Bruce Springsteen is the last of rock's great innocents. There can never be another quite like him. (pp. 6-7)

It was Bruce Springsteen's fate to become the key figure in the transition from hippie music and back toward a more naturalistic rock style. Springsteen writes of cars and girls, the key icons of this macho movement, the way the hippie writers wrote of drugs and universal peace/love—with commitment and passion…. In Springsteen's songs, a questing, romantic spirit is inevitably scorned and banished; he is torn between his own abandonment of the traditional values and his desire to seek them as a refuge. He is not a drop-out; he is an outlaw, in line with what Norman Mailer had written in 1960: "There was a message returned to us by our frontier that the outlaw is worth more than the sheriff." America had eclipsed its frontiers—Vietnam was...