1973 was the perfect moment for Bruce Springsteen to arrive. His debut LP coincided with the widespread sense that young urban idealists were starting to settle into a now-inevitable-feeling sense of Nixon-era disillusionment and American Graffiti hot-rod nostalgia. So Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. landed as a still-potent example of how thrilling it could be to romanticize that lost innocence — and how necessary it was to temper that with a deep connection to the ways that innocence’s unsustainability could mess you up even in your youthful prime. Springsteen’s songwriting was already vivid and unique enough to light a fire under the rock world’s collective ass; Manfred Mann’s Earth Band notched heavy mid ’70s AOR airplay with no less than three covers of songs off this album alone, and two of those — the hazily-recalled teenage debauchery of “Spirit in the Night” and the delirious-with-assonance boardwalk Beat poetry of “Blinded By the Light” — were written under pressure after Clive Davis’s “I don’t hear a single” gripes. The other one, “For You,” is another early Bruce gem — romance as mutual desperation, where the entreaties are simultaneously frustrated and empathetic (“And your strength is devastating in the face of all these odds/Remember how I kept you waiting when it was my turn to be the god?”) and the sweet ride he offers his love interest is a rescue in an ambulance. There’s still room for lighthearted sentiment; “Growin’ Up,” later a live-set showcase for banter-filled, tongue-in-cheek reminiscing stories, is a masterpiece of teen rebellion as personal epiphany. But you can hear what’s coming from the air of devastation around Nam-homecoming ennui study “Lost in the Flood” and the way “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” emphasizes the idea of rock’n’roll coolness as armor against despair. Springsteen’s songwriting stands out a bit more than the still-developing folk-rock musicianship — an imbalance that he and his quickly coalescing E Street Band would address in spectacular fashion one album later — but when the songwriting is this peerless, the work of a Dylan whose Woody Guthrie was Ronnie Spector, his vernacular profundity could carry the weight of an increasingly uncertain world.