- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- In 2013, Rolling Stone magazine named Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. as #37 of the “100 Greatest Debut Albums of All-Time”.
Bruce Springsteen – Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973): Bruce Springsteen made a big splash when he arrived on the music scene in the early 1970’s, particularly after the release of his third album, the monster hit Born to Run (1975). Bruce Springsteen was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, the two biggest magazines in the country, I think at the same time; and he was on television regularly also. Bruce Springsteen really hit his stride with his seventh album, Born in the U.S.A. (1984), one of the largest selling albums of all time that launched one of the most exciting concert tours as well. The cover of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Bruce Springsteen’s debut album shows a picture postcard with photographs inset into oversized letters spelling out the town name. This type of postcard has been popular in tourist communities for decades, particularly beachfront towns like Asbury Park (Bruce Springsteen’s home town), which is located on the sprawling Jersey Shore.
Bruce Springsteen once said that he intended to make an album with words like Bob Dylan that sounded like Phil Spector where he sang like Roy Orbison; and Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. fulfilled this ambition pretty effectively. In order to satisfy record company executives, when Bruce Springsteen was putting together his debut album, he included five tracks that he recorded with his band and five tracks that he performed solo. At that point, Columbia Records President Clive Davis said that the album needed a hit single. In response, Bruce Springsteen wrote “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night”; the two songs, particularly “Blinded by the Light” feature a host of characters and cryptic lyrics whose meaning is hard to follow. Quoting Bruce Springsteen about “Blinded by the Light” in Wikipedia (it is not hard to understand how these meanings would escape nearly all listeners): “According to Springsteen, the song came about from going through a rhyming dictionary and looking for rhymes. The first line of the song, ‘Madman drummers, bummers, and Indians in the summers with a teenage diplomat’ is autobiographical – ‘Madman drummers’ is a reference to drummer Vini Lopez, known as ‘Mad Man’ (later changed to ‘Mad Dog’); ‘Indians in the summers’ refers to the name of Springsteen’s old Little League team; ‘teenage diplomat’ refers to himself. The remainder of the song tells of many unrelated events, with the refrain of ‘Blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night’.” Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was a critical favorite but only a modest success in terms of sales, peaking at #60 on the Billboard album chart. Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. nearly made the Top 40 in the U.K., but only after Born in the U.S.A. came out in 1984. Neither “Blinded by the Light” nor “Spirit in the Night” made the singles chart in their original releases, although both songs have been heard regularly on rock radio over the years. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band covered both of the singles from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. plus a third song from the album, “For You”; their #1 version of “Blinded by the Light” was the biggest hit song by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. In 2003, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was ranked at No. 379 in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”; and in 2013, the same magazine named Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. as #37 of the “100 Greatest Debut Albums of All-Time”. On November 22, 2009, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was played in concert in its entirety for the first time by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, at the HSBC Arena in Buffalo, New York, to celebrate the last show of the Working on a Dream tour.