Springsteen’s “return” has been a painful and long process in which he trusts only his own instincts…He has been involved in approving everything, through the packaging, printing, point of sale material and advertising concepts. This will undoubtedly continue until he is confident enough to trust a manager. In the meantime, he has asked that in all the marketing concepts, understatement be the key element. The emphasis will be on his new visual image, without any copy of the “Future of Rock and Roll” sort that has bothered him in the past. Print, radio and television ads will be simple announcements in the early life of the album, so that the record will take its proper place based on its merits and not hype or superlatives. We have a record that should still be selling well at Christmas by pacing our advertising over the course of the five-month tour (and the various singles)…In the end, however, it comes down to the record. Darkness On The Edge of Town is truly an outstanding album that requires several listenings to fully comprehend. It’s the album we’ve waited over three years for, and the one to take Springsteen to multi-platinum levels.
The projections made for sales—and marketing budget—certainly suggested the label’s faith in their main man was undiminished by the lack of an obvious hit single, or a refusal on his part to do TV appearances or promotional videos.* Their internal unit sales projection as of May 30, 1978, was for domestic sales of Darkness to total two and a half million in the next ninety days, rising to three million by year’s end. Given that the artist in question had to date sold 1,278,589 copies of Born To Run, 534,865 of The Wild, the Innocent and 419,764 of Greetings from Asbury Park, one wonders on what basis such predictions were made. Or who, this time around, was hyping whom.
CBS were not even sure, right up until the moment the record was mastered in early May, that Springsteen had finally delivered his first album under the new deal. In response to Nelson‘s question, “When did you actually know what the ten songs were?” Landau admitted, “The day we mastered the record.” Even after Bruce chopped “Don’t Look Back” and dubbed on a sax part for “Badlands,” he would not let go. As Wingate recalls, “The album was brought to LA to master. He was up against the release date, but he [still] decided to go back to New York to put the guitar solo [on ‘The Promised Land’] back in.” It left the label pinning its commercial hopes on positive press from the shows keeping the album in the charts; a second (and hopefully third) single surpassing the stilted studio “Prove It All Night” in airplay and chart action; and, perhaps most important of all, that the rock critics again did their work for them, reviewing a Springsteen record as if it were the Second Coming and Holy Grail wrapped into one.
By assigning the already indentured Dave Marsh to review Darkness, Rolling Stone were certainly doing their bit. On line two of his rave review, Marsh compared this record to Are You Experienced, Astral Weeks, Who’s Next, The Band and “Like A Rolling Stone.” If that wasn’t enough to break any camel’s back, he went on to suggest that “in the area of production…[it] is nothing less than a breakthrough.” A breakthrough no-one reprised or took further, not even Springsteen. But then, here was a man who was determined to hear echoes of Robbie Robertson’s apocalyptic 1966 riffs and Yardbirds-era Jeff Beck in Bruce’s guitar parts.
He was also prepared to be a voice in the wilderness, celebrating (not lamenting) the fact that “ideas, characters, and phrases jump from song to song like threads in a tapestry.” Some other US reviewers who agreed with this part of Marsh’s critique thought it showed a paucity of imagination. Peter Knobler, a long-term apostle who took on the thankless role of Judas this time, suggested in a two-page Crawdaddy review that the album’s main flaw was his “repeated use of scenes and frameworks that [he] pioneered years ago and everyone from Meat Loaf to Billy Falcon has savaged since…[He] uses all the same settings—night, cars, driving—[while] quot[ing] liberally from himself—chord changes, guitar riffs, vocal tone.” He even dared to wonder aloud whether “Born To Run really had been as far as he could go.” NME’s Paul Rambali also found a number of songs “where he narrowly escapes self-parody;” while an exasperated Mitch Cohen in Creem pondered, “Doesn’t this guy ever get in the car just to go get a pack of cigarettes? It’s a major production every time he turns the ignition key.”
Such criticisms clearly stung Springsteen. He alluded to them in assorted interviews that summer, insisting, “The action is not the imagery, you know. The heart of the action is beneath all that stuff. There’s a separate thing happening all the time. I sorta always saw it as the way certain people make certain kinds of movies.” Yet even Landau had at one point asked him, mid-session, “What’s all these cars? Why are these people always in these cars?” He found himself required to explicate his underlying aesthetic to his own producer: “Well, you know, the idea is they’re always in a state of movement…destination unknown.”
What even the more carping critics couldn’t have known was that Darkness on The Edge of Town, for all its pugnacious power and V8 vroom, was a muddied melange of Albums #4 and 5. Even Springsteen admitted, the week of its release, that “most of the new songs were written while we were recording the album. I was formulating a concept in the studio.” The result was neither one thing, nor the other, neither an Atlantic cross-stitch, nor a full record of time spent at the Plant. As Landau broke it down for Nelson, “‘Badlands,’ ‘Adam Raised A Cain,’ ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Factory,’ ‘Prove It All Night’ were all completely conceived and executed after the album began.” Of the others, “Streets of Fire” was a spontaneous studio combustion, “Candy’s Room” had stripped two superior songs of their spare parts, and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “Racing In The Street,” originally intended for “Album #4,” were recrafted lyrically in order to gain an invite to this beggar’s banquet. That left just “Something In The Night” representing an untainted “Album #4.”
“Album #4”—the one he sketched out in his notebook, endlessly shuffling the already-engorged deck—was a would-be artifact it would take him thirty-three years to get (back) to. In the meantime, there would be just hints as to what might have been, notably the rerecording of various key songs from the Atlantic period—“Drive All Night,” “I Wanna Be With You,” “Independence Day,” “Sherry Darling” for The River; “Frankie” and “Darlington County” for Born In The USA; and, even, “The Promise” for 18 Tracks. Without this halfway house, Born To Run’s successor was always likely to be a shock to the fan system. (Dylan was himself guilty of rerecording inferior versions of three “basement tape” cuts for a second greatest hits, before realizing these songs were of a piece, and releasing them that way.)
In 1978, Springsteen continued dropping hints about what had prompted this dramatic shift in lieu of that missing album: “I started with basically the same imagery as before, the same frames of reference, but what’s happened to the characters is a little different.” With Darkness, he struck a vein he would mine for the remainder of the E Street era. There would be no more seismic stylistic shifts. As he told Marsh the next time around, “I don’t really have a desire to experiment for the sake of experimentation…I’m not really that concerned with style.” From now on he intended to create a body of work that was as full of “warmth, fidelity, duty” as John Ford’s:
Bruce Springsteen: I never felt myself to be a revolutionary…I’m the kind of guy that’s telling this very long story over this long period of time, [knowing that] that craftsmanship and consistency were going to be my friends…I think when I connected into some of the filmmakers that I began to really admire at the time, it gave me a template that I didn’t find in music somewhere, to explain to myself a little bit of where I was going and what I was interested in doing. [2007]
In a sense, he had only just begun. Meaning, he would have to sell himself to fans all over again. It was high time he started pitching this born-again aesthetic to the heartlands. Even this “hyper-conscious kid” knew the “record ain’t gonna sprout legs and walk out the door,
and jump on people’s record players and say listen to me.” The problem was that as soon as he started playing songs from the album—and every show received a near-lethal dose of Darkness in the first half, before more familiar fare revived older fans’ spirits—he realized what they had needed all along was road-testing, not months in a sterile studio. The immediacy that came with an audience, an amphitheater and an audio feed was a pattern that had served him well to date. Yet it was one to which he would never now return.
Instead, he pushed the fixed-to-disc Darkness like there was no tomorrow, determined to get his message across after the fact. Once he delivered the album, the only time he planned to hear those songs again was with the roar of the crowd in his ears. Not surprisingly, their acclaim would stop him from seeing Darkness—for all its capital-A Attitude—as falling short of his oft-expressed long-term goal: “To make the greatest rock & roll record ever made.” By 1981—when promoting an Album #6 that contained more elements from “Album #4” than its precursor—he was insisting, “I simply consider the Darkness LP a failure.” He even had some sense of where he had gone wrong, telling Nick Kent, “Darkness was the one where we deliberately left off all the fun rock & roll songs. But I don’t think a lot of the songs on Darkness were fully realized.” By then, all ten songs—even “Factory”—had been “fully realized,” just not necessarily when the tapes were rolling:
Bruce Springsteen: On Darkness, I like the ideas. I’m not crazy about the performances. We play all those songs ten times better live…Certain things on [that] record I can listen to: “Racing in the Street,”…“Prove it All Night,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” But not a lot, because either the performance doesn’t sound right to me, or the ideas sound like a long time ago. [1981]
In 1975, at the end of his tether after three months’ solid work on Born To Run, Springsteen threatened to just scrap the whole record and record the self-same eight songs at The Bottom Line. He never did. It would have been the wrong album, anyway. If ever there was an album that came alive live it was Darkness; and in a large part, this was because in concert there was also a place for “all the fun rock & roll songs,” the songs he gave away and those he held over to use next time. Context, as this “hyper-conscious kid” once instinctively knew, was all. It was time to let in some light, to allow hope and glory to filter through those drawn Venetian blinds.
* When The Clash was finally released in the US, in 1978, it was with a revised track-listing that incorporated nonalbum singles and deleted punkier paeans—including the contentious “I’m So Bored With The USA.” Both versions would eventually be released on CD.
* Sony’s logs do not indicate the studio (apparently, such information was not deemed “necessary”), so it is not clear when the switch was made for good, but it does appear that through August and into September some work was still being done at Atlantic (presumably on tracks previously recorded there).
* The January 16 sequence was as follows:
Side 1: Badlands. Don’t Look Back. Candy’s Room. Something In The Night. Racing In The Street.
Side 2: The Promised Land. Adam Raised A Cain. The Way. Prove It All Night. The Promise.
* There were a handful of brief news snippets on local TV stations in 1978, but Springsteen continued to nix any live TV performances, even on the ever-popular Saturday Night Live.
Part II
Better Off That Way
Chapter 6: 1978–79—The Ties That Bind
I always think I come off sounding like some kind of crazed fanatic…but it’s the way I am about [playing live]…It all ties in with…the values, the morality of the records.—Bruce Springsteen, 1978
I think his live show is so good that his audience will always be big. He hasn’t gone any further than Born To Run, though…Bruce is not surrounded by the best guys. It’s the blind leading the blind.—Mike Appel, 1978
With Elvis out for the count, Springsteen set out at the end of May 1978 to claim another crown, that of living legend James Brown. Night after night, over six months of solid, relentless touring, he demonstrated who really was the hardest working man in show business. The shows he played at this time—a hundred and ten of them, criss-crossing North America from northeast to southwest, coast to coast and back again—have rightly become the stuff of legends. At a time when his latest album was struggling to pass total sales of The Wild, the Innocent, let alone the platinum Born To Run—it peaked at five in the Billboard chart, two places shy of its predecessor and by the end of 1978 had only sold around 600,000 Stateside—the hype surrounding the shows successfully masked this chastening reality, while serving to reaffirm all the previous hyperbole expended on the E Street Band show that Springsteen had gone to such pains to dampen.
If CBS privately despaired at Springsteen’s resolute refusal to do TV, his willingness to donate his most commercial songs to others (the most aired Springsteen song on AM radio that spring was Patti Smith’s version of “Because The Night”), and the austere nature of the only press ads he would approve, they could have no complaints about the way he was promoting the album at the shows, night after night, or talked up the album in press interviews whenever the subject came up. From day one he insisted he always knew Darkness “might be a harder album for people to like than Born To Run, because it has less surface warmth or optimism. [But] it’s been misinterpreted as being a pessimistic album, which it’s not at all meant to be.”
He was determined to drive its defiantly dark message home. On opening night of the tour, with the album still not officially out, he played nine of the ten songs (wisely dispensing with “Factory”). And he did not stop there. Both “Fire” and “The Promise” came up for air, and in the former’s case quickly became a nightly rockabilly ritual. If the latter’s inclusion merely reaffirmed a belief among fans that he had left off another masterpiece, it proved a less durable inclusion. An early first encore, it passed from the set the gig before his first radio broadcast of the year, July 5. Performed solo at the piano, à la “For You,” here was the definitive rendition. But coming at the end of two and a half hours of rabble-rousing it seemed to take those last ounces of strength and throw them all away, making its mark at the expense of “Born To Run,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and whatever frat-rocker he closed the show with on a given night.
Its inclusion also meant fully half of the 22–song set on opening night was unfamiliar to even the most hard-core fan. Nor did the opening salvo of “Badlands,” “Night” and “Something In The Night” make any concessions. Before the audience could catch its breath, they were in the midst of an enveloping darkness. It was an extraordinarily brave strategy, and one to which he adhered unwaveringly, knowing full well that the emphasis on new songs would draw comment even from regular champions of the great contender. When he gave Philadelphia DJ Ed Sciaky—a rabid proselytizer for five years now—an after-show interview in August he made his intentions plain as day:
Bruce Springsteen: I…believed in [Darkness] a lot. I thought it was more of a difficult record to get into than Born To Run was. It was something I spent eleven months doing and I liked it, loved doing it, felt it. I like playing all the songs from it—that’s the most fun of the night. So I said to myself, “Hey, I’m gonna get out there and hustle it”…There’s a stretch where we go from “Darkness” to “Thunder Road,” a stretch of songs that we do basically in the same order every night because there’s a continuity thing that happens. It makes connections, and gives the rest of the show resonance. [1978]
Such self-belief brooked no argument. The Darkness songs stayed a part of the shows, and only grew stronger with each nightly workout. As did his belief in them. He even told Peter Knobler, who had already given the LP a lukewarm review, that this “record meant more [to me] than…the other records. So when I made it I wanted to make sure that I was gonna be true to what was real for me now.” The way he did this was to test the songs each night, all night. He expressed delight that fans were starting to �
��call out for the new songs…it’s good to see them going down so well” (actually, none of the dozens of audience tapes of the 1978 shows demonstrate any such groundswell of Darkness requests). But there was never any doubt that certain songs which did not leap off the record fast became showstoppers, thanks to the right setting—a stage. “Badlands” burst from the side speakers every night—raising the roof and the near-dead. “Racing In The Street” gripped audiences for whom a single viewing of American Graffiti was as close as they came to its ostensible subject matter. As for the guitarfest “Prove It All Night,” it made the studio version sound like a demo, and the E Street Band like a revved-up Steel Mill.
The word of mouth, and a crescendo of reviews for those early shows from all corners of the globe (even the home of punk), soon convinced CBS that were they to release (even just for radioplay) live versions of the new songs in real time they might reverse Darkness’s downward direction, and send it back up the Billboard charts. But Springsteen remained determined to make the record stand on its own two sides. When CBS sent a film crew to a show in Phoenix in mid-June, to capture three songs from Darkness and a coupla longstanding concert favorites they could use for promotional purposes, the versions of “Badlands,” “The Promised Land” and “Prove It All Night” all burned with a far brighter flame than tamer studio cousins. But as a driven-to-despair Dick Wingate observes, “The only one he would allow to be released was ‘Rosalita,’ which was from an older album. I don’t think he thought it was great. He [thought he] was a little stiff.”
E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Page 22
