Presley’s Graceland mansion and climb over a wall! Hardly the first fan of ‘The King’ to try such a thing, he was quickly apprehended by Elvis’ security team, who had never heard of Bruce Springsteen. Informed that Presley was, in any case, in Las Vegas, where he was performing, the recalcitrant young singer was sent packing with a flea in his ear. Less fancifully, Springsteen’s new-found success forced him to take stock of his own now vastly-improved position in the music business, at which point he made important decisions. Unlike his record company, who urged him to hurry-up and get back in the studio to make what they fervently hoped would be the ‘sequel’ to Born to Run, Bruce decided his next album would have to be as different as he could make it from its immensely popular predecessor. He also decided he needed a new manager, and that he had gone as far as he could in his career with Mike Appel at the helm. Instead, he offered the job to Jon Landau; the man who had started the critical ball rolling with his ‘rock ’n’ roll future’ review, then actually put his money where his mouth was by rolling up his sleeves and helping out in the studio. Understandably, Appel did not take the news well and immediately instigated legal proceedings; action that led to many years in court before the whole thing was finally settled. Avoiding press interviews, Bruce filled-in the time writing songs for other artists, most notably fellow New Jersey-ite Southside Johnny, punk-poetess Patti Smith (giving Smith her biggest hit with Because the Night) and Robert Gordon (who also hit big with Fire). When he wasn’t doing that he was writing his next album – the most studious piece of work since his first album; a bleak yet beautiful masterpiece he had decided to call Darkness on the Edge of Town. Recorded over a nine-month period with Landau at the studio controls, Darkness on the Edge of Town was finally released in June 1978. The album found Bruce Springsteen in more sombre mood than any recording he had made previously, and featured a cast of characters whose motives were cloudier than before. Almost all of these were thrown into increasingly desperate situations, although tracks like Badlands and Racing in the Streets still somehow managed to lend a certain dignity and appeal to the misfits whose stories they told. This further established Springsteen as the most masterful chronicler of small town American life to emerge in the 1970s. Despite the baleful nature of its contents, Darkness… still made the Top 5 in the US album charts and the Top 10 in the UK, where it became his most critically-revered album yet. As Paul Rambali wrote in the NME, ‘Promotion this time is distinctly low profile. The budget has been limited by his order, and no words of hyperbole adorn the ads – just “Bruce Springsteen, his new album.” And in the mighty opening rush of Badlands you feel – if nothing else – it’s good to have him back. The first South side cadence; the cavernous guitar sound; Clarence Clemons’ rasping sax solo; the chord changes: it’s a rousing textbook Springsteen anthem – as is its counterpart on the second side, The Promised Land. Four lines in and he squares up to the events that have overtaken him since the release of Born to Run: “I’m caught in a crossfire that I don’t 14
even understand”… The blockbuster production techniques of Born to Run have been studiously avoided, and the conquer-the-world romantic of before sounds oddly disillusioned, frustrated even.’ A point Mitchell Cohen in Creem also picked up on, describing the album as ‘an artful, passionate, rigorous record that walks a slender line between defeat and defiance.’ Before adding, ‘But if frustration is its subject… it’s also its essence, its soul. The best of this music – Badlands, Streets of Fire – doesn’t just describe the rage, it embodies it… the album is about as powerful as rock ’n’ roll gets.’ One thing everyone agreed on was that the songs on Darkness… found Springsteen developing the sort of story-telling songwriting he had begun previously with songs like Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street and Meeting Across the River – most obviously, in this instance, on tracks like the seven-minute opus, Racing in the Street. This appeared to deal head-on with the line of criticism that insisted he was merely a glorified ‘cars-and-girls’ writer. Similarly the brooding title track itself, was a typically wide-screen evocation of all the themes the album seems to explore – father-and-son conflict, Catholic guilt and confusion, and the disappointment that growing up inevitably brings, when you discover there are no answers, just more complicated questions… Thankfully, the album did offer up occasional lighter moments, as on Prove It All Night, an upbeat get-the-girl song that also served as the first single. Mainly, though, the album concerns itself with uncompromising fare like Adam Raised a Cain, a moody slow-burner, Factory, about what it must have been like for his father to spend his precious days working his knuckles to the bone, and Candy’s Room, a song about what it’s like to find yourself in love with a prostitute. Occasionally, as on Something in the Night or Streets of Fire, the tragic self-absorption and claustrophobic musical backdrop – prison-yard harmonica, chattering drums, clanging guitars and that sometimes intrusive sax – teeter precariously close at times to overweening self-parody. But perhaps that’s the price you pay when you attempt to bare your soul so completely. Certainly, if Springsteen’s overriding wish had been to avoid making Born to Run II, he had succeeded on every level. As Dave Di Martino observed in Creem, ‘What made Darkness… so great, ultimately, was the sheer durability of its sentiment. The emotions dealt with on that set – loss, pain and despair – have always been the most durable, especially when they’re conveyed as well and as meaningfully as Springsteen surprisingly managed… [His fans] loved it. But they would’ve loved Born to Run Part Two even more.’ Even out on the road the shows became less celebratory, more intimate, even, paradoxically, as the venues grew bigger. But by then it hardly mattered. Bruce Springsteen was no longer operating at the same critical altitude as most of his contemporaries. For if Born to Run had made him a superstar, Darkness on the Edge of Town had transformed him into something even more alluring: he was now an artist, a saint, a messiah. Wherever he went now and whatever he did next, he had the world’s full attention.
