From: http://bobcerm.blogdrive.com


Bruce Springsteen

The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle Review

02/17/2005 4:09 AM, AMG

Album Release Date: 1973
Label: Columbia
Genres: Rock, Classic Rock, Mainstream Rock

Bruce Springsteen expanded the folk-rock approach of his debut album,
Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., to strains of jazz, among other
styles, on its ambitious follow-up, released only eight months later.
His chief musical lieutenant was keyboard player David Sancious, who
lived on the E Street that gave the album and Springsteen's backup
group its name. With his help, Springsteen created a street-life
mosaic of suburban society that owed much in its outlook to Van
Morrison's romanticization of Belfast in Astral Weeks. Though
Springsteen expressed endless affection and much nostalgia, his
message was clear: this was a goodbye-to-all-that from a man who was
moving on. The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle represented
an astonishing advance even from the remarkable promise of Greetings;
the unbanded three-song second side in particular was a flawless
piece of music.


Musically and lyrically, Springsteen had brought an unruly muse under
control and used it to make a mature statement that synthesized
popular musical styles into complicated, well-executed arrangements
and absorbing suites; it evoked a world precisely even as that world
seemed to disappear. Following the personnel changes in the E Street
Band in 1974, there is a conventional wisdom that this album is
marred by production lapses and performance problems, specifically
the drumming of Vini Lopez. None of that is true. Lopez's busy Keith
Moon style is appropriate to the arrangements in a way his
replacement, Max Weinberg, never could have been. The production is
fine. And the album's songs contain the best realization of
Springsteen's poetic vision, which soon enough would be tarnished by
disillusionment. He would later make different albums, but he never
made a better one. The truth is, The Wild, the Innocent & the E
Street Shuffle is one of the greatest albums in the history of rock &
roll.


William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide