Song #4

Title: "Incident on 57th Street"
Artist: Bruce Springsteen
Album: The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, 1973
Written By: Bruce Springsteen

As much as I have loved Springsteen's music over the years, you'd think I'd have more than one of his songs in the 24. Suffice it to say that in my expanded Top 200 he is very well represented. This early, pre-Born To Run period is my favorite Springsteen era. He was loose, he was hungry. As great as the E Street Band is (and they are one of the great rock bands), I really love this earliest line-up. Clarence Clemons, Danny Federici and Garry Talent were there from the beginning, but two crucial differences here are David Sancious on piano/electric piano and Vinny "Mad Dog" Lopez on drums. Max Weinberg is a great drummer (and has more technique than Lopez), but Lopez could swing in a way that Max never has.

Anyway, this song (this whole album, really, which is my favorite of his) is the peak of his romanticized Jersey tales, before the more grand escapism and ambition of Born To Run, and way before any sort of working class consciousness of Darkness on the Edge of Town and beyond. Honestly, it is what he really knew vs. trying to make the grander statements of the later years.

This was also when he wrote songs of more epic structure and length, before the Darkness-era streamlining that has continued to this day. (The big difference is that around Darkness he stopped writing songs on the piano and started writing them on the guitar, and you can tell the difference). I love the dynamics, the exuberance, the quirky lyrics, and the great guitar solo (from Bruce himself) at the climax of the song. This is one of the favorites for many Bruce diehards, but it is not very familiar to the masses.

BELOW: I was able to find about 30 different live versions of this song on YouTube, but nobody bothered to post the studio version, which is my actual pick. But this spirited live version from 1980 is a close approximation to the original, although I still do prefer the original. It being 1980, it does not feature Lopez or Sancious. Ignore the rather random images with this clip.


BELOW: Bonus clip. This is a stark, lovely version of the song from '75. Here Bruce is on the piano, accompanied only by the haunting violin of Suki Lahav.