For their early careers, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits shared so much in common. Born just a couple of months apart in late 1949, by 1973 they were both hard-working singer/songwriters telling tales of America’s working classes and painting sonic pictures with every bit as much brutality and detail as a Grant Wood, Edward Hopper or John Steinbeck. And it is listening to tracks like Wild Billy’s Circus Story the two seem inseparable. Capturing characters like the carnies without slipping into cliché or derision, Wild Billy could have been on any of Waits’s Asylum albums just as “Martha” or “(Looking For) The Heart Of Saturday Night” could have slotted seamlessly into The Wild The Innocence and the E Street Shuffle. That a decade later when Bruce was preparing to release Born In The USA, Waits was peddling Swordfishtrombones matters little here…