Search - Bruce Springsteen :: Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

(2.5 stars) Bruce Dylan? Bob Springsteen? Whatever...

finulanu | Here, there, and everywhere | 06/03/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Some people love it. Many people love it. But I always thought it was Mr. Springsteen trying a bit too hard to sound like Mr. Dylan. Just look at the lyrics of the record's most famous song, "Blinded by the Light". Does all that crazy internal rhyming remind you of a particular Dylan song? Bob would've taken one look at word games like "madman drummers, bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat", shook his head, and muttered, "amateur". I like the song, though. The overbusy sax part that makes no sense in context of the song but still sounds really, really cool contributes to a lot of my enjoyment of it; the chorus is catchy; and it's a lot better than that cover by Crapford Crapnn's Crap Band, where it gets done up (to put it mildly, heh heh) in stereotypical '70s prog-pop style. Me, I like "Growin' Up", a downright hummable pop song about just that, much more. Maybe if he had released that as the first single, instead of "Blinded by the Light", it would've caught on. He's not imitating Dylan - he's staking out his own style here, and I like it. Because, as much as I like Bruce (or at least Bruce's later albums), he's got nothing on Dylan. He finds himself imitating Zimmy both on the painfully sparse, beyond-boring acoustic ballad "Mary Queen of Arkansas" and the would-be-annoying-if-it-were-longer-than-two-minutes "Does This Bus Stop on 82nd Street?", which again features Bruce extracting hallucinatory lyrics like "And Mary Lou she found out how to cope she rides to Heaven on a gyroscope" and "Where dock worker's dreams mix with panther's schemes to someday own the rodeo". The issue is, you can't be the "New Dylan" by taking nonsense lyrics and stringing them together. You have to give people reason to believe in, say, "Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule". And, simply speaking, Bruce isn't there yet. And once again, the far better song is the one that has Bruce doing his own thing. "Last in the Flood" is a gangland story-song that precedes "Jungleland", has even better lyrics, and is undoubtedly the best song on the album. The pseudo-progressive organ is a great touch, too. So it's a shame that "The Angel" is "Mary, Queen of Arkansas" all over again: Bruce mumbling an incoherent character sketch over an inconsequential melody. At least it's shorter than five minutes, but it's not a good song. "For You" sounds a lot like "Growin' Up", to the point where the two songs are hard for me to distinguish, but the beat is good, the acoustic guitar fills are pleasant, and there's a great build-up near the end that unfortunately anticlimaxes. Now, "Spirit in the Night"? That is a classic! A slow but swinging, jazz-folk mood piece. Then "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City", he gets back to mimicking Dylan. This is quite far from Bruce's best album, and it doesn't really show much promise. "Growin' Up", "Lost in the Flood", and "Spirit in the Night" are fantastic, but on a whole things would get much better for Bruce in the future."