Bruce Springsteen
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
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NATN Recommended
Bruce Springsteen
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
Columbia, 1978
RiYL: Driving through the desert with a lot on your mind. |
But to me, the man standing on the cover of Darkness On The Edge Of Town is the real Bruce Springsteen. This is the real McCoy, the real Slim Shady, the gen-u-wine product, whatever. I mean, just look at this guy! He’s wearing the same white v-neck tee of his greaser period. The same crusty leather jacket from the Born To Run cover, with the same messy long hair, but without the splotchy beard. He’s standing in front of a yellowed door with plaque-colored Venetian blinds, looking like he woke up five minutes ago on your basement couch and is getting ready to head out on a midnight run to 7-11. He’s tired, maybe a bit angry, and you can’t be sure if he’s coming back.
This is vintage Bruce.
This month marks the 25th anniversary of Darkness On The Edge Of Town, an album that displays Springsteen at a pivotal moment in his life, having just survived the most tumultuous years of his then-short career. Born To Run, his most recent album at this point, put him on the cover of “Time” and “Newsweek,” but a subsequent court battle with his once trusted friend and manager, Mike Appel, legally prevented him from entering a recording studio during his creative peak. By all accounts the trial was an impassioned one, with Bruce fighting -- at some points, literally screaming -- for the rights to his own music. In Eric Alterman’s 1999 biography of the Boss, “It Ain’t No Sin To Be Alive,” there is this excerpt from a Springsteen affidavit in the case:
My interest is in my career, which up until now holds the promise of my being able to significantly contribute to, and possibly influence, a generation of music. No amount of money could compensate me if I were able to lose this opportunity.
The case was settled on May 28, 1977, and a year later, Bruce delivered this album. If there were those who rode the backlash to the Born To Run popularity/hysteria -- critics who called him a Bob Dylan knock-off and peers who saw him as an over-hyped cheese ball who likes to write about Magic Rats -- then this album and its legendary tour quickly silenced them. Not surprisingly, this is Bruce at his most angry; he spends the album’s first five minutes “spitting in the face” of everything he’s been through. But he harnesses this anger and its energy and goes on to present his rock manifesto, a collection of songs that essentially sum up the Springsteen we know and love today. The hard-working Bruce, the hard-rocking Bruce. The blue-collar fighter and the vulnerable, sensitive believer, all wrapped into one recently shaven tramp.
“Sometimes I feel so weak,” he sings on "The Promised Land.” “I just want to explode. Explode and tear this whole town apart. Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart.”
And explode, he does. From opening drum roll of “Badlands” to the final chorus of the album’s closer, “Darkness On The Edge Of Town,” Bruce is audibly erupting. He’s talking about love and dreams and fears and the price you gotta pay. He’s howling about the pain, the sins, and the inherited flame. And, of course, he’s preaching about the work, the work, and the working life. As it’s been pointed out many times before, this is a big turning point for Bruce as a songwriter. The singer himself says, “By the end of Darkness, I’d found my adult voice.” By this, he means, he stopped writing about those damned Rats and started writing about everyday people, sorting through real life dilemmas. The results are stunning.
Despite its stripped down instrumentation, Darkness On The Edge Of Town has an epic feel that ties it to the songwriter’s previous work, including Born To Run. Like its predecessor, Darkness is essentially a collection of short vignettes that sum up to one great vision of desperation. But its raw, lo-fi production is completely different than his earlier material. Bruce has already shown he knows a great deal about pacing and basic storytelling keys. Here he’s able to strip off all the fat of Born To Run and use simple words and more efficient playing to better convey his original and very personal artistic concepts.
The first half of Darkness is almost a perfect album all unto its own; it makes one pine for the days of vinyl, when recordings were divided into two digestible halves. Springsteen first knocks the audience over with “Badlands” and “Adam Raised A Cain,” and then suddenly brings things down a thousand notches on “Something in the Night,” a song with one of the best openings in the songwriter’s career. It’s an epic tune, in the same Broadway showtune vein of “Jungleland” or “Incident On 57th Street,” but sans the imitation wall-of-sound grandiosity, and its spare, plodding drums prove the old maxim about less being more.
The song’s moaning, dream-like ending is followed by the rock-and-roll hand grenade that is “Candy’s Room.” All the repressed energy of “Something In The Night” is cut loose here in the form of Max Weinberg’s pounding drum fills and Springsteen’s screeching guitar solos. The song might have made a perfect closer to the side, if not for the existence of “Racing In The Street,” arguably the singer’s finest song. Its delicate piano opening draws the listener into the melancholy world of the song’s protagonist, a guy who likes to race cars after work to avoid “dying little by little, piece by piece.” The chorus turns a Martha and the Vandelles hit on its head, while the verses shift the listener’s attention slowly to the character’s girlfriend, a woman who “stares off into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.” In the song’s ghostly final verse, the singer plans his ride to the sea, where he and the girl can wash the sins from their hands. The music fades back down to the delicate piano lines and then re-builds itself, gradually growing into a beautiful crescendo -- a sort of credit-rolling finale that gives the album’s first half near-perfect closure.
Of course, the second half of the record ain’t so bad either. “Streets Of Fire” features some of Bruce’s most gritty, soulful singing and guitar playing. “Prove It All Night” offers listeners a touch of lighthearted braggadocio, a well-needed break from the album’s heavier material. “Factory” is a bit of a dud, and delivers the working life message with heavy-handed imagery. But the side’s opening and closing songs -- “The Promised Land” and “Darkness On The Edge of Town,” respectively -- more than compensate.
In the first of the two, Springsteen offers some of his most emotional lyrics:
There’s a dark cloud rising from the dessert floor
I packed my bags and I’m headed straight into the storm.
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted.
Does anyone write lyrics like this anymore? Springsteen puts so much on the line in “The Promised Land,” both figuratively and literally. He exposes his fear, his anger, his pride, and his most treasured beliefs. That last line is particularly devestating, so clearly connected to the songwriter's recent struggles.
“Darkness” is much the same. In his collection of lyrics, “Songs,” Springsteen writes, “’Darkness On The Edge Of Town’ dealt with the idea that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end of your rope.” If there is a Bruce belief system, the title track of this record might very well serve as its blueprint. It seems to be the song that resonates most easily with the rest of the songwriter’s later material; he never fails to re-purpose it in his live performances. Like many of his songs, “Darkness” turns the everyman into a hero. In many ways, it turns the audience into the hero. It asserts that hard-fought happiness is the greatest success story, a notion that Springsteen’s work is completely steeped in.
With the release of this record, Bruce and the band embarked on his most celebrated tour, where they brought the intensity and magic of this record to life for audiences across the nation. These legendary shows typically ran up to and above four hours long, often broadcast via radio to surrounding areas, and established Springsteen and the E Street Band as a rock and roll institution. At one particularly famous concert in L.A., the singer told a story about growing up with his parents, who chastized him for playing “that damn guitar,” and pushed him to be a lawyer or an author.
“But what they didn’t understand is that I wanted everything,” he says just before someone in the crowd yells, “You got it!”
With the creation of “Darkness On The Edge Of Town” -- both the painful court battle leading up to its actual creation and the recording process itself -- Bruce Springsteen got it all. He found his voice and in doing so, produced the most vital recording of his career. This album took him to the next level of artistic achievement, elevated him above one-hit wonder status, and for better or worse, established a new type of rock and roll.
BEN FRENCH | Ben founded NATN in the winter of 1998-1999 with fellow IU alums Troy Carpenter and Jonathan Cohen. During the day time, he's working for Nielsen Business Media, publisher of Billboard. Ben's favorite acts include Bruce Springsteen, The Clash, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys.