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Greetings is 50 years old today.

January 5, 1973. He's taken us on a hell of a ride since then.

Lester Bangs' 1973 review -

REMEMBER P.F. SLOAN? ? Sure you do. It was back when every folk rocker worth his harmonica holder was flushed with Dylan fever and seeing how many syllables he could cram into every involuted couplet. There was Tandyn Almer, of “Along Comes Mary” fame (“The psychodramas and the traumas hung on the scars of the stars in the bars and cars — something like that), and David Blue had his own Highway 61 too, but absolutely none of ’em could beat ol’ P.F. He started out writing surf songs, but shook the world by the throat with his masterpieces “Eve Of Destruction” and “Sins of a Family,” and all his best material was just brimming with hate.

Boy howdy, the first thing the world needs is a P.F. Sloan for 1973, and you can start revving up yer adrenaline, kids, because he’s here in the person of Bruce Springsteen . Old Bruce makes a point of letting us know that he’s from one of the scuzziest, most useless and plain uninteresting sections of Jersey. He’s been influenced a lot by the Band, his arrangements tend to take on a Van Morrison tinge every now and then, and he sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck. It’s a tuff combination, but it’s only the beginning.

Because what makes Bruce totally unique and cosmically surfeiting is his words. Hot damn, what a passel o’ verbiage! He’s got more of them crammed into this album than any other record released this year, but it’s all right because they all fit snug, it ain’t like Harry Chapin tearing rightangle malapropisms out of his larynx. What’s more, each and every one of ’em has at least one other one here that it rhymes with. Some of ’em can mean something socially or otherwise, but there’s plenty of ’em that don’t even pretend to, reveling in the joy of utter crass showoff talent run amuck and totally out of control:

“Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat/In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat” begins the very first song, and after that things just keep getting more breathtakingly complicated. You might think it’s some kinda throwback, but it’s really bracing as hell because it’s obvious that B.S. don’t give a shit. He slingshoots his random rivets at you and you can catch as many as you want or let ’em all clatter right off the wall which maybe’s where they belong anyway. Bruce Springsteen is a bold new talent with more than a mouthful to say, and one look at the pic on the back will tell you he’s got the glam to go places in this Gollywoodlawn world to boot. Watch for him; he’s not the new John Prine.

14 comments

14 Comments

berlintramp

Jan 16

Ah, nice one Jerseyfornia

MagicRatAFC

Jan 14

@Jerseyfornia I have "Nebraska" on the phone for you.......

Jerseyfornia

Jan 14

This is still the best Springsteen record to listen to while smoking weed.

Scott Peterson

Jan 14

Replying to

Interesting. I don't smoke, but I would have thought The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle would be.

Jerseyfornia

Jan 16

Replying to

That's a great smoking record, too, but Greetings edges it out for the more abstract lyrics and weird songs. The only weird song on the second album is Wild Billy's Circus Story and while it is weirder than the weird songs on Greetings, it doesn't beat out the combined weirdness of Blinded By The Light, Mary Queen of Arkansas, The Angel and Spirit In The Night. By weird songs, I simply mean songs about weird people doing weird shit. The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle is my number two Springsteen smoking album, but it should be told that I listen to all his records - and everyone else's - while smoking and I'm smoking while writing this post and listening to Nebraska.

Nebraska is another great album to get stoned with - but in a different way. It's good for a brooding kind of high, when the weed has you sort of drowsy, like you've been driving all night and the sun's just about to come up. That album is a fuzzy dose of reality when reality is what you're trying to escape.

Walkerinthesun

Jan 10

https://badlands.co.uk/bruce-springsteen-greetings-from-asbury-park-n-j-limited-edition-ultradisc-one-step-33rpm-vinyl-lp-set/

If you haven’t heard a MoFi Ultradisc One-Step release before this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Jerseyfornia

Jan 09

My only entry in the cover debate is this -

Considering Columbia's standard for debut album covers was a photo of the artist's face and Springsteen managed to subvert that policy - is the postcard of an unknown Jersey shore town a better first cover than a close-up shot of an unknown singer's scruffy face?

wout

Jan 08

What a ride it has been!! (Even though I have only experienced the last decade or so actively.) I love this album, I also love the cover art, and the title is just amazing... "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J."... It just sounds so magical to me.

Not to mention that this record also features Bruce's best song: Lost in the flood!!

Scott Peterson

Jan 06

Why, it doesn't look a day over 49!

Such an awful cover. Starting off a long and only rarely interrupted string of Bruce Springsteen albums that have terrible covers hiding amazing music.

I still think the two acoustic songs are perhaps the two worst songs he's ever released on record—that's right, "Real Man," you heard me—but that leaves 28+ minutes of music that's never less than Very Good and often somehow manages to edge into Absolutely Brilliant territory. Not a bad way to start one's recording career.

Scott Peterson

Jan 07

Replying to

A cover is supposed to do many things. One of them is to accurately represent the art inside, whether that's an album or a novel or film or whatever. In this regards, it's at least an 8/10 in my books.

But one of its other purposes—perhaps the most important—is to get people to give the album/book/film a try. I think this did the exact opposite. I base this belief on several things, the main being its actual sales. It's not a coincidence that he has two consensus all-time great album covers, and those are also his two best-selling albums. (Yes, I know, many of us also love the covers to Darkness and Nebraska but they rarely if ever make the kinds of all-time lists that the two Borns do.)

So. If this were the cover to his followup to a Born in the USA-sized blockbuster? You betcha. I'd give it about a 7/10 for artistic statement. As a debut album? 0/10 for effectiveness.

(It has often struck me how amazing the Molly Hatchet covers by the likes of such greats as Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo were. 10/10 for commercial effectiveness, 4/10 for accurate representation of the music inside, which was clearly going to be some sort of metal or prog and not adequate southern rock. Averaging those together, we 10/10, because I am convinced that at least 85% of that band's commercial success was due to the covers so who gives a shit about accuracy?)

Bill Zebub

Jan 08

Replying to

I'm pretty positive that if Bruce had saved the Greetings cover, and title for that matter, for the album that we know as Born In the USA, sales would have been about the same. And if Greetings featured the BItUSA cover, it might have sold even less.

Scott Peterson

Jan 08

Replying to

"I'm pretty positive that if Bruce had saved the Greetings cover, and title for that matter, for the album that we know as Born In the USA, sales would have been about the same."

About the same, meaning 30,000,000 copies, even with the Greetings postcard cover!?

"And if Greetings featured the BItUSA cover, it might have sold even less."

That I can agree with. Because context matters.

Obviously, no way of knowing, but if his debut had had the Born to Run cover, I suspect it would have sold 2x what Greetings did, which of course is something like 20% (eventually) of what Born to Run did.