The Boss Recovery™ Dept. - Bring On The Band

John Hammond - the legendary John Hammond, as we always have to remind ourselves - signed Springsteen because he thought he heard the New Dylan. He liked the prolix troubadour, not the rock n' roller who'd been building a rep as a viscerally exciting performer since the late 'sixties. So the first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, is a compromise between what Springsteen (and his fans) wanted and expected, and what John Hammond wanted, and it's forever flawed as a result.

So what we have here is, sorta kinda maybe, the album Springsteen might have made, had he not had to accede to Hammond's well-meaning authority. Out go the angsty Guthrie strums, and in come the band compositions cut a little later and passed over for The Wild The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle. This isn't such a cheat as it looks on paper. The Wild is a perfect album, impossible to improve by addition or reduction or tweaking or a new cover. It is a masterpiece, and the rejected tracks didn't make the cut because they're not quite up there. Sonically, their thinner sound is more consistent with Greetings, and some of the lyric and melodic ideas resurface to greater effect on the third album. And guess what. Their incorporation creates a fantastic first album, twelve songs, each side finishing with an epic. It's like this was meant to be, and now it is. It captures the boardwalk strut of a rock n' roll band about to make it big, having the freaking time of their young lives, and I'll take this over anything post-Born To Run. And in a way it completes a seasonal trilogy; spring to the summer/fall of The Wild The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle, and the winter of Born To Run.

I've kept to the rules of using only tracks that Springsteen deemed worthy of release, and avoided the many bootlegs from this period. This isn't an archivist's complete recordings project - fooey on that - it's a playable album, one I'd have worn out. That track list in full (click for big):

Note: I've been focussing on the Boss maybe a little too much. But this turned out so swell I had to put it up fer youse bums. We'll give him - and you - a break for a while, but there's more to come.