1972 - #01 - Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ
It's a record with many words, rhymes, linguistic games, fast songs and strange characters, certainly autobiographical with events experienced or imagined by Springsteen himself. Legend has it that Bruce auditioned with manager John Hammond, the same one who looked after - for example - Bob Dylan, not the latest arrival, and convinced him with just one song: It's hard to be a saint in the city.
The most significant songs are For You, Blinded by the light, Spirit in the Night, Lost in the flood; some of them are still played in the most recent tours. In the next articles of this blog we will analyze the "life" of these songs and we will see that more than 50 years later these are still absolutely new.
In truth, the album was not an immediate success; it is said to have initially sold 25,000 copies, not a huge number; as with its successor, The Wild, the innocent and the E-street shuffle, they were good records that began to make Bruce Springsteen's name known but not to make him a star. This happened 3 years later, in 1975 with Born to Run, we'll get to that in the next post.
