ABSTRACT
The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle was recorded in the summer and fall of 1973 and released that November. At Columbia Records, it was a less-than-ideal moment to be considered a Clive Davis protege, especially if your first album hadn’t sold enough copies to justify a heavy promotional budget. E Street was released with the absolute minimum of fanfare. The CBS field people who had pushed hard for sales and airplay on Greetings now had several projects of much higher priority—not an uncommon circumstance for an artist whose first bum has been a widely publicized flop, although it was perhaps taken to extreme lengths by the CBS national promotion man who encouraged a Houston station to cease playing Bruce’s record and begin programming Boz Scaggs and Billy Joel instead.
