and I’m sure it’s atop many a list) because what comes between those two distant points is so fucking good.

Even Steven Van Zandt admitted; “If it had been a single album, it would have been appreciated more, especially if he had put more of the pop-rock stuff on there. It would have been our biggest album. All you gotta do is throw on “The River” — that’s all the content you need. A little of Bruce’s content goes a long way. But he felt he had to do eight or ten songs like that.”

It was appreciated – critics fell over themselves to hand plaudits to its “weighty conclusions, words to live by”**, it topped the charts in the US and did well elsewhere too, going on to shift sufficient copies to sit immediately behind his two Born.. albums in terms of overall sales. Yet it’s often overlooked in his catalogue, not only because of its length but because, perhaps, it also sits between those two periods – it’s nestled between the breakout of Born To Run and Darkness and the massive explosion of Born In The USA.

With twenty tracks written and recorded at a period that Springsteen and the E Street Band were untouchable, it’s  got the lot: from the silly (‘Crush On You’) to the serious (‘Wreck On The Highway’), everything in between, including Bruce’s first Top Ten hit (‘Hungry Heart’). The River is the best one-stop slab introduction for anyone who wants to get a grip on every aspect of his writing.

Highlights: We’re well into 5 Star territory here so, as before: The whole bloody thing.

*these are far from the only songs recorded during this period consigned to the vaults. Most of Disc 2 of Tracks contained songs from this period whose omission boggled the brain and then The Ties That Bind: The River Collection set offered even more. My favourite:

**Rolling Stone, of course.

“This boardwalk life for me is through
You know you ought to quit this scene too…”

What a difference six months can make. After his début failed to propel him to the dizzying heights hoped for by his signing as a ‘new Dylan’, Bruce Springsteen entered 914 Studios in New York to record his second album. This time, though, things would be a little different. For one, Bruce wanted more control of the sound and production. For another, and perhaps prompting the former, Springsteen was fired up about playing with his embryonic E Street Band and had reignited his passion for a big, full-band sound that was absent from Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ.

Everything on here is aiming for epic – the sound, the instrumentation and even the characters. Before he started singing about the less fanciful Marys, Wendys and Joes his New York and New Jersey characters were more colourful than a ‘gang meeting’ on Hill Street Blues. On The Wild, The Innocent… there’s Power Thirteen and his girl Little Angel, Sandy, Kitty, Big Pretty,  Catlong, Missy Bimbo, the Flying Zambinis, Margarita, Sampson, Tiny Tim, Spanish Johnny, Puerto Rican Jane, Billy, Diamond Jackie, Little Dynamite and Little Gun, Jack the Rabbit and Weak Knees Willie, Sloppy Sue and Big Bones Billy all amidst a maelstrom of boy prophets, Latin lovers and hard girls on Easy Street. Not to mention a certain girl called Rosie. All within just seven songs.

And what songs they are. Here Bruce ditched the rhyming dictionary and attempts to sing a novel at speed in every verse, embraced the opportunity offered by the band and delivered a set of songs with more ambition in terms of lyrics and scope than you’d have guessed possible of him just six months earlier. While personally I’ve never been hugely fond of the opening cut (it’s down to that phunk keyboard line dancing all over it like some platform-shoed drunk disco elephant) there’s no denying its quality. Other than that, every other song here gets a five star rating from me.

With its wistful tale of Madame Marie, ‘4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)’  alone shows the strides Springsteen took as a songwriter between albums and the benefits of road-testing songs before getting into the studio. It’s easy to see why Federici asked to play this showcase on his last performance with the band and this most romantic of Bruce’s songs remains a live highlight decades later.

‘Kitty’s Back’ is a monster of a tune, clocking in at over seven minutes and showcasing Springsteen’s guitar chops (again absent through Greetings..) and proving what a wild, R&B/Soul/Jazz/Rock powerhouse outfit his band was. I’ve heard criticism that ‘Wild Billy’s Circus Story’ takes itself too seriously but to that I say “arseholes”. It’s a cracking, fun little tune and contains a great lyric: “the runway lies ahead like a great false dawn”. It’s odd but I think that Springsteen’s lyrics often get overlooked as some of the real nuggets like this one are often missed when reflecting on the overall story of the song. At just 23 Bruce was already coming up with some great lines.

Listening back through these albums has meant I’ve been discovering little gems that I’d almost forgotten and that’s certainly true of ‘Wild Billy’s Circus Story’. It also means my young son has been getting introduced to these and along with calls for this one (the “Elephant Song” based on Gary Tallent’s tuba blasts) he’s surely one of precious-few three year old’s calling out for “Rosie!”

Ah yes, ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)’. There’s no getting away from just how fucking good this song is. Described by Bruce as an early ‘Born To Run’ but with more humour, this is a real indicator as to where Springsteen’s sound was going. Just listen to the mix of sax and guitar around the 5:10 mark, you half expect “the highway’s jammed…” to come barrelling in. In this instance, it goes back to the party instead. Rolling Stone have described this song as “a raucous celebration of desire.” It is a big, beautiful and triumphant song and easily one of Springsteen’s best and does remain the album’s biggest sign post as to what’s to come both in terms of it’s “it’s time to bust out of here” and it’s sound, made especially arresting by it’s sequencing.

The prototype of Bruce’s ‘busting outta here’ song sits between his two most unabashed and wonderful epics; ‘Incident on 57th Street‘ and ‘New York City Serenade’. ‘Incident on 57th Street’ is a massive song in terms of Bruce’s song-writing. It’s like listening to the sound of all the pieces aligning properly as Bruce steps aside and delivers one of his finest – and earliest – songs sung from an observational point that’s far greater than the sum of its parts.

Why I mention sequencing, though, is that the sound of the final, gentle tickle of piano notes is quickly blasted away by the sheer force and power of ‘Rosie’, making the juxtaposition between the two styles all the more evident.

And then there’s ‘New York City Serenade’. You know 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 not 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’*. I’ve played this song to people who thought they knew what to expect from a Springsteen song and they’ve always had to question whether it was really “that Born in the USA guy”.

One of my all-time favourite songs.

 What this also means is that Side B of this album might just be the finest 25 minutes of music put to vinyl.

Easily Springsteen at his most expansive, poetic and romantic, The Wild, the Innocent & The E Street Shuffle is a beautiful embrace of and gentle kiss goodbye to his boardwalk life as he takes his characters and breaks them out of their surroundings in pursuit of a new dream.

Oddly, though, his record label didn’t agree that the album was up to scratch. When Springsteen handed it in, the allies he’d had at Columbia were no longer in place. Instead of receiving the great feedback he’d hoped for, Bruce was instead told that the players were sub par and it was suggested that he re-cut the majority of it with professional studio musicians. Of course, this wasn’t an option. Unfortunately, sticking to his guns meant that Columbia buried the album. No release fanfare, no promotion, little distribution. Bruce would play shows in towns where they had no idea the album had even been released.

Thankfully, though, Bruce still had what it takes to cut it live and lay down a killer show. This lead to two things. The first was catching the eye of Jon Landau and the infamous  “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” review that would lead to the pair’s friendship and Landau becoming Springsteen’s manager.  Secondly, Springsteen took to taking aim at his record company during his on-stage patter. One particularly embittered voicing of his frustration happened at a college where the son of the label’s boss happened, unknown to Bruce, to be in attendance. Legend has it he called his father, explained just how much of an amazing act Springsteen was and what was being said and the head of the label soon sat down with his charge and said words along the lines of “what can we do to get this working?”

With Landau and his record label supporting him, it would be time to shed the mythic tales and follow The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle with a last chance power drive…

Highlights: ALL OF IT

*You’d sit on it and it would go “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh!”

“Shelter line stretchin’ ‘round the corner
Welcome to the new world order
Families sleepin’ in their cars in the southwest
No home, no job, no peace, no rest”

I’m starting to think that the poor reception that greeted Human Touch and Lucky Town kinda knocked Bruce’s confidence a little heavier than he’d let on. Going by the fact that, at the time, he was still actively fighting depression and going through a lot of personal changes, it’s not that big a surprise. One could imagine that, were he feeling more resilient mentally he may have said “nuts” to the negative reviews, gone back to the woodshed and kicked it up a notch. Instead, during the period between the end of what’s now called ‘The Other Band’ and the start of the E Street Reunion tours precious little of what Springsteen wrote saw the light of day (pun intended).

Now to me – and I hope others – this is a real burr because what recorded material from 1994 onwards has reached the eager ears of listeners is gold and does show that the man was more than capable of saying “nuts” and going back to work. There’s an entire album’s worth (close to two*) of material that was shelved and will likely never be released. There’s been some hints as to what it contains – like the E Street reworking of ‘Waiting on the End of the World‘ – but it’s likely to remain unheard save a (much prayed for) Tracks 2**emerging and all you need to is cast a look at the material Bruce did release from that era, all with a certain understated charm, to know why we’re missing out: ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, ‘Secret Garden’, ‘Blood Brothers’ (the latter two written during a run of inspiration ahead of and during the E Street reunion for Greatest Hits), ‘Missing‘, ‘Lift Me Up‘, ‘Dead Man Walking’, even ‘Without You‘ has a joyful charm, ‘Nothing Man’ originated during this period… and then there’s this thing he wrote called ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’.

‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ was written around the time of Greatest Hits and Bruce even took the band through a few takes but, much like elusive ‘Electric Nebraska Sessions’, it wasn’t right. So, instead of the presumed course after that compilation’s reunion, Bruce took a sharp left: he assembled a group of songs about the American South West and, for the most part, embellished them with little more than his voice and some delicate guitar patterns weaving through the odd keyboard drone (something that started with ‘One Step Up’ and featured heavily in his 90s output to good effect).

And what a group of songs they are***. More restrained and narrow focused than his earlier solo (masterpiece) Nebraska, these songs actively incorporated silence and hushed phrasing (so much so that the tour that followed was often referred to as the ‘Shut the Fuck Up’ tour) to create memorable and affecting stories that lingered. Listening back to this one I’d forgotten just how powerful some of these are, take the tale in ‘Sinaloa Cowboys’ as an example:

Here the stories are perfectly succinct and the delicate touches of instrumentation mean that in their simplicity they achieve what the over-worked attempts of Devils & Dust failed to: stories with bite with music as a subtle backdrop rather than focus.

There are four songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad, title track included, for which Bruce assembled a small backing band – including Gary Tallent and Danny Federici – to add a little colour to the sonic palette and these serve as beautiful counterpoint to the otherwise stark, bitter-sweet beauty of songs like ‘The Line’. ‘Straight Time’ and ‘Dry Lightning’ may not linger as much as, say, the powerfully stark ‘Highway 29’ which could slot right at home on Nebraska, but the title track and ‘Youngstown’ are both essential Bruce songs.

‘Youngstown’ has become such a torch-burning, electrically recast centre-point of E Street band shows since the Reunion tour that it’s easy to forget just how strong the original is:

The other reason Ghost of Tom Joad is an essential part of Springsteen’s catalogue is that it finds him rediscovering his voice. Not the hushed tones of the vocals but the no-linger inward focus. This was Bruce looking for inspiration outside of the men vs women themes he’d used for the previous three (released, that is) albums, but looking at the struggles of others – as he says; ““the songs on it added up to a reaffirmation of the best of what I do. The record was something new, but was also a reference point to the things I tried to stand for and still wanted to be about as a songwriter.””

Received to slighter commercial success but pretty strong reviews with Rolling Stone reckoning it “among the bravest work that anyone has given us this decade”  (and a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album), it perhaps receives a harsher view in retrospect from some corners than it deserves. Some criticisms fired at this album focus around the hushed, minimal delivery or the lack of fire and brimstone given to the recorded versions of songs like ‘Ghost of Tom Joad’ and ‘Youngstown’ compared to their now live rendering but, if you ask me, they’re missing the point. The songs on this album (something of a concept album in that respect) all focus on the- as  his own website puts it – ” poverty, immigration and the brittle troubles of Americans and Mexicans in the Southwest.” The desert can be a cold, bleak place with vast empty spaces. The Ghost of the Tom Joad, sonically, is the sound of these oft-broken characters staring into that space after a day in the cruel, blinding light of its heat with acceptance / surrender of the inevitable. It’s not a time for boot, stomping rock and, in the brittle, fragility of its delivery of these stories Ghost of Tom Joad remains an understated and captivating masterpiece.

Highlights: ‘Ghost of Tom Joad’, ‘Youngstown’, ‘Highway 29’, ‘Sinaloa Cowboys’, ‘The Line’, ‘Galveston Bay’.

Not so highlights: The exclusion of ‘Brothers Under The Bridge’ which could’ve elevated this album to virtually unimpeachable. But then everybody needs a ‘Blind Wille McTell’.

*Depending on how much different side-men know: Bruce has spoken about an album of more relationship songs in the minimal ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ style, Shane Fontayne has given interviews that hint at yet another. Could just be crossed wires, could be another well of unheard material. He was certainly clocking up recording sessions during this period.

** At the time of Tracks 75% of Bruce’s material was unreleased. Even the number of songs settled on for Tracks was then culled from 100 to 66. What was on those extra two discs? Surely more than went on to make up The Promise and The Ties That Bind?

***Here, again, though he wrote some 22 songs. There’s tales of two albums’ worth of songs – one with the band backing – being recorded. Some would pop up on tour, some never to be sung again. FFS.