Mercurial drummer Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez would be fired before the recording of Born to Run, and pianist David Sancious would depart to pursue a solo career. The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle also marked the end of the first incarnation of the E Street Band. But if those two are all you know from the album, you are missing out on some of Bruce’s best songs. The two best-known of the seven tracks on The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle are without question “Rosalita” and “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” both of which would become crowd favorites at E Street Band shows for the next 5 decades. This being Bruce, however, the second album was, in my opinion, superior to the first it has faded from memory simply because it had the misfortune of being overshadowed two years later by Born to Run, his third album and The Greatest Album Ever. The same can be true with musicians, and there is no doubt that (lyrically at least) Springsteen threw all he had into that debut album. With novelists, for example, the second book is often not as good as their debut simply because they poured a lifetime of ideas into that first book and are basically starting from scratch with the second. Sophomore efforts can be a hit-or-miss proposition for any artist. The album that rarely gets mentioned nearly 50 years after its released is his second, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. ( Alex Markham would surely include Working on a Dream). Ask them to go deeper, and you’ll get Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, Magic, and even his debut album Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Born to Run, The River, Born in the USA…these are the albums that immediately come to mind when most people think of Bruce Springsteen, and rightly so.

E street shuffle album cover