I'm no jonmc, but I'd like to chime in here and say "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J." and "The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle" are my two favorites: if you want to hear young jacks strutting up and down the boardwalk, talking tall, so raw and jumped up you see them in your sleep playing pom-pom keepaway with giggling cheerleaders just before the night cools down the beach, then this is where you want to park. Watch your car for a dollar, mister?

"The River"'s pretty good, too. (I kid, I kid: 'The River"'s pretty great).

I will take a listen, in fact, knowing me, I'll be slowly working my way through his whole catalog, now that I'm hooked.

It's funny how even a music geek like me could ignore a whole body of work like that...make me wonder what else I am missing.

/heads of to vox

My pleasure, rich. The whole reason i write about music is to get people to listen or re-listen to it, so this is extremely gratifying.

(FWIW, I like the first few albums too, but Mike Appel was trying waaay to hard to turn Bruce into a folkie/singer-songwriter when rock and roll was his true element, which he dosen't break into completely until 'Kitty's Back' and 'Rosalita')

P.S. Any guy that can make "You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright" sound like a hell of a compliment is impressive. I love that line.

Ha! I just wrote about that yesterday. It's the line about rolling down the window that gets to me, man. I also highly recommend that you get hold of 'Wings For Wheels' the DVD documentary of the making of Born To Run. For fans, it's incredible, but even if you're not the world's biggest Boss fan, it's a fantastic look at the record making process, (and hearing some of the early takes of the title track and watching Bruce and Jon Landau's reactions to them is hysterical).

(Also, get Nebraska, possibly the darkest record ever released by a major artist. I'm not kidding)

To get you started (and as a thank you for the incredible compliment), here are the two earliest recordings Bruce ever made, with his high school garage band the Castiles. These songs were recorded in a strip mall studio in Bricktown, New Jersey in 1966. Bruce sings backup and plays guitar, lead vocals are handled by George Theiss (who co-wrote both songs with Bruce), the drummer is Bart Haynes, who was later drafted and killed in action in Vietnam, providing some of the inspiration for "Born In The USA." Only four copies of the original acetate are known to exist, so the fact that it wound up in circulation is something of a miracle. But here goes:

Baby I

That's What You Get

The recording is primitive, but it's a great look at Bruce's garage rock roots.

Have you posted those before? I swear I've heard them!

yeah. But I didn't know if you had grabbed 'em so I put em up again due to your newfound fandom.