Originally published in Sounds, 16 March 1974

Bruce Springsteen was confined to the boardwalk life in New Jersey. He lived over a drug store “in all the craziness of downtown,” prayed for summer, sought sanctuary on the beach at Asbury.

Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., his picture postcard intro to city life, is like a holiday ad for Blackpool. On the way it put Springsteen on the road to stardom—along with his mates from NJ. He came on like Bob Dylan, all the hip imagery and he a frail city urchin with a scrubby beard and tousled hair and clothes that he might have been living in for the past six months. Springsteen doesn’t talk, he mumbles, he don’t walk, he shuffles.

He spent a few years quenching his insatiable thirst for the city by commuting between Asbury Park and downtown New York—mostly at the Café Wha in the Village; spent his CBS advance by putting a band together.

New Jersey, cowering under the burgeoning weight of New York, could never be credited with any character and Springsteen was hardly likely to become significant so long as he stuck to the Jersey bars. The Greetings album put ‘em both on the map.

“Jersey’s a dumpy joint,” Springsteen opined. “I mean it’s okay, it’s home, but every place is a dump. I guess it just took a long time for someone to think of something to write about it but Asbury Park had a lot to do with the tone of the first album.”

He was hailed as a rising genius—inevitably the new Dylan, but as the pressure has been removed he has tended to get better.

But right now it’s 4:30 in the morning and Springsteen has just completed his second show at Georgetown University. Washington, scenario for The Exorcist. He’s been ill—coughing up blood, causing the cancellation of the two preceding gigs. He’s still coughing profusely and draws on a bottle of prescribed cough medicine, which the doctor provided along with the statutory shot. What was the matter, Bruce? A futile question when you’re on the road 90 percent of the time.

“The doctor knows I only go and see him when there’s something wrong,” he says, and calculates that he’s played over 200 gigs this past year. He puts on his old black jacket, check shirttails showing out underneath. At 4:30 in the morning he shuffles over to the piano in the dressing room to play a new song on request, and at five he decides we should go and eat. The cops direct us to a subway café, which says “Open for breakfast” but the doors are closed and we drive back along “M” street to Georgetown and the last remaining hamburger joint. Springsteen bemoans the lack of good food with a tacit gesture on behalf of his sick body and prays for summer and watersports.

Six o’clock. Springsteen decides the hamburger will be sufficient to induce a good day’s sleep before catching the train down to New Orleans. At his hotel Mike O’Mahony of CBS informs Bruce that I’ve traveled 18,000 miles to see the band twice—in Los Angeles last year and in Washington tonight. “Sure ‘preciate it,” he says proffering his hand, and disappears to bed.

Twelve hours earlier we had arrived at the Jesuit college, found the hall and walked right in on the soundcheck… “Spirits in the night, all night, in the night, all night…” CUT. Back to that bluesy, discordant intro, start again, great song.

Like most of Springsteen’s songs, it’s improved with age. I mean there’s cuts on the new album which you’d only just about recognize if you heard ‘em onstage now—“New York City Serenade”, for instance, whilst “Kitty’s Back”, an outstanding cut, is stretched across a marathon piano intro from David Sancious, which is horribly over-embellished but a guaranteed winner with audiences.

“I’ve never heard him play a song the same way twice,” exclaims a Springsteen fan who has been following him on the road. And as we survey the assembly of instruments and the incongruous bunch of bar musicians who are about to play them you wonder how the hell Springsteen can induce a discipline that would invite comparisons with Van Morrison.

Anyhow, he’s onstage and he’s given a pop star’s welcome—the crowd is screaming for him but they cut off instantly in order to decipher the mumble of his opening rap, which is a pretty funny monologue punctuated by the occasional laugh and the odd decipherable word. He picks up acoustic guitar. Danny Federici has accordion and Garry Tallent hauls the tuba up into playing position by which time the audience have already predicted “Wild Billy’s Circus Story.”

Gradually he works his way through the new songs—“Incident On 57th Street”, which he refers to as “Spanish Johnny”, “New York City Serenade”, then “Spirit in the Night”, which he now intros himself on harmonica in unison with Clarence Clemons’ sax.