Garage was part of the tidal wave caused by the British Invasion, or rather the Beatles appearances on the Ed Sullivan show. Even though "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen was released in 1963, as sort of an avant garde Garage release, those appearances were what busted the band culture wide open and prompted Springsteen to pick up the guitar and join his first band the Castilles. I believe that Garage became an important part of the aesthetic, romanticism and ethics that is at the base of Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band. Garage gave young kids the feeling that anybody could have that big record on the top of the charts. More than ever Garage made the dream of R&R accessible to just about anyone. By the time the Beatles hit, the first wave of R&R had perished. Radio was dominated for a while by R&R based pop, by the lavish productions of Phil Sector or Leiber & Stoller, or by the highly polished songwriting and performing of Sam Cooke and Roy Orbison. While that did give R&R more credibility and gave R&R more artistic value it also put R&R beyond the reach of many kids. The Beatles showed that you could do it yourself basically, they opened the doors to a whole new bag of R&R dreams.
That band ethic is why "Born To Run" turned out the way it did. Springsteen wanted to record his own Phil Spector album, but I believe he never even contemplated recording it with studio musicians and a proper producer. In stead he took the band in the studio trying to recreate the Spector sound with his own band, layer by layer. Spector simply had an army of musicians in the studio recording them simultaneously on a two track recorder. Although the musicians on Spector's record became known as the Wrecking Crew, they were never a band in the way the E-Street Band was. I think to Springsteen the R&R band represented the sort of mystic brotherhood busting out of class together, trying to get away from those fools. That romanticism created a different aesthetic from the producers approach Spector had, where musicians were secondary to his own genius. It was also the reason why "Born to Run" ultimately came out sounding different from Spector's ground breaking singles. Though recorded with a smaller band, the album ironically sounded a bit more cluttered and muddy than what Spector achieved with his two track. By the time "Born To Run" hit the market Spector was already far in his decline. Springsteen met him once in the studio when Phil was recording one of Bruce's idols, Dion, in '77. Spector merely turned to Springsteen and said "doesn't this make "Born To Run" suck".
But as Don McLeese pointed out in his classic article, "Abdicating the Rock 'n' Roll Pedestal: Bruce Springsteen Gets Down", for the Chicago reader in 1980 there was a paradox to Springsteen as well, "[By] treating a Springsteen as something special, we threaten to undermine what made him special in the first place". As early as '78 Springsteen realized that when the first River songs became part of the Darkness tour. Two of them "The Ties That Bind" but especially "Sherry Darling" were much closer to the the sounds of the Garage bands that inspired Springsteen. As "Tracks" showed, Springsteen had been writing songs like that for the E-Street Band as early as 1973 with "Seaside Bar Song". It wasn't until "The River" Springsteen started to bring those Garage sounds more to the foreground. Further scaling down his songwriting Springsteen abandoned much of the grand imagery that defined "Born To Run" and "Darkness On The Edge Of Town". Partly produced by Little Steven, "the River" was oozing with the sweat of the garage that gave birth to Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band in the first place.
"Devil With The Blue Dress On" - Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels
"Dirty Water" - The Standells
"Double Shot Of My Baby's Love" - The Swingin' Medallions
"Sherry Darling" - Bruce Springsteen (live '78)
