Very much looking forward to purcahsing this…
Chicago Tribune.
Bruce Springsteen: In ‘Darkness’ reissue, the CD that might have been
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In between the game-changing albums “Born to Run” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Bruce Springsteen’s career was derailed by legal turmoil and artistic indecisiveness.
The struggle is documented on a six-disc box set, “The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story” (Columbia), which presents the original 1978 album in remastered form and supplements it with dozens of outtakes and three DVDs containing live performances and a documentary.
Bruce Springsteen, second from right, performs in 2002 with members of the E Street Band.
“Darkness” was not Springsteen’s most popular album, yielding only one minor top-40 hit (it was far outsold by Springsteen’s 1984 blockbuster “Born in the U.S.A.” and the 1975 “Born to Run”). But “Darkness” stands as his leanest, hardest-hitting album with the E Street Band, and – at least for this listener – his best. The tour that followed, as captured on a DVD of a typically galvanizing Houston concert, was even better. Springsteen’s ascent to stadium-rock icon hit over-drive.
What’s less appreciated about the era chronicled on “Promise” is the large volume of exceptional music that didn’t make the final cut, left to languish unheard except for a few live performances and covers by other artists – until now. The box set’s most crucial addition to the Springsteen canon is the album that might have been (available separately as a two-CD set, “The Promise”); one completely different in tone and intent than “Darkness” but well worth hearing.
“Darkness” itself still sounds compact and lean, Springsteen’s once- grandiose music compressed until only muscle and bone remain. The mix places the instruments in constant conflict, the singer’s voice fighting for space alongside guitars, drums, keyboards and a small army of percussion (has any artist done more for the glockenspiel post-Phil Spector?). Springsteen speaks through his guitar, a voice that evokes a revving motorcycle engine on “Candy’s Room,” a gun fight on “Adam Raised a Cain.”
It was a fittingly combustible soundtrack for Springsteen’s life at the time. He was litigating his way out of a troubling contract with his former manager and friend, Mike Appel, and his recording career had stalled. Springsteen dreaded becoming a hit-one wonder, the guy who appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek simultaneously as he did when “Born to Run” was released and then couldn’t follow it up.
Whereas “Born to Run” was about sculpting a handful of songs until they took on Mt. Rushmore-like scale, “Darkness on the Edge of Town” was more scattershot, a long process of songwriting and recording, followed by more songwriting and recording. Holed up in Springsteen’s farmhouse in New Jersey, the singer and the E Street Band knocked out four albums’ worth of material; but sifting through the songs to find THE album – the one that would follow up “Born to Run” – proved more daunting than anyone expected.
“Born to Run” was made with Springsteen in thrall to his ‘50s and ‘60s heroes: Roy Orbison, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, the Brill Building songwriters. It fervently argued that though times were tough, there was a way out. A car, a girl, rock ‘n’ roll and one long night really could save your life, possibly even redeem it.
Many of the songs written in the wake of “Born to Run” clung to that naïve vision of wanderlust and innocence. The best of them would’ve made a terrific album of extravagant pop music: the Buddy Holly-like yearning of “Outside Looking In,” the towering hymn “Someday (We’ll be Together),” the chiming guitars of “Rendezvous,” the Dion-like doo-wop overtones of “Ain’t Good Enough for You,” the brisk, horn-swept R&B of “Talk to Me” (later covered by New Jersey compatriots Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes).
But Springsteen balked. He starting shipping out songs that would become hits for the Pointer Sisters (“Fire”) and Patti Smith (“Because the Night”) because they didn’t fit the album he envisioned, much to the chagrin of his bandmates.
“A real love song like ‘Because the Night’ … I was too cowardly to write at the time,” Springsteen explains in “The Promise” documentary DVD.
He also must have realized that any album centered on such romantic themes would’ve been seen as more “Born to Run”-like escapism. Springsteen was chasing something else, and he found it an unlikely confluence of inspirations: the rising punk movement, old Hank Williams records, and the stark moral reckoning of John Ford movies such as “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Searchers” and countless noir films. What’s more, his legal fight with his former manager made such romanticism appear hopelessly naïve. The dispute inspired a quietly wrenching song, “The Promise.”
“Every day, it just gets harder to live/This dream I’m believing in,” Springsteen sings.
Though he couldn’t bring himself to include it on “Darkness,” the song set the tone for what the album would become: 10 songs that capture the moment when disillusionment gives way to defiance. Springsteen had taken a turn into a world of diminished expectations, an adult world more stark and forbidding than the wide-open one depicted on “Born to Run.” At a time when the American economy was choking on rising oil prices and President Jimmy Carter complained of a national “malaise,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town” addressed working-class communities such as the one in which Springsteen grew up and once tried to escape. Now he was bringing it all back home, the responsibilities, compromises and broken promises of adulthood closing in around him. In response, “Darkness on the Edge of Town” channeled another voice from that era and Springsteen made it his own. He was mad as hell and he wasn’t going to take it anymore.
