Dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funnybone, that’s where they expect it least

Bruce Springsteen: Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

There’s a song called “Speed” by Canadian hip-hop act Bran Van 3000 that strings together a lot of Bruce Springsteen song titles into a narrative. Speed, as a concept, is a cornerstone of Springsteen’s songwriting, particularly in these early years. The speed of cars and motorcycles, of love and debauchery. These are songs of escape velocities. The music is meandering and the verbal calisthenics stretch and shape meter, tumbling over boundaries in their lexical excess.

At this early point in his career, Springsteen had the mantle of a sort of working class Bob Dylan, rich strings of verbal imagery painting only slightly surreal portraits of youthful ennui and growth, ranging from the grim and world-weary to the starry-eyed and naive. The songs are frequently rambling and blissfully incoherent. Both “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirits in the Night” were later hits for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (“For You” was also covered by Mann, but less successfully), with highly condensed version of the lyrics, but here they are in all their wild verbosity, which makes for such delightfully weird lines as ‘go-kart Mozart was checkin’ out the weather chart to see if it was safe to go outside.’ “Blinded by the Light” is a rambler, but quick, dotted with references to Peter Pan and various bizarre Jersey folk, and it opens this debut album with a brief explanation of how they got here, if in an obscure, stream-of-consciousness sort of way.

“Growin’ Up” is a more specific chronicle of Springsteen’s Jersey youth, the cruising of main drags, getting high, and ditching school, the stuff he would later mine for his landmark Born to Run album. “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” picks up the theme of speed again, on a psychedelic Vistavision ride into town courtesy Mercury, Joan Fontaine, wizards, hardhats, and black panthers. “Lost in the Flood” provides Greetings with Springsteen’s first powerful epic, images of apocalypse, a Vietnam vet ‘Bronx apostle’ Jimmy the saint, with the populace blood-drunk, the pavement stained with it, wind and fire consuming all that someone once was. “The Angel” is even more steeped in doom, ‘the interstate choked with nomadic hordes in Volkswagen vans with full running boards dragging great anchors followin’ dead-end signs into the sores.’ “Spirit in the Night” is much more relaxed than the almost comically overstated Mann version, a curious tale of a drunken impromptu lake escapade.

In all, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. is a strong, weird debut, and a very different view of Springsteen as a songwriter than what he would come to be. This is a much looser, charmingly frayed version of the E Street Band, and some damn fine rock and roll.

****

~ by jshopa on July 30, 2008.