Ariel Swartley

The following long essay on the various pleasures of listening to Springsteen’s second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973) was written specifically for Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (1979), edited by Greil Marcus. Swartley is, she says, “a sucker for someone who takes rock and roll as a religion. . . .” In Springsteen, she sees many things: a romantic at heart, a mythmaker, a rock and roll storyteller, and a street poet with a bit of James Joyce and the Dovells in his corner boy swagger, as well as touches of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison.

The Wild, the Innocent and
the E Street Shuffle
Bruce Springsteen (Columbia 32432)
1974
from Stranded:
Rock and Roll flor a Desert Island

The band’s playing and the singer’s singing something about going home.

—“Incident on 57th Street”

 

■ IT MUST HAVE BEEN the summer of ’65 when Sandy’s, our late night rendezvous, closed down and the action moved across the street. The Cave & Pit was in tune with the times—two entrances and a wall down the middle that divided more than the bar and burger halves of the establishment. You didn’t just go in one door or the other; you picked a side and made a stand: dope or booze, freak or straight, FM or AM, dove or hawk. Lines were drawn down the middle of everything, including old friendships. But down in back where the jukeboxes were, there was a connecting door that was always open. And standing in that doorway you were on the firing line in the loudest confrontation of them all—the battle of the bands. Nightly the Kingsmen fought it out with Dylan, party boys against the prophet, Louie knocking at the gates of Eden. Usually I knew which side of the wall I belonged on (and where I couldn’t get served). But back between the Wurlitzers I was caught out on the fence, wanting both: the visions and the dumb exuberance, a prophet and a party, rock and rock and roll.

It still seems like the perfect combination. A kind of ethical hedonism, an enlightened savagery, a wise naiveté. An American dream out of Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain—but I don’t want to talk about history. All I want is for a voice to come out of the wilderness and the stereo to crackle in flames like the burning bush. I don’t want to have to ask, “Are you talking to me?” I want to know. And then I want to dance. In other words, I’m going to be a sucker for someone who takes rock and roll as a religion, and romanticizes the hell out of mundane details. For someone who says, “Sparks fly on E Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot.” Bruce Springsteen wins my heart with the first line of The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, wins it over and over again. Used to be only rock critics took lyrics that seriously and turned the romance of the streets so explicitly into myth. But while Springsteen’s making his pronouncements the horns are waggling their hips and sassing him. And just when you think the song’s going to collapse under the weight of its verses, the party-time chorus shouts the immortal instruction: “Everybody form a line.” Then the only thing left on anybody’s mind is the latest step—the E Street Shuffle or the Bristol Stomp. James Joyce meets the Dovells? Creation myths from The Land of a Thousand Dances? Yes, I say. Yes. Yes.

With its mumbled lyrics, its street slang, nicknames, and local references, the song, “The E Street Shuffle,” seems as deliberately insular as the kids it’s describing. But then dance songs have always flaunted their authenticity and traded on an exclusivity that’s an open invitation: learn the steps, join the crowd, they’re doing it in Philly, instructions included. Springsteen’s insularity is just as artificial and provocative a barrier. The narrator doesn’t figure you know the neighborhood—he points out the spots of interest—but he assumes you’re on his side. It’s an assumption that’s hard to resist, as rock and roll has always understood. From the start its appeal has been partisan (call it anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, provincial, chauvinistic, ageist, sexist, all or none of the above—doesn’t matter). All you have to do to join is want to. Having gotten you to buy into the rock and roll myth, Springsteen invites you to examine it. He plays with associations the way he plays with overtones on the guitar: picking at them while he’s playing a line and just letting them ring.

Nice word, “shuffle.” It applies so well: to the motion of the cornerboys, their heel-and-toe strut before the girls, their ironic and provocative defiance of authority. And to the wild cards and jokers who fan out when the cops come, only to rearrange themselves at another hangout. It’s all a dance—Little Angel changing partners, the dos-si-dos with the riot squad, the poses and the posturing and the attitudes. The cosmic E Street Shuffle. Even Leonard Bernstein saw the light: put the corner kids on the stage, wrapped them up in literary allusions, and orchestrated the thing. But Springsteen leaves the dance on the street where it lives. He is a participant as well as an observer, and he takes the details as seriously as their metaphoric possibilities. The song’s final scene has the hypernaturalism of a closing shot in a grade B western: “He slips on his jeans and they move on out down to the scene—all the kids are there.” That string of adverbs is as deliberate as a walk into the sunset. It’s a hero’s exit, except the boy-prophet’s on his way to the hop. For if it’s all a dance, it’s also just a dance, and that’s enough. Springsteen’s laughing like the party’s starting and all his oldest friends have just walked in the door and he picks up a guitar and twangs out lines the Ventures would have killed for.

Smack dab in the visionary tradition of Dylan and Van Morrison, Springsteen’s got the former’s faith that words, stretched and piled on fast enough, are music; the latter’s feel for the grinning warmth and greased motions of R&B. Listen to Springsteen and you know he’s listened to them both, and also to garage bands, Little Eva, one-shot singles, late-night TV giveaway deals. He hasn’t only learned from masters. But it’s not the knee-jerk nostalgia of teen-scene verité he’s after in his authentic dialogue and his blasts from a past that never seems so bright except in retrospect. He treats rock and roll history as our common language, our shared mythology, and thereby reinforces rock and roll’s promise of community. Spectoral echo, (James) Brownian motion, Dion-ysian brawl—he triggers memories like you were a jukebox and he was the man with all the quarters; plays it like a slot machine and wins. Hell yes, he exploits rock and roll’s past, just like he exploits the language itself—turning it inside out, digging for the metaphors under the surface of conversation.

The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle is Springsteen’s most extravagant and most easygoing album. He insists you can have rock and roll both ways—even the title makes it clear. Two value judgments and a dance step—what’s going on here is synthesis. But Springsteen’s double vision doesn’t have an ironist’s cruel double edge. Sure, characters in his dramatic monologues reveal themselves. The narrator of “Sandy” is an adolescent loser, the kid whose shirt gets stuck in the fun-fair ride, leaving him stranded and looking like a fool. You’d think he was ruining his chances with the girl: he can’t stop telling her about his humiliations, about the girls who led him on, about the waitress that got tired of him. He can’t even hand her a line without blowing it: “I promise I’ll love you—forever?” Springsteen’s voice squeaks incredulously. Oh, there’ll always be another girl; adolescence is something you grow out of. But that’s cold comfort and Springsteen’s offering something warmer and more immediate: the moon is rising, the organ notes twinkle like stars, the “sha la las” are triumphant and irresistible. The chorus promises romance despite the odds.

“New York City Serenade” opens with a piano riff as night dark and extravagant as the song’s title, as glitteringly arrogant as the city itself. A marching band tootles at the beginning of “The E Street Shuffle,” fat and self-important. Springsteen doesn’t just establish a mood or a groove; his songs begin with gaudy overtures—instrumental trailers for the story that’s to follow. The piano in “New York” is stilled by a single acoustic guitar note coming soft and startling like an unexpected kiss; the marching band is taunted by a cheeky guitar and an electric piano line that sprints away before they can retort. The action begins before Springsteen sings a word. When his voice finally comes, it seems to be fighting its way through the elaborate arrangements, the flood of words, determined to get to you, to grab you, to convince you. Intimate against the grand scale of the songs, compelling in its compulsion to be heard, Springsteen’s voice is that of a man possessed. His techniques are those of a master storyteller: the whispers to get your attention, the shouts to bring you to your feet, the teasing expectations. He builds songs into an ache of tensions, laying on strings like whips, applying pressure with drawn-out horn notes; dissolves the tensions in chants as rowdy as a Bronx cheer. But release is only temporary: he pulls the next phrases taut, the percussion threatens, the horns renew their urgency. Springsteen’s timing reels you in through the artifice and sentimentality in “Wild Bill’s [sic] Circus Story.” The verses, spun out wide-eyed, filmed in ever slower motion, lead you on, “past the kids, past the sailors, to his dimly lit trailer / And the ferris wheel turns and turns like it’s never going to stop.” He delays the punch line till the last possible second, then spits it out in a rattle of phlegm and tobacco juice: “Hey sonny, wanna try the big top?” Who wouldn’t be a fool for a tall tale? Springsteen’s one himself. Sprawling, methodical, impassioned, and manipulative, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle teeters on the edge of melodrama and slips into rapture. “Ooh, ooh, ooh, it’s all right”; “Good night, it’s all tight, Jane.” Springsteen’s final choruses are incantations. Benedictions. Acts of surrender. He’s caught up in his own spells.

If Springsteen is a storyteller, so are his characters. In some sense hustlers, both he and they live by their lines, by their powers of persuasion (and self-persuasion), by their ability to transform prosaic material into something shining. His stories are set in a self-absorbed, circumscribed world of adolescents, small towns, closed communities, where appearances count and reputations are as unshakable as a nickname. No one travels Springsteen’s streets incognito. He identifies them all: Spanish Johnny, Lover Boy, Jazz Man. Even nouns. They aren’t modified, they’re christened: fire trails, rude boys, bruised arms, blond girls. More than descriptions, the adjectives, like nicknames, have the force of characterizations. Say “the girls were blond” and you’re talking about the color of their hair. Say “blond girls” and they’re something special, blond all through, a race apart. It’s the old rosy-fingered dawn trick: the epic-maker’s device for turning ordinary words symbolic and loading details down with implication. But it’s not like the songs lay out in neatly knitted metaphors (or plots)—one tug and they’re unraveled. They come at a rush and you grab what you can. Still, the implications are felt. The omnipresent compounds in “The E Street Shuffle”—double-shot, sweet-sixteen—drag at the verses like heels scuffing the pavement. Each stretched-out line ambles on, coolly oblivious to the insistent jab of the horns, the frenetic blather of wah-wah and percussion: “But the boys are still on the corner loose doin’ that lazy E-Street shuffle.” The rhythm of the words is as nonchalant as the boys, and it’s only when Springsteen finishes “shuffle” with a wheeze and a gasp for breath, that there’s any suggestion that that cool costs an effort to maintain. Sometimes the implications are felt in the sheer weight of words: “with bruised arms and broken rhythm and a beat-up old Buick—” (“Incident on 57th Street”). They beat upon the line till it’s punch-drunk, so that the phrase that steps out clear when the dust settles seems all the more defiant “—but dressed just like dynamite.”

Spanish Johnny’s clothes and cornerboy’s shuffle are gestures falling somewhere between courage and bravado, between a hustle and a good story. Johnny plays the gallant promising Janey he’ll take her away from the battles on the street, but she’s got his number: “Those romantic young boys / All they ever want to do is fight.” She knows they’re not going anywhere. The corner is “The E Street Shuffle,” the boardwalk in “Sandy,” the hometown alleys of “Kitty’s Back,” even the traveling midway of “Wild Bill’s [sic] Circus Story,” the tenement neighborhood of “Incident on 57th Street,” the back roads and parent-and-school dominated world of “Rosalita”—Springsteen’s settings are territories in limbo. Satellites of the metropolis, overshadowed, robbed and ruined; resort towns begging to be invaded, dependent on other people’s leisure and mobility; home turf staked out and fought for but never owned. And adolescence itself. Like the “man-child” or the “boy-prophet,” neither one thing or the other. All of Springsteen’s characters live on islands close enough to shore to see the mainland, too far away to make the crossing light or easy.

But isolation is chosen as well as imposed. Caught in the middle, challenged from the outside, each community is self-protective, fiercely partisan. When Kitty comes back, it’s almost too good to be true, for her departure was a double betrayal, forsaking the hometown and the kids in the alley for marriage and the big city, power, prestige, and opportunity. Her return not only vindicates her small-town admirer, but all of those who’ve never left. And their victory is as sweet and keen-edged as the notes of Springsteen’s guitar. Yet her defection raised doubts and questions that still hang like the sax’s final whistling high note. As envied and disdained as a resort visitor, as threatening and tempting as the city, adulthood glimmers just over the horizon too. And like the Corner or the Street, it has to be claimed. The final song on the album confronts growing up and the metropolis head-on: “New York City Serenade” is a rite of passage. Enticing with its jazz and drugs and promises of plunder, dangerous—“a mad-dog’s promenade”—the city is a domineering mistress, sneering like Fishlady that cornerboys are too easy, grinding supplicants in their own insignificance. In her hostile, garishly-lit embrace, manhood becomes a matter of self-assertion—“I’m a young man walking real proud for you”—and self-respect: “Sometimes you just have to walk on.”

But then, he doesn’t sing the line quite straight; there’s a gulp in his voice, an exaggeration to his drawl. Dangers over the horizon, oppression at home—what’s a poor boy to do? One solution is obvious, and Springsteen concedes the point so fast you trip over it in the album’s most explicitly autobiographical cut. In “Rosalita” he’s no street fighting man, and no more under the thumb of circumstances, adults, and authorities than any other kid. When he comes to the door he may be a truant, a hot-rodder, and what your mother would call a bad influence, but rock and roll is his guarantee of respectability. Hell, that record company advance is probably a lot bigger than Rosie’s father’s salary. There’s an edge of mockery that keeps Springsteen’s heroism honest. He’s found the perfect escape: work that’s fun, rebellion that’s legitimate, eternal youth, a name that’s known not just on the corner but on the global street, all that stuff. But however much he romanticizes rock and roll as an ideal of a code, he only plays the star in fun. Sometimes it seems like he’s deliberately burying his voice in the mix, as if to deny that he’s anything but another member of the band. Sometimes it seems like he and the other guys have never left the corner at all.

Certainly the songs seem like they were filmed on location, or maybe it’s just that the settings feel like characters themselves. Springsteen is a compulsive recorder of detail—the sheets “damp with sweat,” the girl “bopping down the beach with a radio.” But it’s not like you’d call him a realist. Sometimes it seems as though he’s looking back at the corner through a rearview mirror—the streets turned shimmery and the action blurred by the speed at which he’s traveling. It’s not just that the language slips out of the colloquial into the high-flown. It’s as though he’s caught up in the rhythm and led by his own words to more and more audacious leaps. From neat tricks like putting hard girls on easy street, to metaphors that are high wire acts: “Let the black boys in to light the soul flame.” (I mean, I always figured that phrase had to do with turning the radio to an R&B station. But?) And finally he skips beyond probability and any tidy interpretation to visions: Of “golden-heeled fairies” fighting with .38s (and it’s anybody’s guess what kind of fairies). Of “barefoot street boys” throwing down their switchblades and kissing each other goodbye. Visions of the natural order he’s been at pains to record turned on its head. But then, calling the kids on E Street “boy-prophets” was a leap as well. Springsteen’s double vision, seeing the what-is beside, on top of, through the what-could-be, is consistent enough to take on a moral force. Like a hardboiled detective, he observes as though his life depended on it, on recognizing the shift in stance that tells you the other guy’s about to go for his gun. And like the detective, once he’s established the facts, they’re not enough. His characters aren’t presented as free agents: they’re shown, if not as victims, at least as products of an environment. And still, they’re held accountable for their actions. They can walk on or not. The choice may be only a gesture, but the space between courage and bravado, between a hustle and a good story, is also the place where appearances become truth. Where Fishlady’s gibe is picked up and worn as a badge of honor: “Hey babe, I’m easy, won’t you take my arm?” Where the only names that matter are the names you give or call yourself.

Knowing the score is how you survive; knowing, for instance, that midnight in Manhattan is not the time to get cute. Faith, on the other hand, is how you manage—well—whatever it is that’s more than survival. Yeah, it sounds hokey, but faith in these songs isn’t just some smarmy, self-help estuary. It’s nothing more or less than an act of imagination (like the songs themselves). Envisioning a junkman dressed in satin is as absurd as falling in love. The facts don’t justify the faith; no loved one ever lives up to a lover’s dream; still, no love ever survived on facts alone. So buy the vision. Believe the lady’s sawed in half. Be willing to be made a fool. Listen to the junkman. If only every act of faith were just as easy.

Still, held in any kind of limbo, trapped in stupid circumstances, it’s nice to hear him singing. Singing something about the towns I grew up in and the boys I loved. And why I left and why I care about them still. But I didn’t grow up in towns much like the ones he describes. Or something about the songs I listened to and the beat I danced and turned around. Something then, about growing up. But I’m already grown. Aah, it doesn’t matter. The band’s playing and the singer’s singing something about a prophet, something about a party. And rock and roll’s going to take me home.