The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle Review

The step from the first album to this one is enormous and almost nobody noticed at the time. The band is now the point. There is an accordion, a tuba, a vibraphone, a saxophone doing lead lines, and arrangements that change key and tempo halfway through because the story requires it. Rosalita runs seven minutes and is essentially a comic short film about eloping, and it stayed the set closer for a decade for good reason.

Incident on 57th Street and New York City Serenade are the ones that show what he was actually reaching for: street opera, piano led, romantic in the old sense, and completely unfashionable in 1973. Fourth of July, Asbury Park is a farewell to a place and a season, and it is the most controlled writing on the record. The mix is still cramped and the band occasionally outruns the tape. Even so, this is the sound of an entire world being invented and then handed to almost no one.