In 1973, Bruce Springsteen Wrote the Greatest Summer Song Ever

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In June 1973, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band went to 914 Sound Studios to make their second album of the year, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. He’d recorded his debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., with Mike Appel and Jim Cretecos the previous summer, pinching pennies just so they wouldn’t blow through their advance from Columbia Records. Upon Greetings’s descent into our reality, it sold poorly but earned a tip of the cap from the best critics of the era. Lester Bangs said that Bruce’s lyrics “revel[ed] in the joy of utter crass showoff talent run amuck and totally out of control,” while Peter Knobler wrote that he sang “with a freshness and urgency I haven’t heard since I was rocked by ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’” “[Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.] rocks, then glides, then rocks again,” Knobler added. “There is the combined sensibility of the chaser and the chaste, the street punk and the bookworm.” Robert Christgau also likened Bruce’s “absurdist energy” and “unguarded teen-underclass poetry” to Dylan, crowning the 23-year-old the proverbial “next man up” in rock and roll.

In a synthesis of blues, jazz, soul, and first-wave rock and roll, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band embraced their fullness on “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight),” “Incident on 57th Street,” and “New York City Serenade.” Gone were the folkish aspirations of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., substituted for The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle’s enthusiastic, vibrant ruckuses made by six men eight miles deep into one of the greatest pockets of all time. The urban sprawls, the sweeping cinema of New Jersey living shaded by nightfall, the hot-rod language, and coming-of-age disquiet—this is the world that lies before a sleeveless, sweating God. And hearing the East Coast streets growl with fortune tellers, strongmen, alley rats, and arcade games, I think of the moon and the stars and the planets and the satellites and the little bitty space men that Wolfman Jack was yammering about. But Pat Carty may have said it best about The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle: “If I want to beam like an idiot and remember why I fell in love with music in the first place, this is the Springsteen record I put on.”

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Less than five minutes into The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, I greet “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and its pull-apart, inexhaustible fountain of story. I turn to what Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Bangs, said in Almost Famous 25 years ago: “Music, true music—not just rock and roll—it chooses you. It lives in your car, or alone, listening to your headphones, with vast, scenic bridges and angelic choirs in your brain. It’s a place apart from the vast, benign lap of America.” Sandy is there, and the Independence Day fireworks are raining over Little Eden. Switchblade lovers bump shoulders with pinball wizards, casino boys dance shirtless, greasers wake up on the beach in the hands of cops, factory girls flirt beneath the boardwalk, and a waitress, dressed like a star, kisses a boy in their parked car. I know them all even if I’ve never met any of them. In Bruce Springsteen’s music, days bleed out slowly. There’s room for us in the mess and the light, and I adore “Sandy” because it’s a song that chronicles a young life becoming different for people who no longer belong. It’s a love song about somebody you won’t love forever. “Sandy,” Bruce sings, ditching the hushes and the yawps, “the aurora is rising behind us,” and you can feel the dim start to slide down your back.

The sentimental color of Danny Federici’s accordion and the drama of Suki Lahav’s voice spring a premonition: “This pier lights our carnival life forever.” The song, I always argue, is not only a time machine but an acknowledgement of a broken vow as it’s being made. “Oh, love me tonight and I promise I’ll love you forever,” Bruce coos, taking inspiration for “Sandy” from Van Morrison’s childlike, wintry vision of Belfast on Astral Weeks, namely in “Madame George.” The image of Van singing “The love that loves to love the love” becomes a portal to a room full of ghosts and laughing and dancing, just as a tilt-a-whirl spun Bruce into a realm of women on fire, unsnapped jeans, a tired boardwalk life, and a bon mot quaking in his worn splendor: “Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin’ fortunes better than they do?”

Suddenly, Asbury Park becomes a homecoming dance, a drive-in movie theater, traffic lights that are always green, and a kiss under high school football game bleachers. It becomes the New York City that hovers an hour away. But beneath a banner of fireworks, Bruce sets a scene for leaving, because he was born in a place people leave: You either become one of the stranded faces or carry the burden of remembering them. Where his later work, namely the triplicate of Darkness On the Edge of Town, The River, and Nebraska, would make a case for the poetry of aging, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, in the bang of “Sandy”’s serenade, flirts with the fortunes of vanishing.

Discussions are already being had about this year’s “song of the summer,” and many fans, listeners, and writers will submit their takes. Of course, we will argue for Addison Rae, or Sabrina Carpenter, or Morgan Wallen (I guess?), or Doechii, or Wednesday, but “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” is a perfect cocktail for when the hot won’t quit—a union of the somber and the euphoric, the bright and the lusting. Foreshadowed in “The E Street Shuffle” (“As them sweet summer nights turn into summer dreams”), “Sandy” is as elemental as any of the suped-up folktales our parents passed down to us, as Bruce peddles the “majesty, the mystery, and the ministry” of the Jersey Shore to wide-eyed outsiders aching for a photo-op outside Madame Marie’s. You see, the best summer songs are the ones born already in motion. In “Sandy,” the greatest drug is the traffic you’ve escaped on your way to someplace else, and the normal world is far too fabulous to be fully obliterated by make-believe. Bruce sings about the boardwalk he knows, just as the Drifters had nine years earlier, and eulogizes the lifetimes caught beneath it. He sings about the pleasures that consume us in our tireless chase for glory. But glory eludes us, “Sandy” reckons, so maybe the best any of us can do is say goodbye.

The song offers refuge even as Bruce searches for his voice. When he wrote it, he had not yet fully embraced the themes that would highlight the rest of his catalogue: sirens of American dreaming, salvation, and redemption, told in-between bursts of labor, heartbreak, and small living. This is not “Thunder Road” or “Backstreets.” In 1973, Bruce’s castles still jutted up from spirals of disaffected teenagerdom, where run-down boys chased after beach babes in fruit-colored cars. He sang about those fantasies despite not knowing how to drive, as the satellite of Jersey lured his imagination out of the doldrums. “Sandy” is the perfect noise for lying belly-up in the dog days of July, for devouring every myth of young romance. I hear Bruce Springsteen’s voice sing “my, my, my, my, my baby” and I am again in a tanned room filled with music, paying for Cokes in small bills and watching swimsuits peek above jort waistbands, because there is no love greater than the one that bit you first.

Listen to Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band perform “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” in 1978 below.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

In 1973, Bruce Springsteen Wrote the Greatest Summer Song Ever

Tucked into the saga of his second album, “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” became the perfect noise for lying belly-up in the dog days of July.