June 2, 1978—In his first album after settling a lawsuit involving his former manager-producer, Bruce Springsteen released Darkness on the Edge of Town, signaling not only a change in management but also in musical direction.
I had waited, with growing impatience, for Springsteen’s follow-up to the album that put him on the covers of Time and Newsweek (the first time that feat was ever accomplished). A photo of him in concert during his three-year recording hiatus, sans beard, startled me. What other changes would occur when he emerged? I wondered.
I still recall a headline in the music press of the time, encapsulating his dilemma at this point: “Re-born to Run or Born to Re-Run?” Heightening the uncertainty was that the singer-songwriter was reintroducing himself to fans just when punk rock/new wave was making inroads. But, following the album’s release and his subsequent triumphant tour in support of it, Bruce’s relationship with fans was set on an even firmer footing than before.
(For the rest of this post, I’ll refer to him as “Bruce” rather than “Springsteen,” breaking my custom with other figures discussed on this blog. Now, I’ve never met the man, though if I did my reaction might be similar to Andy Richter’s on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” when he finally met William “Captain Kirk” Shatner”: i.e., bowing down before his master.
No, I haven’t met The Boss, but like legions of his other fans, I feel like I know him well. He’s the guy from the neighborhood who, by all rights, should have spent most of his adulthood as a grease monkey—except that he was in the grip of a dream and possessed of enough talent to make it come true. “And that,” as Robert Frost wrote in his great poem “The Road Not Taken,” “has made all the difference.”)
New Musical Forms and Lyrical Concerns and Styles
From album to album, changes in Bruce’s musical and lyrical content might seem incremental. You don’t see how much has changed until you view the entire 35-plus-year career. So it was with Darkness.
On the surface, at least, much remained the same from his first three albums, especially the obsession with cars (“I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396/Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor,” go the opening lines of “Racing in the Street”).
At the behest of new manager-producer Jon Landau, however, Bruce began to move away from the longer, more free-flowing songs of his first three LPs, such as “Kitty’s Back in Town,” “Rosalita,” and “New York City Serenade,” in favor of shorter three- and four-minute tracks. He was still backed by his “blood brothers,” the E Street Band, but the arrangements this time were tighter.
Even Clarence Clemons’ warm, commanding saxophone was much diminished, sometimes even MIA. Filling its place, more often than not, was Bruce’s own guitar—urgent, sometimes angry and blistering, particularly on “Adam Raised a Cain” (voted #67 on Rolling Stone’s recent “100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time”).
At the same time, his lyrics, featuring simpler, less Dylanesque imagery and wordplay, burrowed more deeply into his blue-collar background, tightening his bond with millions in his audience. “Factory,” the most explicit example of this here, would soon give rise to “The River,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Highway Patrolman” and “Seeds” in the 1980s.
Let me state my preferences clearly: Born to Run was and remains my favorite album by The Boss. You don’t ever forget your first love, after all, and with its Spectorian “wall of sound,” open-hearted romanticism and all-of-life-in-this-moment spirit, that album made me a lifelong acolyte of Bruce’s traveling rock ‘n’ roll revival show. I knew that, with the new Landau regime in place, I’d miss songs similar in ambition and impact to Born to Run’s nine-minute, West Side Story-style epic, “Jungleland.”
Secrets and Crossfires
But Darkness claimed its own portion of my soul’s allegiance. It was released a couple of days before I graduated from high school—fitting, in a way, as Bruce was the first rock-music god I came to worship on my own, without the guidance of my two older brothers.
The album spoke to me in a personal way. Leaving one way of life, I was deeply concerned about the one to come—an academic environment larger, more secular, and more competitive than the one I had known through 12 years of parochial school. The prospect ahead offered as much peril as promise, with the fears of my inadequacy filling me with foreboding and helping me understand what Bruce meant by, “Well, everybody’s got a secret, Sonny,/Something that they just can’t face.”
As he hunkered down in a farm in Holmdel in an attempt to grab the brass ring again, Bruce must have felt even more keenly another set of lines, from “Badlands”: “I’m caught in a cross fire/That I don’t understand.” Though original manager Mike Appel had been a tireless partisan for the musician when nobody would give him the time of day, he had also inked a contract that resulted in Bruce assigning him the rights to his music, retaining only a small fraction of his royalties. The legal struggle to sever the ties was long and frustrating, an experience that left the artist with a sour taste of music industry ethics and business practices.
A Business Promise Broken…and a Promise With Fans Renewed
Though Bruce denied the lawsuit’s influence on the song, “The Promise,” a number originally slated for the comeback album, seemed clearly inspired by his legal fracas, with lines setting down his anger and bitter disappointment in no uncertain terms: “When the promise is broken you go on living/But it steals something from your soul.”
He premiered it on August 3 at the Monmouth Arts Centre in Red Bank, N.J., and continued to play it on the Darkness tour until July (about a month before I finally had the chance to see him live). He did not perform it live again until his reunion with the E Street Band more than 20 years later.
Around that time, I finally had the chance to hear the song. Bruce kept it off all his albums, even the multi-disk Tracks, the set in which he pretty much opened his musical vault. But he finally relented, releasing “The Promise” on a cassette called 18 Tracks that featured three songs left off the more ballyhooed disk package. Even though I had most of the songs already on the larger set, I figured that the addition of these songs would make the purchase worthwhile. I was right.
For all the haunting, mournful beauty of "The Promise," I think Bruce made the correct decision in not putting it on the Darkness album. For one thing, Darkness was meant to turn the page in his life; any controversy concerning his former manager would have hindered that goal. Perhaps more important, “The Promise” was so bleak that it would have undermined the theme of the album: that even in the face of constant struggle and disappointment, you should set your face against the world with all the defiant (albeit hard-earned and wised-up) sense of affirmation that you can muster.
Darkness might have been a summary of Bruce’s crisis of the soul, but appropriately enough, in the jump-off-the-couch, fist-pumping-the-air anthem “Badlands,” it was also dedicated to the spirit of aficionados like myself who had waited for his return: “For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside,/That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” Through it all, he had kept faith with us. From now on, we would return that all-consuming devotion.
I had waited, with growing impatience, for Springsteen’s follow-up to the album that put him on the covers of Time and Newsweek (the first time that feat was ever accomplished). A photo of him in concert during his three-year recording hiatus, sans beard, startled me. What other changes would occur when he emerged? I wondered.
I still recall a headline in the music press of the time, encapsulating his dilemma at this point: “Re-born to Run or Born to Re-Run?” Heightening the uncertainty was that the singer-songwriter was reintroducing himself to fans just when punk rock/new wave was making inroads. But, following the album’s release and his subsequent triumphant tour in support of it, Bruce’s relationship with fans was set on an even firmer footing than before.
(For the rest of this post, I’ll refer to him as “Bruce” rather than “Springsteen,” breaking my custom with other figures discussed on this blog. Now, I’ve never met the man, though if I did my reaction might be similar to Andy Richter’s on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” when he finally met William “Captain Kirk” Shatner”: i.e., bowing down before his master.
No, I haven’t met The Boss, but like legions of his other fans, I feel like I know him well. He’s the guy from the neighborhood who, by all rights, should have spent most of his adulthood as a grease monkey—except that he was in the grip of a dream and possessed of enough talent to make it come true. “And that,” as Robert Frost wrote in his great poem “The Road Not Taken,” “has made all the difference.”)
New Musical Forms and Lyrical Concerns and Styles
From album to album, changes in Bruce’s musical and lyrical content might seem incremental. You don’t see how much has changed until you view the entire 35-plus-year career. So it was with Darkness.
On the surface, at least, much remained the same from his first three albums, especially the obsession with cars (“I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396/Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor,” go the opening lines of “Racing in the Street”).
At the behest of new manager-producer Jon Landau, however, Bruce began to move away from the longer, more free-flowing songs of his first three LPs, such as “Kitty’s Back in Town,” “Rosalita,” and “New York City Serenade,” in favor of shorter three- and four-minute tracks. He was still backed by his “blood brothers,” the E Street Band, but the arrangements this time were tighter.
Even Clarence Clemons’ warm, commanding saxophone was much diminished, sometimes even MIA. Filling its place, more often than not, was Bruce’s own guitar—urgent, sometimes angry and blistering, particularly on “Adam Raised a Cain” (voted #67 on Rolling Stone’s recent “100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time”).
At the same time, his lyrics, featuring simpler, less Dylanesque imagery and wordplay, burrowed more deeply into his blue-collar background, tightening his bond with millions in his audience. “Factory,” the most explicit example of this here, would soon give rise to “The River,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Highway Patrolman” and “Seeds” in the 1980s.
Let me state my preferences clearly: Born to Run was and remains my favorite album by The Boss. You don’t ever forget your first love, after all, and with its Spectorian “wall of sound,” open-hearted romanticism and all-of-life-in-this-moment spirit, that album made me a lifelong acolyte of Bruce’s traveling rock ‘n’ roll revival show. I knew that, with the new Landau regime in place, I’d miss songs similar in ambition and impact to Born to Run’s nine-minute, West Side Story-style epic, “Jungleland.”
Secrets and Crossfires
But Darkness claimed its own portion of my soul’s allegiance. It was released a couple of days before I graduated from high school—fitting, in a way, as Bruce was the first rock-music god I came to worship on my own, without the guidance of my two older brothers.
The album spoke to me in a personal way. Leaving one way of life, I was deeply concerned about the one to come—an academic environment larger, more secular, and more competitive than the one I had known through 12 years of parochial school. The prospect ahead offered as much peril as promise, with the fears of my inadequacy filling me with foreboding and helping me understand what Bruce meant by, “Well, everybody’s got a secret, Sonny,/Something that they just can’t face.”
As he hunkered down in a farm in Holmdel in an attempt to grab the brass ring again, Bruce must have felt even more keenly another set of lines, from “Badlands”: “I’m caught in a cross fire/That I don’t understand.” Though original manager Mike Appel had been a tireless partisan for the musician when nobody would give him the time of day, he had also inked a contract that resulted in Bruce assigning him the rights to his music, retaining only a small fraction of his royalties. The legal struggle to sever the ties was long and frustrating, an experience that left the artist with a sour taste of music industry ethics and business practices.
A Business Promise Broken…and a Promise With Fans Renewed
Though Bruce denied the lawsuit’s influence on the song, “The Promise,” a number originally slated for the comeback album, seemed clearly inspired by his legal fracas, with lines setting down his anger and bitter disappointment in no uncertain terms: “When the promise is broken you go on living/But it steals something from your soul.”
He premiered it on August 3 at the Monmouth Arts Centre in Red Bank, N.J., and continued to play it on the Darkness tour until July (about a month before I finally had the chance to see him live). He did not perform it live again until his reunion with the E Street Band more than 20 years later.
Around that time, I finally had the chance to hear the song. Bruce kept it off all his albums, even the multi-disk Tracks, the set in which he pretty much opened his musical vault. But he finally relented, releasing “The Promise” on a cassette called 18 Tracks that featured three songs left off the more ballyhooed disk package. Even though I had most of the songs already on the larger set, I figured that the addition of these songs would make the purchase worthwhile. I was right.
For all the haunting, mournful beauty of "The Promise," I think Bruce made the correct decision in not putting it on the Darkness album. For one thing, Darkness was meant to turn the page in his life; any controversy concerning his former manager would have hindered that goal. Perhaps more important, “The Promise” was so bleak that it would have undermined the theme of the album: that even in the face of constant struggle and disappointment, you should set your face against the world with all the defiant (albeit hard-earned and wised-up) sense of affirmation that you can muster.
Darkness might have been a summary of Bruce’s crisis of the soul, but appropriately enough, in the jump-off-the-couch, fist-pumping-the-air anthem “Badlands,” it was also dedicated to the spirit of aficionados like myself who had waited for his return: “For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside,/That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” Through it all, he had kept faith with us. From now on, we would return that all-consuming devotion.
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