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The Band on Bruce: Their Springsteen
A candid look at the legend from his "greatest friends" — the E Street Band

The sound is classic amateur 1966 — chaotic, jangling guitars, impatient drumming and crude raging-hormone vocal harmonies — and Bruce Springsteen knows every note by heart. Hypnotized by joy in front of a small tabletop stereo cranked to top volume, he dances on the balls of his feet, vigorously strums an imaginary guitar with his right fist and howls along during the chorus — "Baby I-I-I-I!" — in a deeper wild-bear version of his old plaintive teenage tenor.

Springsteen, 59, is happily singing and playing air guitar with himself — to "Baby I," a single he made at 16, when he was a guitarist and singer in a New Jersey garage band, the Castiles.

Earlier that afternoon, Springsteen is sitting in the wood-paneled living room of Thrill Hill, a 19th-century farmhouse in central New Jersey that he has converted into a studio. He talks about some of the Sixties echoes — including the Walker Brothers, Jimmy Webb, the Beach Boys on "Heroes and Villains" and the Byrds' Fifth Dimension — ringing throughout his new album with the E Street Band, Working on a Dream. That gets him reminiscing about the Castiles, his first serious band. Suddenly, Springsteen bolts upright in his chair. "I have to dig it out before you go," he says excitedly. "I found the actual two-track tape of our record. I had it put on a CD. It's back at the house. I'll bring it over."

And he does, rushing home — Springsteen, his wife and E Street singer Patti Scialfa and their three teenage children live in an 18th-century house just down the road — and back. Springsteen doesn't even bother taking off his bulky winter coat. He strides into the glassed-in porch where he demos new songs and made his 2005 solo album, Devils & Dust, hits "play" and flies back to May 18th, 1966, when the Castiles recorded "Baby I" and the flip side, "That's What You Get," at Mr. Music Inc., a studio in nearby Bricktown.

"Well, what could have been a studio back then," Springsteen cracks after he plays both tracks. He and singer-guitarist George Theiss wrote the songs, according to legend, while driving to the session. The band cut them in an hour. "I talk to George once in a while," Springsteen says. "He got married very, very young. Had a lovely family. Made music. I used to see him at the Stone Pony all the time. He had a great voice."

But the Castiles' big moment passed that day in '66 — their single was never released — while Springsteen, nearly 43 years later, is at a new peak in his career. Working on a Dream is Springsteen's third great album with the E Street Band in a decade and arguably the best of the three in its classic-pop songwriting and intimate lyric force. They made most of it on days off from their 2007-08 shows — Danny Federici played keyboards on some tracks before his death at 58 last April 17th from melanoma — with Springsteen and producer Brendan O'Brien enriching the E Street Band's natural stampede in "My Lucky Day," "What Love Can Do" and the opening eight-minute horse opera, "Outlaw Pete," with an abundance of strings, guitars, choral vocals and saxophonist Clarence Clemons' leonine blowing. The result is Springsteen's most ornate album since 1975's Born to Run.

He has already started the new year with a Golden Globe for his theme song to The Wrestler and is assured an Academy Award nomination as well. After his January 18th performance in Washington, D.C., at "We Are One," the free Barack Obama inauguration concert, Springsteen will play a hotly anticipated halftime set with the E Street Band at the Super Bowl on February 1st — itself a kickoff for another E Street tour, in the spring in the U.S. and Europe. The last time Springsteen wrote, recorded and hit the road at this velocity was when he was a new Columbia artist. His first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, were both released in 1973.

"At that time, you signed old-fashioned contracts where you were supposed to make an album every six months," Springsteen says. "But after that, I said, 'Nah.' Without going into the whole story" — he grins — "obviously there was the perfectionism, the self-consciousness and the pursuit of very specific ideas, while you're forming who you are, what you want to write about."

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