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In the days long before music services and social media, music fans inhabited message boards, listservs, and tape trading circles. Compared to our everything-at-your-fingertips present, musical gratification was much delayed for said fans, but it was all the more satisfying for the waiting.

For Bruce Springsteen aficionados, fandom central was a listserv called the LuckyTown Digest. Every morning, I’d receive an email from the LuckyTown listerv to my (still going strong) AOL account, and it would contain posts that had been mailed to LuckyTown headquarters within the previous day. If you wanted to engage with something that someone posted, you’d send a note to the listserv for inclusion in the next day’s digest. It was glorious.

At the top of each installment of the LuckyTown Digest was table of contents that would detail the topics of the posts to follow, and each header would begin with one of three designations, namely “BC,” “SBC,” or “NBC”––“Bruce Content,” “Some Bruce Content,” or “No Bruce Content.”

All of that is to say, here’s a Letters to You that’s full on BC: this guy was last week on the campus of Monmouth University, at a Bruce Springsteen symposium dedicated to the Boss’s second album, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, which is enjoying its 50th anniversary this year.

The symposium was glorious. In addition to performances of the songs off TWIESS at the end of the day, attendees watched panel discussion after panel discussion featuring pretty much everyone still alive who was involved in one or another aspect of the album’s production. We were treated to insights from managers, promoters, art directors, producers, roadies, and musicians who had a hand in the making of The Wild, the Innocent, and as the cherry on top, there was a surprise appearance by Bruce himself.

One of the highlights of the symposium for me was an interview with Louis Lahav, the recording engineer for TWIESS. He went into mad detail about the piano sound on the record, the overdubbing of multiple harmonies from his wife Suki in an effort to mimic a children’s choir, his difficulty in finding proficient horn players, and so on.

Lahav likewise gave the single best line from the entire day when he observed, “The best musical moment of the The Wild, the Innocent is the split second of silence.”

Everyone knew what he was talking about. And he was right.

Go ahead and find The Wild, the Innocent on a streaming service of your choice, and do yourself a favor by listening to the album from start to finish, all the way through. As you hear some of the best music of Springsteen’s entire oeuvre, you’ll notice that for the second half of the record, the songs stretch out and become pretty long. One of those show stopping, leisurely tunes is the classic “Incident of 57th Street,” a baladeering slice of NYC street life that finds Bruce at his most romantic. It’s a sweeping tale of love discovered on the wrong side of the tracks but lost too soon, and the end of the song features the protagonist leaving the bed of his lover to embark upon the proverbial one last score. The lyrics of “Incident” don’t provide a proper conclusion to the story––does our hero make it? is he gunned down?––and the music itself ends with a lovely piano figure that ascends into a final progression. However, just when you feel that it’s time for the piano to play that one last, resolving chord, “Incident of 57th Street” abruptly ends. We don't know what ends up happening to our man, and the music echoes that uncertainty.

But that’s not the end! If “Incident” never comes to rest, it was Louis Lahav who talked Springsteen into eliminating the standard, two second pause between that song and the one to follow, “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” one of Bruce’s earliest, most raucous, and best party anthems. Instead, as “Incident” stops suspended on a hanging piano figure, you hear only the briefest nanosecond of silence before the roaring, power chord guitar introduction to “Rosalita.” 

The opening chords of "Rosalita" both kick off the song at hand but also conclude the one before.  In between, there's that pregnant silence.

At the symposium, Louis Lahav said of that sliver of stillness, “It’s magic.” “Incident of 57th Street” concludes with death, loss, and sadness but then waits expectantly for “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” to erupt with new life.

The secret of the album, and the secret of the universe, is contained within that pause. See ya next week when I trace a couple big bangs through the Bible.

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