“It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City” by Bruce Springsteen

"It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City" landed on Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Bruce Springsteen's 1973 debut, but it was opening doors for him well before that. It moved Mike Appel to quit his job and manage an unsigned singer, and on May 2, 1972, Springsteen led off his CBS Records audition for John Hammond with it. Hammond would sign him, and the next day he cut it for a 12-song demo that finally surfaced on Tracks in 1998.

The album version went down in the summer of 1972 with three future E Street Band men, Garry Tallent on bass, Vini Lopez on drums and David Sancious on piano. It's a young man's tale of trying to stay good and do right on the city streets, and John Sayles later set a high-school lunchroom scene to it in Baby It's You.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.