The Boardwalk Prophet: How Bruce Springsteen’s Quiet Debut Became a Legend

Initially dismissed by the charts, Springsteen’s wordy 1973 debut proved that the "New Dylan" was actually a one-of-a-kind rock icon in the making.

On January 5^th 1973, a scruffy 23-year-old from the Jersey Shore released an album that sounded like a whirlwind. Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was dense, wordy, and local. It was the introduction of Bruce Springsteen to the world, but at the time, the world wasn’t quite ready to listen.

While the album is now cemented in the rock and roll canon, its arrival was anything but a triumph. It peaked at a lowly number 128 on the Billboard charts and sold fewer than 25,000 copies in its first year. To the executives at Columbia Records, it looked like a flop. To the critics, however, it was the birth of a "New Dylan."

When Springsteen signed his record deal, the industry was looking for a solo acoustic act to fill the void left by Bob Dylan’s mid-career shifts. Columbia Records’ legendary talent scout, John Hammond—the man who discovered Dylan and Aretha Franklin—thought he had found exactly that.

However, Springsteen had other plans. He didn't want to be a lonely folk singer; he wanted to lead a rock and roll band. The resulting album was a strange, beautiful compromise. It featured acoustic-driven tracks like "Mary Queen of Arkansas," but it also pulsed with the street-gang energy of "Spirit in the Night" and "Growin' Up."

The lyrics were unlike anything on the radio. Springsteen filled his songs with a cast of colorful, cinematic characters: the Gypsy Angel, Wild Billy, G-Man, and Killer Joe. He wrote about the boardwalks, the drag strips, and the humid New Jersey nights with the precision of a novelist.

The album’s opening track, "Blinded by the Light," is now one of the most recognizable songs in rock history. Ironically, it almost didn’t exist. After hearing the initial tapes of the album, Columbia president Clive Davis complained that there wasn't a "hit" for the radio.

Springsteen sat down on the beach with a rhyming dictionary and wrote "Blinded by the Light" and "Spirit in the Night" in a single sitting. Even then, the song failed to chart when Springsteen released it. It took four years and a radical synth-heavy reimagining by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band for the song to reach number one on the US charts in 1977. To this day, it remains the only Springsteen-penned song to ever top the Billboard Hot 100.

The reason Greetings failed to sell initially was largely due to a lack of identity. The label marketed him as a folk singer, but the music sounded like a bar band from the future. Radio stations didn't know whether to play it next to James Taylor or The Rolling Stones.

But greatness has a way of surfacing. As Springsteen’s reputation as a live performer grew throughout the mid-70s, fans began digging back into his catalog. They found a debut album that was remarkably sophisticated. It captured the sound of a young man trying to cram every thought, every observation, and every rhyme he had ever had into 37 minutes of vinyl.

Today, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. is frequently cited by Rolling Stone and other major music outlets as one of the greatest debut albums of all time. It serves as the blueprint for the "Springsteen Sound"—a mix of blue-collar reality and romantic myth-making.

While Born to Run would eventually make him a superstar, and Born in the U.S.A. would make him an icon, Greetings remains the most intimate look at the artist. It is the sound of a kid from a small town standing on the edge of the ocean, shouting as loud as he could just to see if anyone would answer.

Sources:

• Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen
• Rolling Stone Magazine
• Billboard
• The New York Times

Image:  Fair use.  Author CBS