Episode
From Asbury to Hammersmith: How "The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle" Set the Stage for Bruce Springsteen's Crossed Channels Breakthrough
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- Sep 11, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 721
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Summary
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit tonyfletcher.substack.com Welcome to the 20th episode of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast — a.k.a. the podcast in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond. For our big 2-0, we’re back on American shores — the Jersey Shore, to be specific. Bruce Springsteen is someone whose work is extremely dear to both of us — though because of our slight difference in age and the fact that we grew up on opposite sides of the Atlantic, our experiences were quite different when it came to discovering his music. We compare notes on the “origin stories” of our Bruce fandom in this episode, while also taking a closer look at a Springsteen album that didn’t chart in either the US or the UK at the time of its release: 1973’s The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle . Released just 11 months after the acoustic-oriented Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. , Springsteen’s ambitious second album found him plugging in his electric guitar to record seven songs — four of which ran seven minutes or longer — with a full band, while drawing upon a much wider range of musical styles and influences. The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle was an incredibly important stepping stone in Springsteen’s career, once which put him and the E Street Band on course to create Born to Run and to play their first shows in the UK and Europe, including their now-legendary appearance at London’s Hammersmith Odeon on November 18, 1975. We talk about that incredible performance in this episode, along with why Wild/Innocent is still such a compelling listen, Bruce’s knack for myth-making, the time Tony interviewed Bruce for his book with Eddie Floyd,…