Walk Tall or Don't Walk at All: The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (1973)

Today's selection:

(1973)

"All the romance and heartbreak, the veil of spotlights, and the windblown highway. A nomadic existence held together by music, camaraderie, and duct tape. And also an image evolved to fit the dreamy-urban-poet persona that inhabited so many songs on The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. In the thrall of (it) Bruce's entire personality seemed to have shifted." – Peter Ames Carlin

Bryan: I’m here once again with the Artist Formerly Known as the Honk Mahfah, Bryant Burnette, continuing our trek through the Boss' catalog. Before I bring him in, though: the below is the result of multiple back-and-forths over the past few months, at least a dozen spins of the record, googling, book-reading, you name it, as topped off with my sending Bryant the rough draft and some final editions and moving stuff around, etc. and then some final editing. You'd think after all that my scores would more or less settled. And yet as I listen to the album typing this up right now, I want to bump up all of my scores at least a quarter-point. It goes to show you how different speakers for analog-age albums, even digitally remastered ones, can often mean a whole different listening experience. I'm in my home office, writing this, and these cheap Dell speakers suit The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle quite well, I guess. Maybe I should have done all my original scoring at this computer!

Anyway! Bryant, welcome back. Peter Ames Carlin mentions in his book that Bruce had a "renewed passion for full-band rock 'n' roll" when he was recording this one. What’s your take on Bruce and the Boys’ 2^nd affair?

Bryant:  I think that Carlin’s assertion makes sense. It sounds like a more fully-engaged piece of work across the board. Asbury Park is the work of a songwriter/bandleader/performer with gobs of innate talent, but without the wisdom and experience to know precisely how to put it to use. That was coming, and quick, but it wasn’t there. I think it mostly is there for the second album.  It hadn’t been perfected yet, but perfection isn’t to be expected in a second album.

Bryan: Let’s line ‘em up and knock ‘em down.

"The E Street Shuffle" 

Bryan: Wow, this is quite a different tune for these guys. I like it, though. I like the stuff in the middle of the song the best, and the overdubbed solo. The first one, that is. The fade-out works for me. 3.5/5 

Bryant: 2.5/5  I got nothin' against this one, and it's beautifully played. But it's a little too laid-back, or something. Maybe this is my anti-jam-band tendency coming out, because that's what they're veering toward at times here. The production definitely is vastly better than on the previous album. 

Bryan: Definite jam band terrain. As is: 

"4th of July, Asbury Park" 

Bryan: Or at least the Grateful Dead, in some ways. I like the feel and mood and everything, pretty much, about this song, it just doesn't inspire quite the same passion in me as it seems to in others. Or I don't respond to the mythology of the song the same way Bruce himself does in interviews, maybe. Makes sense, though - this is his boardwalk tune, where I'll only ever be a tourist but he's an insider with miles of stories and observations.

The accordion on this one is great, and anyone who clicks through will hear Danny Federici's last performance with Bruce before shuffling off this mortal coil, as well as a moving little montage at performance's end. 3.5/5

Bryant: I love this one. Boy, Bruce sure did seem to be obsessed with drag queens during these first few years, didn't he? But they're just an accepted part of the landscape, which makes these songs kind of admirable from a modern-day perspective. 3.5/5 

Bryan: I wish he’d found a way to get this one to the Beach Boys. They've have done a nice job with it, with a nice Mike Love or Bruce Johnston lead vocal and the others harmonizing, preferably while Carl was still kicking.

"Kitty's Back"

Bryan: Fun guitar / very 70s sounding. (I thought of Wings a few times. Until Bruce started singing. Bruce and Paul share some vocal traits, to be sure, but not here.) Kind of a prog/trippy number for the E Street fellas, eh? I approve. 4/5 

Bryant: 3.5/5 This is deeply good stuff, here. Part of me wishes that the band HAD been able to do more jam-type stuff. I know, I was dissing that a few sentences ago. Not really, though, because this particular band is so good that I'd like to think I'd follow them anywhere. So maybe in some vault -- guarded like it was placed there by Gandalf himself -- there's hours and hours of tapes of them just riffing endlessly. If so and it ever gets released, I'm all over it.   

"Wild Billy's Circus Story" 

Bryan: More songs should have lines like "God save the human cannonball," in any context. This one's not bad and some of the vocals are funny or sound like fun, but not a fave. 2.5/5

Bryant: We're pretty much in agreement on this one. It's a song I always want to like; every time I give this album a spin, I'm like, 'maybe this'll be the time the circus song catches fire for me.' It never does. But I don't dislike it. It's a vastly-more-agreeable version of the sort of thing he was doing on the first album with "The Angel" and "Mary, Queen of Arkansas." And I kind of like the very last line, where somebody asks Billy if he wants "to join the big top." I'd have no issue with any Boss fan loving this one to pieces; I hope I can join 'em someday.  2.25/5   

"Incident on 57th Street" 

Bryan: Here's another good scoring example. I think there's really no difference in quality or performance between this and "Kitty's Back," but I like this one slightly more, so I add an arbitrary hundredth to my score. 4.1/5 Tough to make out some of the words for this sort of fairy tale. Big epic arrangement fits it well enough.  

Bryant: I love your explanations of the scoring process you're using. It all makes sense to me, but I'm stuck in remedial-score-assessment, so I'm reluctant to step beyond the quarter-point system. Even that is taking some adjustment! I see the appeal, though. With that in mind, I'm trying to be stingy with mine. I'm determined not to award a 4 or above to anything that I don't feel is basically a perfect song, and then use the quarters to illustrate the proximity to actual perfection (5). With that in mind, this song gets a 4.25/5 from me. I'm tempted to go slightly higher, though. I find this to be a deeply sad song; I assume ol' Spanish Johnny fails to ever come back from that meeting on the street. Toetags and metal tables for him after that, in my mind. But here he is, somehow frozen in time, making love to Puerto Rican Jane for all of eternity. I guess you could do worse.

Bryan: While we’re here, “Making Love to Puerto Rican Jane For All Eternity” is a criminally never-used title for a novel or movie. 

Bryant:  $40 million opening weekend, guaranteed.

Bryan: "Toetags and Metal Tables," too. 

"Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" 

Bryan: No complaints just not a fave. 3.25/5  I've seen this referred to as "the greatest rock and roll track of all time.” Sometimes the critical acclaim afforded to Springsteen borders on insane. It's a good tune but… I don’t know. I know I'm like the only Springsteen fan on the planet to feel this way, but to me, it’s borderline generic. 

Bryant: 4.75/5 You can probably tell from that score that I'm a huge fan of this one. And boy, I sure am. This is the sound of a guy who knows he's on the cusp of living exactly the life he wants to live. He wants to do it with this specific girl, but if she can't make it...? Well, that car is leaving with her or without her. I love the production, and the performance: the song constantly sounds like it's on the verge of falling apart, like everyone playing it is just barely managing to keep the energy flowing. They do, but only by the skin of their teeth.  Something hugely poetic in that for me, and prototypically Springsteenian.  

Bryan: Your enthusiasm for it is catchy. I give the early albums a lot of flak for their production sound, but I’ll definitely agree they got the right mix with this one. I guess people bugged him to play this live so much that he got an attitude about it and didn’t for years, or only rarely. 

He probably got tired of the girls running on stage to try and accosting him while trying to sing it. You'd think "nah" but everyone was a potential Squeaky Fromme!

Bryant: I’m not quite an expert enough to say, but my impression is that he’s grown comfortable with the fact that people love and revere him. That’d be a thing that would be difficult – to say the least – to cope with for anyone, so if he had trouble with it for a long time, who could blame him? It does as if he’s finally come around to thinking, "Hey, I guess this is just a big party, and it’s metaphorically being held in my house, so I gotta make sure all my guests have beer and pretzels."

Bryan: True. I can only assume celebrity - especially in the glare of the"face-searing spotlight" (as Ken Kesey put it somewhere, I think in Demon Box, good book - at least I used to like it back in the day) of mega-stardom - is, no matter how much anyone craves or pursues it, as disorienting as deep sea diving while on mescaline.

"New York City Serenade" 

"Fish la-ady! Fish la-ady!"

Bryan: I feel kind of similarly to this as I do to “Rosalita.” Cool lyrics and all, no complaints just not a fave. I always expect it to go into “Aqualung” at the very beginning, similar kind of piano intro. 3.25/5 

Bryant: 5/5 To be honest, I want to give this a 4/5, just to prove I can restrain myself. Plus, I've never been 100% sure the song actually makes any sense. I think it does; I think it probably makes all the sense in the world to Bruce, who just didn't necessarily feel like he needed to spell out exactly what it was that it meant. 

Bryant: I can remember the first time I ever heard the song, it was like time stood still. It was one of those moments where I couldn't believe what I was hearing, that was how utterly it captured something about my own emotional makeup. And I have no clear idea why that is! I'm not sure I ever want to unpack it, either, because the bottom line is, this song wrecks me. If I'm in the right mood, I'll cry the whole damn way through it, like the old wussy I am. It's by no means the only song that exists that has that sort of effect on me -- it's not even the only one by Springsteen -- but it's certainly among them, and that being the case, I can't be objective about it. It's a 5/5er for me all the way. Here's a great live version I'd never heard until just in the last few minutes: 

Bryan: I had no idea you liked it so much! More than me but hear, hear. That is indeed a kick-ass live version. I'm almost with you on a 5 for that performance.

Bryant: I remain slightly befuddled by some of the lyrics, but two bits always stand out strongly for me: "Save your notes; don't spend 'em on the blues, boy." Disrespectful to an entire genre, but beautifully said. And "It's a mad-dog's promenade, so walk tall; or, baby, don't walk at all." If I had ever pulled the trigger on writing a Springsteen overview for The Truth Inside The Lie, I might have considered calling it "Walk Tall Or Don't Walk At All."  It seems like kind of a perfect summation of Springsteen's attitude, particularly in these early days. 

Bryan: It's a great line. Totally. Just as a motto or as some kind of E Street Gang slogan. I wonder if this had some kind of influence on The Gunslinger? I think of this mainly for attitude, but also because of King’s introduction to the revised edition where he talks about storing up a reservoir of arrogance as a teen because once life gets done knocking you around as an adult, you’ll appreciate having had the extra pounds to lose, so to speak. It's not much of an overlap, but he was a huge Bruce fan (as well as highly impressionable.)

Bryant: It’s entirely possible. We know that King was(/is?) a Springsteen fan specifically, and that he’s a music fan generally. So I’m sure that some of the mood and attitude of Springsteen’s music filtered down into King’s work somehow. "New York City Serenade" doesn’t seem to me like it’d be King’s kind of jam, but I am basing that on very little. Anyways, for my part, I love this song every bit as much as "Born to Run" and "I'm on Fire."  Maybe even more, believe it or not!

FINAL

THOUGHTS

Bryan: Total 24 Avg 3.43 Much crisper production, and the band's matured into the studio for this 2nd effort. A good follow-up and great collection of tunes. There's a whole prog rock demographic of Bruce fans who graduated high school in 1973 who wax poetic about side 2 of this album, I bet.

Bryant: Total 25.75 total Average 3.68 It's such a short album that I got through the whole thing driving around doing pre-work errands this afternoon. A big leap over Welcome  to Asbury Park, but that seems sensible. Gonna be another big leap for next time, I expect. 

Bryan: These early years of the band would make a great movie. Very Americana. This is one of those Captain Obvious statements, but still.

Bryant: I feel certain that movie is going to happen one of these days.  How could it not?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

"Folkie trappings behind him, Springsteen has created a funky, vivacious rock and roll that's too eager and zany ever to be labeled tight, suggesting jazz heard through an open window or Latin music out in the street with zero conga drums. He celebrates youth in all its irresponsible compassion and doomed arrogance. This guy may not be God yet, but he has his sleeveless undershirt in the ring. A-” – Robert Chrisgau

SINGLES

Released: 1975 (Germany only)

PERSONNEL

The Boss – guitars, harmonica, mandolin, recorder, maracas, lead vocals

Big Man – saxophones, backing vocals

David Sancious – piano, organ (including solo on "Kitty's Back"), electric piano, clavinet, soprano saxophone on "The E Street Shuffle", backing vocals, string arrangement on "New York City Serenade"

Danny Federici – accordion, backing vocals, 2nd piano on "Incident on 57th Street", organ on "Kitty's Back"

Garry Tallent – bass, tuba, backing vocals

Mad Dog – drums, backing vocals, cornet on "The E Street Shuffle"

Richard Blackwell – conga, percussion