Out on the Turnpike

WHEN JANIS JOPLIN SANG, you could hear the years of whiskey and smoke she'd seen. And while Bruce Springsteen is usually as full-voiced as a coonhound hot on the trail, he has that same degenerate raspiness, hoarsely trailing off at the end of a line, or scream-whispering into a mike. In Springsteen's first two albums. Greetings From Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle, his voice jibed perfectly with his driving music and his lyric description of growing up in New Jersey. But his new album, Born To Run, is inconsistent; Springsteen's voice powers through too much slickness and often verges on incongruity.

The finest vocal on the album, in the song "Meeting Across The River," capsules the false bravado of a Jersey hood asking his friend Eddie for a ride through the tunnel to New York City, where his connection is waiting. But the effect is almost ruined by the lilting trumpet accompaniment, which would be perfect for sitting-on-the-front-porch-swing-sniffing-the-honey-suckle-with-yer-sweetie, but here, makes mush of the vocal. The longest song on the record, "Jungleland," also suffers from over-orchestration: a string section introduces the central piano theme and channels the song's build up to Springsteen's slashing, cymbal-crashing guitar chords; the song seesaws from a suite for piano and orchestra to a jazzy version of the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." "She's the

One" combines love-hate lyrics like

...she knows that it kills me

With her soft French cream

Standing in that doorway like a dream

I wish she'd just leave me alone

Because French cream won't soften those boots

And French kisses will not break that heart of

Stone:.. with a synthesizer-like framework of harpsichord, piano, and organ notes played simultaneously, which is much too tightly controlled to flesh out the emotion in the words.

Springsteen listeners have evolved a theory (already?) to explain the slickness and tightness of Born to Run, namely, that Jon Landau decided to take time off from his Rolling Stone column and make Springsteen a superstar. Hence, presumably, Landau's ideas of what great rock'n roll is distorted Springsteen's gutsy music. Actually, however, there is no significant stylistic difference between the title song (the only one without Landau) and the four other hot-rod rockers on the album. After all, Bruce Springsteen wrote and arranged and co-produced the album; blame for inconsistency and tightness goes to him.

For every "Jungleland" though, there is a "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," which is not complex musically but, like the bass line in "Sunshine of Your Love," allows for incredible solos. Contrasting to the tightness of "She's the One" is the emotion of "Night," where Springsteen's vocal and Clarence Clemon's blaring, buzzing sax transcend the simple message--"You work from nine to five/And somehow you survive/Till the night"-- and make boredom and anguish palpable.

CLEMONS PLAYED with Springsteen on his first two albums; hearing him again conjures up images of the loose, everybody-plays-three-instruments exuberance that is lost in Born to Run. Only Clemons and Garry Tallent, the bass guitarist, remain from the "E Street" group, and Tallent no longer fools around with tubas and accordians--the brass players on Born To Run are pros, on loan from other studios. What makes Born To Run frustrating to listen to is the lingering suspicion--no, firm conviction--that with the spunk of his original group, Bruce Springsteen would have produced a great record.

He seems to have settled on the automobile metaphor as the primary archetype of Jersey adolescence--after all, exhaust fumes probably account for his vocal grittiness. Songs like "Thunder Road" rumble, muffler-less, with pounding guitars and bass:

And in the lonely cool before dawn

You hear their engines roaring on

But when you get to the porch they're gone

On the wind, so Mary climb in... and the wailing nostalgia of "Backstreets," perhaps the album's best song, intersects universal lost childhood:

Remember all the movies, Terry

We'd go to see

Trying to learn to walk like the heroes

We thought we had to be

Well after all this time

To find we're just like all the rest

Stranded in the park

And forced to confess

To hiding on the backstreets...

Running on the backstreets

Terry, you swore we'd live forever

Taking it on them backstreets together...

But Bruce Springsteen seems to be leaving the backstreets behind. His arrangements have less and less of the heat and roar of the pits in them. He's smoothing out his music and he's headed out on the turnpike. And out on the turnpike, neither the screeches not the fumes are quite so noticeable. AM radio takes over on the turnpike.