The river was on 10 October 1980 to the market. I can not remember exactly at this 10 October. A terrible day, any exam time was gone in the pants completely again. In the afternoon, I learned from a friend that there was a new Springsteen album, a double album. Actually I liked at that time rather English groups. The Clash and The Damned, to be exact, from America at best Dead Kennedys, but then I thought of Darkness at the Edge of Town and back more out of love for the old days I went out and bought The River. I have not looked back. It is my favorite album from the Boss. It's an album with no frills and how many times I have asked myself whether it would not but basically a live recording is. Rarely has a musician on an album a live atmosphere created as Springsteen on The River in my eyes. The title song was presented a year earlier at the legendary No Nukes concert in Madison Square Garden for the first time to an audience. It's a ballad, not too slow, with a rhythm which is initiated after an introductory harp passage. The song contains a lot of autobiographical component. It tells the story of a teenager who married his pregnant girlfriend and must then earn his living in the building. The only diversion offers a nearby river, which he leads his girlfriend regularly. But the river is also a metaphor for all those passions of the young man that he was forced to retire after being confronted with the responsibilities of adulthood. At the end of the song eventually the river has dried up, as the love of his wife: "Is a dream a lie if it do not come true / Or is it something worse / that sends me down to the river / though I know the taken river is dry ". Basically, The River, the current New Jersey version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The album marked a major development step in Springsteen's life, not only because it first catapulted him to the number one on the charts. While he was on the first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, noncritical the side of the working class youths occupied, so the social status increased excessively, he confronted the listener on Born to Run and Darkness at the Edge of Town more and more with the classic everyday problems of his teenage underdogs. He did the same on The River, only the young man can now no longer put in a car and the difficulties simply drive off (as in Stolen Car, when he sings, "and I travel in fear / that in the darkness I want to disappear" ), but is as it were in a permanent state of suffering of adulthood The boundless freedom in the land of opportunity is suddenly no longer as limitless other words... of innocence has been experience, and from experience was despair Just as in real life!
