The decision to release Human Touch and Lucky Town was probably the worst decision ever made in the Bruce Springsteen camp. Springsteen hadn’t been wrong about many things up to this point in his career, but whoever okay-ed the decision to release one really mediocre record and one really good record on the same day clearly didn’t know much about marketing and the forever-lasting stain one would leave on the other.

It is with the synthy, glossy, overproduced and underwhelming memory of Human Touch that Lucky Town will forever be dragged down. Many people (definitely including me, until as recently as about three weeks ago) dismissed the latter of the two records because of how misguided the former is. Even in 1991, when Springsteen’s management decided it was okay to release the two separate records on the same day (Springsteen was the first artist to ever do this), fans appreciated the singles on Human Touch and little else. 

Following up Born To Run is something that seems like a monumental task, but given the pressure Bruce Springsteen experienced in earlier parts of his career, it probably didn’t seem like such a tall mountain to climb. When Springsteen released Born To Run, Columbia Records basically treated it as the 25-year-old’s last chance to write something that could make them some money. Luckily, Springsteen churned out one of the most fantastic records of all time, launching himself into stardom as a household name and a worldwide presence. Need further evidence as to his importance other than his extensive world touring after the record? On Oct. 27, 1975, both Time and Newsweek put Springsteen on their respective covers, with Time calling him “Rock’s New Sensation.”

Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 release Nebraska is probably the release that Columbia Records was looking for when they signed a young and unproven Springsteen in the early 1970s. Although the record came about a decade later and it was Springsteen’s sixth studio album, Columbia probably isn’t too disappointed with how the whole Springsteen experiment played out.

The story behind Nebraska is not one that is known very well outside of the Springsteen faithful. Basically, The Boss recorded demos of an album that he meant to record with the E Street Band on a 4-track at home. When he went into the studio and the entire band recorded the album, Springsteen and his producers felt it didn’t translate right. The end result was the actual releasing of the demos, as recorded on a 4-track in Springsteen’s home. Let The Boss tell you about it himself.

I got a little Teac four-track cassette machine, and I said, I’m gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin’ ’em, then I’ll teach ’em to the band. I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin’ else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a little Echoplex that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It’s amazing that it got there, ’cause I was carryin’ that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of week, just draggin’ it around. Finally, we realized, “Uh-oh, that’s the album.” Technically, it was difficult to get it on a disc. The stuff was recorded so strangely, the needle would read a lot of distortion and wouldn’t track in the wax. We almost had to release it as a cassette. [quote taken from a 1984 interview in Rolling Stone via the wonderful Wikipedia.]

I can’t even.

Unlike a couple of Bruce Springsteen’s previous records, The River can never be called a flawless effort. Arguments are made by some that Born To Run is a perfect work. With less fervor, people have called The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle or Darkness On The Edge Of Town perfect. I’m not going to argue the degree of perfection found in any Springsteen album. But with The River, a 20-song, 83-minute behemoth of a double-disc record, there are certainly flaws. But with those flaws came yet another sign of Springsteen’s musical genius that was the most captivating part of rock and roll in the 1970s and 80s.

Springsteen originally recorded 10 songs for a record called The Ties That Bind, and that record was going to be released in late 1979. Instead of releasing that, Springsteen went back to the drawing board and wrote some darker material after penning a song called “The River.” The result was the double-disc that saw light of day in the fall of 1980. While the record didn’t have the compact and straightforward storytelling themes of Born To Runand Darkness, it does feature some of Springsteen’s most compelling songwriting.