As someone who got to know Bruce around the time he was the biggest living rock star on the planet, Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ,  was not an easy bite to chew. Just accepting the fact that it was the same person who bawled out bigger-than-life rock ‘n’ roll anthems at gigantic football stadiums as the bearded weirdo who stared back at you from the back cover of the Greetings album took years.

It didn’t help that one of the first Springsteen albums I owned - long before I got Greetings - was the Live 1975-85 box set. Live 75-85 contains three live versions of songs from Greetings. Unlike the studio versions, they all have that E Street Band punch and emotion that I had come to expect, and Bruce sounds like, well, Bruce. Okay, even on Live 75-85, “Saint in the City” sounded like a tuneless, confused train wreck to me, but still, drawing a line from “Growin’ Up” on side 2 of Live 75-85 to, say, “The River” on side 7 wasn’t completely unfeasible. It actually made sense.

So when I finally bought the Greetings album in order to complete my Springsteen collection, which back then was entirely on cassettes, my reaction was... there’s no other way to say it... disappointment. Who was that wimpy-voiced, bearded parody of my hero? Sure, I recognized those songs that I’d heard on Live 75-85, but boy, were they lacking in comparison!

The only redeeming factor was “Lost in the Flood”. I adored “Lost in the Flood” from the first time I heard it, and it’s still my favorite on that album. The rest was a pale mush that I only listened to because I wanted to hear “Lost in the Flood”, and with cassette tapes you couldn’t easily skip to the songs you wanted to hear.

From that low point on, my ascent to, first acceptance of, and then finally adoration for the Greetings album began. As Bruce grew from a musician I enjoyed listening to, to an all-consuming part of my life, things started to fall into place. No, Greetings From Asbury Park is not sonically Bruce’s best album, the production is neither fish nor fowl, his voice is very far from what it would become just a couple of years later, and he has released much better collections of songs since. But listen to it all the way through followed immediately by The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, and then Born to Run, and you have a trilogy of albums that so beautifully reveals the making of an artist before your very eyes... or, in this case, ears. Leave out one of those albums and the story is incomplete.

While Greetings is the inferior of the three albums and does suffer from the above-mentioned deficiencies, its existence is of course justified by more than just being a piece of a puzzle. As decades of live performances have shown, the quality of the song-writing is there. In addition to “Lost in the Flood”, songs like “Growin’ Up”, “Spirit in the Night” (which provided the name to this very site), and “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” all have enough focus and memorable imagery to stand tall among later, more famous songs. Even the under-appreciated “The Angel” has an atmosphere and an urgency that few artists can hope to achieve on their debut album. He even managed to include a song, “Blinded by the Light”, that would become a number one hit, if not for himself, then for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band a few years later.

Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, will never win any “Best album” polls, but few albums are still remembered 40 years on. Of course, much of that owes to Bruce’s later merits, but I for one would like to think that if Bruce had never made another album, there’d still be a small place in music history for this quirky postcard album from a promising artist named Bruce something or other. We’ll never know.

So let’s just pop it in the CD player, or better yet, put it on the turntable, and enjoy it like it’s the first chapter in your favorite book. It would be a bad book if the first chapter was the best, but the same would be the case if the first chapter wasn’t there at all.

Happy 40th Birthday!