“Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” is an unabashed ode to financial, familial and spiritual freedom bursting at the seams with rock and roll vigor. It was Born To Run that brought him commercial success, but E Street Shuffle was the establishing marker of that record’s tone. Musically, Springsteen forges a new path for his career with the E Street Band by his side. Maturity doesn’t ring true just on the lyric sheet though. And because of where Springsteen was when he released this record-on the verge of becoming the next rock ‘n’ roll star of being a kid from New Jersey who made his own way in the music industry – the contrasts are held together by an undeniable honesty. E Street Shuffle is an album of contrasts of the way youthful naiveté (“4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”) is constantly threatened by an impending realism (“Incident on 57th Street,” “New York City Serenade”). Like the New Jersey version of Bob Kaufman, he mixes glowing imagery with a harsh street reality. Over a shimmering piano and organ, he weaves the tale of Spanish Johnny and Puerto Rican Jane. “Incident on 57th Street” may be the finest example of a Springsteen who was moving towards his magnum opus. Where genre fusion can occasionally breed tension, E Street Shuffle gleefully coalesces. All of this comes to a head at the midway point, where Springsteen’s guitar faces off against the rest of the E Street Band in a blissful blend of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. The seven-minute “Kitty’s Back” boasts the same kind of communal feel, the sax provided by Clarence Clemons and Garry Tallent’s bass lines anchoring the shifting time signatures and chaotic guitar solos. “The E Street Shuffle” opens with a mess of horns slowly working their way into a full blown arrangement, as Springsteen’s funky guitar and David Sancious’ electric piano penetrates the haphazard intro. Maybe it was his own attempt to shake the Dylan comparison or the fact that Greetings went generally unnoticed commercially, but whatever it was, E Street Shuffle represents Springsteen’s most far-reaching record, ambitiously blending his patented American rock and roll with shades of the blues, soul, jazz and R&B.Į Street Shuffle is a coming out party of sorts for one of the most famous backing bands of all time it’s a collaborative effort that contrasts the largely solo feel of Springsteen’s debut. Only seven months later, he released The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, a definite extension of Greetings but with a superior, staggering sense of ambition and growth. Like an untamed cross between a beat poet and a rock ‘n’ roll god, Springsteen debuted in 1973 with Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., a raucous set of thesaurus-pillaging tunes that garnered him a lot of comparisons to Bob Dylan. If Jack Kerouac captured the spirit of the American youth in the 1950s, then it wouldn’t be too far off to consider that Bruce Springsteen did the same for the 1970s. Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look. The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle
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