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.

Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. is one of the two records that Bruce Springsteen released before he was Bruce Springsteen. At this point in his career, a 23-year-old Springsteen was not yet The Boss, but a singer/songwriter who Columbia Records signed with the hope that he would blossom into the next Bob Dylan. To say the least, Columbia was not pleased with Springsteen’s January 1973 debut full-length, as Greetings had no huge singles and proved to be much more rock’n’roll than Columbia had bargained for.

The record was received well by critics at the time of release, but Springsteen didn’t become America’s favorite rock star right away. Columbia released “Blinded By the Light” and “Spirit In the Night” as singles, but neither had any impact whatsoever on any charts. Most people only know “Blinded By the Light” because of the remake by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, and “Spirit By the Night” didn’t have the instant accessibility needed to become a regular number played on the radio. Considering the conditions under which the record was written, with Springsteen recording with producer/manager Mike Appel in one of the cheapest available studios in New York, it’s not much of a surprise that it only sold around 25,000 copies in its first year.

With Columbia Records disappointed at the result of Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., there was only one thing for Bruce Springsteen to do – give it another chance. So what did he do? He wrote, recorded and released an entire record in less than a year. Even lessthan less than a year, if that makes sense. Greetings was released on Jan. 5, 1973. The Wild, The Innocent& The E Street Shuffle came out barely seven months later – on Sep. 11, 1973.

Perhaps more impressive than the short turnaround is the quantum leap between the two records. Shuffle is more rock’n’roll while at the same time being more funky, the lyricism is improved to an exponential power, and it is the recorded debut of Springsteen’s E Street Band. An interesting point is that when Springsteen started off, he signed a contract with Columbia Records for Bruce Springsteen – no E Street Band existed for quite a while. Even on Shuffle, only three members of the E Street Band would continue on to work with The Boss for his entire career.

Next in the order of Bruce Springsteen’s studio records should be Darkness On The Edge Of Town. Rest assured, I’m not skipping Darkness, but I am skipping three other studio albums. Instead of doing reviews for The Ghost Of Tom Joad, Human Touch and Lucky Town, I am instead reviewing three live performances – Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 (from the Born To Run 30th anniversary boxed set), Live In New York City ‘01 and London Calling. Since the Hammersmith Odeon concert happened in between Born to Run and Darkness, I’m just filing the review where it belongs in chronological order. The Darkness review will be up in next week’s batch.

If you read the last review in this series, about Born To Run, you probably noticed that I liked that record quite a bit. I wrote that I think it’s the best record of all time, so it should come as no surprise that I think Bruce Springsteen’s best touring days came after the release of that album. Many people subscribe to the opinion that Springsteen and The E Street Band were even more impressive after the release of Darkness On The Edge of Town, but I don’t think anything can compare to Springsteen’s performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in London in 1975.

Born To Run is the best album ever written. It contains within its eight tracks the two best rock and roll songs ever written and three other songs that are damn close. The album cover is the best album art ever put on a record. This review does not reflect my bias of Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, but rather my honest opinion about what I (and many others) consider to be the record that saved rock and roll music.

When a 25-year-old Springsteen released Born To Run in 1975, he was almost ready to hang up his hat on music. Columbia Records did not approve of the cult following that Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shufflecreated; they signed Springsteen with the very specific idea that he was going to sell as many records as Bob Dylan. They wanted his face on billboards on the highway, and they wanted his name on top of the Billboard singles charts every week. Springsteen has said that the only thing that made him write Born To Run was that he never wanted to have a 9-to-5 job in his life. In Dave Marsh’s biography of Springsteen, Marsh writes that Springsteen was finally going to call it quits if Born To Run didn’t succeed. Well, the record didn’t just succeed – it went down as one of the most important records ever released, and Springsteen filled an empty void as America’s beloved and adored rock and roll superstar.