It’s tempting to define Bruce’s early career as a series of eras characterized by the band Bruce belonged to at the time. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, Bruce travelled from The Castiles to Earth to Child to Steel Mill to The Bruce Springsteen Band (with a Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom dalliance and a Sundance Blues Band detour) before finally convening the original E Street Band in late 1972.<\/p>\n
But any reasonably close inspection of Bruce’s bands from Child onward reveals that there was a whole lot of E Street from Bruce’s earliest days. Vini Lopez and Danny Federici were founding members of Child in 1968; Steve Van Zandt joined them in Steel Mill in 1970; and Garry Tallent and David Sancious enlisted in the Bruce Springsteen Band in 1971.<\/p>\n
With so many familiar players carrying over from one band to the next, there was understandably a lot of sonic carryover as well. Early Bruce Springsteen band gigs sounded a lot like Steel Mill, and early E Street Band shows sounded a whole lot like The Bruce Springsteen Band.<\/p>\n
The Bruce Springsteen Band was known for loose, jazzy, bluesy performances. If Steel Mill set pieces were all about the guitars, in the BSB every player had a chance to shine.<\/p>\n
The original E Street Band was virtually identical to the Bruce Springsteen Band; in fact, new addition Clarence Clemons is the\u00a0only <\/em>original E Streeter who wasn’t in Bruce’s previous band. And with so much personnel continuity, it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that the early E Street Band sound was pretty similar to the late Bruce Springsteen Band sound.<\/p>\n Perhaps the best illustration of this can be found in our heroes’ cover of “Walking the Dog,” originally recorded by Rufus Thomas. “Walking the Dog” is an odd song; with verses based almost entirely on a children’s nursery rhyme paired with a non sequitur chorus and dog whistles, it verges perilously close to a novelty song. Despite (or perhaps because of) that, “Walking the Dog” became a hit for Thomas, cracking the Top Ten in 1963.<\/p>\n