Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)

Seven minutes of pure joyful chaos, and the closest Springsteen ever came to writing a Broadway finale for a garage band. The arrangement is deliberately overstuffed — Clarence Clemons' saxophone bursting in like a horn section, an actual horn section behind it, Danny Federici's organ churning, a piano rolling through changes that keep refusing to settle, all of it stopping and restarting on a dime. It's bar-band R&B inflated to absurd scale, and the joke is that it works. The young Springsteen's voice is rangier and rawer here than it would ever be again, half-shouting, cracking with laughter, spilling verses too long for their melodies. The story is a comic opera of adolescent escape: a boy at the window, a father who hates him, a mother listening in, and then the punchline that turns the whole thing giddy — the record company gave him a big advance, so they can finally leave. It's the last moment before *Born to Run* made the escape mythic and heavy; here it's still funny and unearned and entirely possible. The definitive live closer for a decade. Best for the middle of a good night, loud, with people who know when to shout the horn parts.