The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle

If people are discovering Bruce's career in reverse like I did it's easy to be slightly dismissive of the album(s) immediately before Born To Run, since it's such a legendary monster of an album.

The Wild The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle is my favorite album by Bruce. Total masterpiece. I just love the scope of it, the romance of possibility. It's like he's painting in full color. After that record, hurt really entered the picture and it becomes like black and white pictures. Beautiful and deliberate, but largely with the color strangled out.

 

Great description about the color! It's like a widescreen Technicolor album.

 

TWTI&TESS takes some of the unique lyrical qualities of the Greetings album and also incorporates romanticism and escapism into the mix; two themes that would in part define the Born To Run album. Even though it has a very good reputation, it was always a bit of an underrated album.

 

You might like the Asbury Park album. The RSD reissue is said (by Fremer) to be good. It's unhinged and weird and swingy like Wild, Innocent, etc.

 

My guess is that except for "Rosalita," it's rather less accessible than most of his other albums. Don't get me wrong, most of the other songs on it are fantastic, but they do take some effort to appreciate. There is a reason why it wasn't a hit on its initial release.

 

One of his best. Bruce at his most cinematic and romantic. A great summer album too.

 

I own the Columbia cd (CK32432) that was released in 1990 according to discogs. I found it at a thrift store too.
It sounds excellent imho.

 

This album has a very special place in my heart. In a distant Philly suburb, we picked up on this early on. Initially, it was all about one song: Rosalita. The rallying cry. We danced to it, drank to it, smoked joints to it, and sang along with every word. Then I bought it and was just blown away by 6 of the 7 songs. I loved the fast songs, such great stuff, R&B influenced but not derivative. And those emotional ballads--the end of Spanish Johnny, the wonderful song to Sandy (he saying something about an aurora--how f'ing cool is this guy?), then Rosy and that impressionistic song about NYC. The piano intro was so unlike everything else that came before and that string arrangement came out fo nowhere. The lyrics seemed to describe several different people and encounters. There was no real story, but the phrases were so cool (walk tall, or baby don't walk at all). At college, I met other like minded guys who could not get enough of this album and we bonded over it, I think fo my dead friend Kevin all the time when I play it. Now 40 years on, Rosy still brings me a smile, it is so much about what it was like to be young--the freedom, the joy of inviting your love to come on out for an adventure, and the fact that mom and dad didn't matter, just being together did. And NYC Serenade is still one of my favorite songs by anyone ever.

 

The Bruce album I have listened to most. Probably about as much as the rest of his stuff combined.

 

There are few things as sublime on a rock & roll album as Incident > Rosalita > NYC Serenade.

 

damn, what a post. If i could frame a post from this forum, this would be it. I love the intimate look into your life and the joy and sadness that wraps around it only to be seasoned with a bruce springsteen album. Keep on keeping on my friend.

 

This is my "go to" Springsteen album.

The others sometimes astound me with their charms, this album always does.

 

Bruce's first two albums are my favorites.

 

Love this album.

 

I think as a complete album and not just taking favorite songs, that it is my favorite Bruce album. I was playing it one day (lol maybe 20 years after release) and a friend really liked 4th of July (Sandy) and was amazed that it was Springsteen. My boyfriend in college really liked Rosalita as well, and this was 1978ish, he didn't really care for Born to Run at all.

The single best concert I've ever been too was at the Paramount in Seattle, on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour. Maybe it was just my young and impressionable age but it has stuck with me through the years. Totally awesome live.

 

And to think the tour immediately following this album actually improved these songs...it's mind boggling.

N.Y.C. Serenade at the Main Point show in February 1975 is one of the greatest things I will ever hear in my life. (Wish I was there!!)

 

I first got into Springsteen with BitUSA (I was 12 at the time). After about the thousandth listen, my dad handed me BTR and a tape of the WNEW broadcast of the Passaic 78 Darkness show. That was a life-changing day for me. Then I dug through the rest of his old records (I had never gotten past the Beatles section) and found The Wild, The Innocent. There are better 4 minute songs on most of his albums, but this is his best 40 minutes.
I was a trumpet player back then. The horn section "warming up" on the intro to E Street Shuffle grabbed me immediately. It's a shame he never really explored more of the Jazz/funk vibe on this record. I think there would have been some really interesting music there.

 

There is a lot of criticism of reissued or remastered vinyl, some of it justified.

However a lot of good things have deservedly (in my view) been said about the recent Bruce studio album vinyl box set (vol 1), and a number of posters think that the Wild, Innocent and E Street Shuffle is the best or most improved of the set - each issued individually for RSD 2015.

It's an album that is often overlooked in Bruce's canon, say as compared with Born to Run, Darkness, or Nebraska. But to my mind the new version of The Wild, The Innocent is well worth the purchase. Its an important guide to early Bruce, great songs like Sandy, a great band and great playing. And, of course, Rosalita.......

 

I like the first 2 albums the best. Before he became 'The Boss'.

 

Amen brother!

Been saying the same thing for years. That album stands alone.

 

Great album. The first three Springsteen rule!

 

I never owned his 2nd album until this year when I found a nice used old copy. What a great album!

 

Soon after this album was released, I had an airport layover in St. Louis. I got to talking with a group of people in the terminal* and the subject of music came up. I said there's this guy from New Jersey and to keep a lookout for him, he might be big someday.

* For you younger readers, yes, people did at one time speak to each other at airports instead of scurrying around looking for cell phone charging stations.

 

My favorite albums are the first 4, also stuff from the River and b sides box set. The Wild & Innocent was played a lot here in the NY metro area when it came out. Radio station WNEW was big on promoting Springsteen. I think it's one of best albums. I still have the old cd and a 1980 reissue lp.

 

I wonder what Bruce's albums would have been like, had he stayed with Mike Appel and allowed Landau to keep recording classics with Livingston Taylor and the MC5. I love much of his subsequent stuff, but The Wild is my favorite.