Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

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.

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