Bruce Springsteen - Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. FLAC

I fully realize that I’m showing my age by referencing The Association and their haunting hit “Along Comes Mary,” spilling out fast paced syllables that skip across the surface of a record like a stone across a still pond … “the psychodramas and the dramas and the traumas left unsung and hung upon the scars.” Well, in a nutshell, one filled with adrenaline and caffeine, that’s just what Springsteen does here, complete with Dylan inflections dancing wildly around the edges, where at the time, Greetings From Asbury Park N.J. was just about the freshest and most compelling album to ever filter across the airwaves, where before “It’s So Hard To Be A Saint In The City” could finish playing, I was breathlessly at the record store searching out my own copy.

Greetings was a cosmic release of verbiage imagery, an overhead elevated train on the wrong side of the tracks speeding headlong toward the beach, breathtaking in its delivery, complicated, romantic, silly and visionary. Greetings was an album that was a riveting slingshot escapade of gritty street life, an actual walk on the wild side that drew listeners in the front door, while rolling them out the back and into a heart-attack ambulance.

Greetings was a driven album, an album that was also laced with ballads such as “The Angel” and “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” where suddenly a piano was used in a manner I’d never heard before, where a number such as “Spirit In The Night” with its jazz infused funk influences had me promenading down the street as if this music had forever been apart of my DNA, and only now had been released. I was twenty-two in 1973, I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to have been a teenager discovering rock n’ roll to this album, a thought that to this day makes me very jealous.

The album, wrapped in hooks and chord changes, instantly took on a mythical persona, a place where fiction collided head on with reality, indistinguishable, filled with tales of people Bruce had either met, imagined, or assembled from conversations he might have overheard, making Greetings essentially one long rebellious unstoppable tall-tale of nonlinear epic vignettes that for this listener, just home from Viet Nam, came across as a bouncy musically illustrative relentless cinematic morality tale, an evolution of musical score and structure, rising up from the cracked sidewalks and scheming its way into the very being of my nature.

People are going to imply that Greetings has far too many shortcomings, that it embraces lyrical overkill, that it was far too strung out, where even the ballads refused to give listeners a space to breathe, that it was much too evocative … yet I found it to be intoxicating elegant, charming and filled with exuberant skepticism that was both foolhardy and benevolent.

As to the vinyl, there are many ways to hear this record, though the original vinyl, complete with surface noise, is the way I’ll always recognize this album.

*** The Fun Facts: Strangely enough, Columbia Record’s policy at the time dictated that all debut albums were to feature a large format photo of the band or artist on the jacket, yet Springsteen was able to get away with using a vintage postcard, and then used that postcard as his album’s title … and if you don’t own the album where the postcard is detachable, then you seriously need to search one out, as it provides an whole new listening space perspective.

Review by Jenell Kesler

Hi there! Any suggestions on which release to go for? Thank you!

I have two of these. On the label one has S 65480 with (KC 31903) underneath so I'm not sure if it is a UK 1973 edition or a Canada 1973 edition.

The second is a 1982 CBS32210 re-issue