Songfacts®:

• This song is based on people and places Springsteen met in his early years as a songwriter. His father Doug was a bus driver for a time, which helped inspire the song. >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Dirk - Southwest of Freehold, NJ
• The barrage of images in the lyrics helped earn Springsteen the tag "The New Dylan," a comparison he played down. He moved away from the Dylan style by writing less introspective, harder rocking songs on his next album, The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle.
• This song started with the lyrics, something Springsteen did from time to time when he started out as a songwriter. Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. was his first album, and it marked a turning point in his songwriting: Instead of keeping the lyrics as simple and repetitive as possible to accommodate the bars he was playing with his bands, he started using elaborate wordplay to tell different stories, often within the same song - something you could do in a recording studio but not in a noisy club. This song makes passing reference to a number of characters, but leaves the listener to decide their fates. Just what becomes of Mary Lou, the mongrel nymphs and the lucky, young matador who catches the rose is in the ear of the beholder.
• Joan Fontaine pops up in the lyrics for no apparent reason:
  
  Broadway Mary, Joan Fontaine
  advertiser on a downtown train
  
  She was an actress who starred in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rebecca.