With so much top-shelf material written and recorded, Bruce entered a new frontier in his lost-in-the-wastelands style of production. Rather than spending months obsessing over the intricate dynamics of each song, he’d deliver a landslide of raw material and then spend months sifting through the heap, choosing, sorting, polishing, and dumping. Then he’d start all over again until some larger narrative revealed itself. So for all that Bruce thrived on the simple joy of rock ’n’ roll, he was even more determined to give his music an intellectual and emotional gravitas. He wanted the music to be powerful enough to reflect his life and times while also redefining the possibilities of American rock ’n’ roll.
In a lot of ways, it all went back to Elvis Presley, whose naive brilliance had fused white culture with black music. The accidental big bang that had blasted popular culture into Technicolor ignited a revolution and, as quickly, became the basis of a rapacious cottage industry that sapped Presley of his magic until he was too sad and weak to dance. For years the King of Rock ’n’ Roll’s steady devolution served as the leading example of American capitalism’s most sharklike impulses. All of which became clear in the insider tell-all Elvis: What Happened, which Bruce (along with Van Zandt and several other guys in the band) had been reading. Still, Bruce felt Elvis’s charge strongly enough to turn the story of his 1975 attempt to visit the King by jumping his Graceland manse’s gates into a fine piece of self-deprecating, hero-worshiping stage banter. More recently, Bruce had bought tickets for the concert Presley had scheduled at Madison Square Garden in September 1977. When news of Presley’s death radiated across the TV networks on August 16, Bruce took the news hard. “He was really upset; just incredibly pissed off,” says Chirmside.
Two days later Bruce, Van Zandt, and photographer Eric Meola flew together to Salt Lake City, threw their bags into the back of a red, 1965 Ford Galaxie 500XL convertible, and drove into the heat warp of the desert, making for the sandy, one-lane roads that skirt the mesas, connecting the ranches and Indian reservations to the towns, to the cactus raising its arms toward the distance. With Meola scoping the terrain for photogenic remnants of the twentieth-century frontier, Bruce and Van Zandt charted Presley’s decline, and how his cocoon of oldest, closest friends had coddled their magisterial pal all the way into his grave. Elvis had considered the Memphis Mafia guys to be his best friends in the world. But when his head began to slip beneath the surface, they didn’t say a word. “All those guys, all his friends, abandoned him,” Van Zandt said. They collected their salaries and left the King to drown in pills, silence, and a book about Jesus he would never finish.
They drove straight through for the first thirty hours, chasing Bruce’s curiosity down every dirt road, following the ruts until they forked into another road or simply vanished into the rocky desert floor. When they came across a little general store, they parked by the gas pump, bought some Cokes, and gave Meola enough time to take out his camera and squeeze off a few shots. Bruce and the car, Bruce and the frontier, Bruce and the cannonball clouds that ribboned the sunlight. Set loose in the fly speck desert towns, Meola hoped to evoke the same melancholy that Robert Frank achieved in The Americans, a seminal collection of portraits that revealed the underclass of the 1950s and 1960s in their desolate towns and broken neighborhoods. Bruce connected with Frank’s work at first sight; like John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, The Americans depicted the world he saw when he shut his eyes. Meola, who had introduced Bruce to Frank’s photography, edged into his terrain by shooting in black-and-white, which also helped draw out the texture of the desert and the magnitude of the mesas jutting from the desert floor. An enormous thundercloud grumbled over the peaks one hot afternoon, packing thunder, lightning, and winds that swept the dust until it merged with the clouds. “It was like a Biblical storm, like something I’d never seen before,” Meola says.
They watched the storm come and go, and then went back to driving, moving until well after midnight, when they found a dusty street that had once been a central road in a small town. Only a few houses remained, along with a pack of dogs that chased around in the blackness, howling after the creatures in the brush. Pausing for a few hours’ sleep, Bruce stretched out on the front seat, while Van Zandt took the back, leaving Meola with the big, flat hood of the car. “It was hot as hell, with those dogs howling down the street,” the photographer says. When dawn came, they woke up, shook the cobwebs from between their ears, fired up the engine, and took off again, heading back to Salt Lake City for the flight home.
Meola came home with his desert portraits and the series of shots showing Bruce with the car as the storm rises above the peaks behind him. Bruce had his own way of internalizing the trip across the arid Southwest, spinning the harsh beauty of the desert together with the ghost of Elvis, the heat-bedazzled dogs, and the lightning storm into another testament to the spirit he recognized in the untamed land. “Gonna be a twister to blow everything down / That ain’t got the strength to stand its ground,” he wrote in the final verse, going on to describe a storm devastating enough to strip away the tender dreams and follies that make a person too vulnerable to stand a chance in the raw frontier: “Mister, I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man,” he declares. “And I believe in the promised land.”
• • •
When the sessions moved to the Record Plant, Bruce and Landau made straight for the studio floor, where they went over the songs still left to record, talking it all over in the stuttering shorthand of like minds. Bruce took up his Fender and played an early version of “Come On (Let’s Go Tonight),” while Landau snapped his fingers, bobbed his head, and pitched in a little harmony. When Bruce looked up, Landau nodded excitedly. “That’s great. Really great. What else you got cookin’?” Bruce put down his guitar and led the way to the piano, where he opened his notebook and went back to playing the “Come On” verse, focusing on the passing references to Elvis Presley’s death. “The power of the images,” he said, “was that they weren’t the central part of the song, but sorta, you know—”
LANDAU:—tangential. It’s good. It’s very good. It’s sophisticated.
BRUCE: It kinda states it [Presley’s death] as a fact, but . . . I don’t know, it’s sort of strange.
LANDAU: [quoting from lyrics] “Some came to witness, some came to weep.” That’s a great line. A very important distinction there, like, the curious and the . . . it’s great. Really great.
Bruce flipped a few pages, put his hands back on the keys, and laid out the first chords of what would become “Candy’s Room.” In this iteration of the song, the central image is a mysterious house; a walled-in mansion that draws the narrator to its gates, where he peers across rolling lawns to see a woman’s face gazing back through the glass.
LANDAU: That’s great. That’s really great. It’s got such detail, so sharp . . .
BRUCE: I’m trying to work simpler, clearer images, really.
LANDAU: You got it, you really got it. This is just as vivid as in the past, only . . .
Bruce nodded happily and went back to singing.
LANDAU: This is great, the way she comes in here—
BRUCE: Yeah, it kind of gives it a sexual thing, like—
LANDAU:—the inside of the house is the female thing, and the outside of the house is the male thing.
BRUCE: Exactly.
LANDAU: The formal construction is unbelievable.
BRUCE: It’s a real cinematic thing. But the words aren’t really together; I can’t figure it out . . .
LANDAU: It’s very together.
When Bruce stopped playing, Landau smiled and nodded his head.
LANDAU: That’s great. It’s scary. It’s blowing my mind to hear all this stuff after so much time. And to hear it sound so together . . . The combination of the first set you show me for “Come On,” and the first set you show me for this . . .
BRUCE: “I think this is real. This is real. We got good stuff.”
Landau went back to the control room, and when
Van Zandt wandered in, Bruce seemed practically giddy when he told his aide-de-camp that more new songs were on the way.
BRUCE: We’re gonna be rehearsin’ this week.
VAN ZANDT: Are you crazy?
BRUCE: Nope, I’m serious.
VAN ZANDT: What are you gonna throw out?
BRUCE: I can’t think of somethin’. But I’ll think of somethin’.
He spun on his heel and hunched to play, pounding out chords while Van Zandt grimaced and shook his head.
Bruce, from over his shoulder: “Remember, there’s always room to throw something out!”
• • •
Musically austere, lyrics stripped down to sepia portraiture, Darkness on the Edge of Town sets out to describe the underbelly of America’s everything-all-the-time culture. The backdrops shift from song to song, moving from Asbury Park to the Dakotas to the Freehold of the 1950s to the Southwest to the industrial flats to the highway and beyond. But the real setting is that same forgotten America that Frank had captured in the backwaters of the nation’s cities, towns, and wilderness. “Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland,” runs the first line of “Badlands,” the martial rocker that opens the album. “Adam Raised a Cain,” the next song, turns the focus in the opposite direction, confronting his own demons in the form of his sad, angry father.6 A tense, heavy-footed blues, “Adam” rides Federici’s church-gone-wrong organ, call-and-response vocals, and Bruce’s own slashing guitar into the sinful heart of the father, the son, and the world around them: “Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain,” he howls at the song’s conclusion. “You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames.”
Again, the personal twists into the political and the sociocultural springs from the tangled roots of individual lives. The deafening industrial floor in the bleak country ballad “Factory” (new lyrics for the musical body of “Come On [Let’s Go Tonight]”) opens the door for “Streets of Fire” and its gospel-of-the-damned portrait of an outcast in a society redolent with sulfur. “Something in the Night” describes the same vision from the post–“Born to Run” perspective, where even a successful escape can end in disaster. “You’re born with nothin’, and better off that way,” he sings. “Soon as you got something, they send someone to try and take it away.”
Speaking to the Washington Post’s Eve Zibart just after the album’s release, Bruce acknowledged that his vision had darkened. “There’s a little more isolation in the characters, less people on the record,” he said. Describing “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” which would become the album’s title track and closing song, to Dave Marsh in 1981, Bruce cast the album as a journey to the core of individual existence. “The guy at the end of ‘Darkness’ has reached a point where you just have to strip yourself of everything to get yourself together.”
As he’d done with the songs on Born to Run, Bruce built the finished songs from key lines, phrases, and images that bubbled up from his notebook, surfaced as lines in other songs, or started merely as telling phrases scribbled into his book (such as “driving force,” “night shift,” “with death in their eyes,” “the outsiders,” “hot rod angels in a promised land,” and so on) only to emerge as part of another, completed song. What they all had in common was their place in the vocabulary Bruce had concocted to describe his own interpretation of where he had been and what he had seen during the two or three years he had lived since Born to Run.
Bruce’s experience plays out repeatedly across the album, finding its most vivid forms in “Racing in the Street” and “Darkness,” both of which conclude with their narrators on the far side of their respective ambitions, wondering if their achievement could possibly be worth the sacrifice the fight required. In the plangent “Racing,” the triumph turns out to be the struggle itself, and the questing spirit that can fill the most mundane life with a kind of sanctification: “For all you shut-down strangers and hot-rod angels rumblin’ through this promised land,” he sings, “tonight my baby and me are gonna ride to the sea / And wash these sins from our hands.” The narrator in “Darkness” reaches a similar, if less affirming, conclusion, since his vow to keep going also requires an acceptance of the emotional isolation that comes with “wanting things that can only be found / In the darkness on the edge of town.” Singing wordlessly over the song’s (and the album’s) final moments, Bruce evokes the opening bars of “Something in the Night,” and the chill cloaking the entire album: the creeping suspicion that the things that make you feel the most alive will turn out to be some combination of unobtainable, worthless, and self-destructive.
All of which dovetails perfectly with the last lines of “The Promise,” and the spiritually destroyed racer who finally admits he had always known his road led to nowhere: “Remember, Billy, what we’d always say / We were gonna take it all and we were gonna throw it away.”
SIXTEEN
BIG MAN! ARE THEY STILL STANDING?
FINISHED WITH THE RECORD IN the spring of 1978,1 Bruce set out to design the prerelease publicity campaign with as much authority as he had brought to the recording process. He visited the cover-printing plant to make sure the cardboard reproductions of Frank Stefanko’s cover portrait didn’t nudge his face too far into the pallid or tangerine registers. Still feeling singed from the aggressive ballyhoo of earlier years, Bruce met with CBS publicist Dick Wingate in Los Angeles to warn him off a massive Bruce Is Back campaign. “If it were up to me,” he told Wingate, “no one would know the album was coming out ’til it was in the stores.” As a result, there would be no magazine story pitches, no interviews, no advance tracks granted to strategically chosen radio stations. All the world needed to know, Bruce decreed, was that Bruce Springsteen had a new album out, and this is what it looks like.
Released on June 2, Darkness on the Edge of Town2 came into the world facing plenty of competition: the Rolling Stones’ acclaimed Some Girls album, plus new releases by album-rock stars Bob Seger and Foreigner. “I remember us looking at the release schedule, trying to figure out how we might do,” Wingate says. CBS’s management clearly wanted the album to be huge, even given the artist’s resistance to splashy promotion. Magazine and newspaper ads ran the week before and then the week of the album’s release. Television ads (a rarity in those days) aired coast to coast on Memorial Day weekend. When disc jockeys at New York’s WNEW-FM and WPLJ-FM jumped the gun by playing lead-off single, “Prove It All Night,” during the embargo period, CBS quickly filed cease-and-desist orders, unwilling to let even the most staunch supporters disrupt its promotional plans.
Released to another chorus of euphoric reviews (“Springsteen aims for moon and stars; hits moon and stars” read the thumbnail review in Rolling Stone that summer) and a quick hop into the Top 10 of Billboard’s album chart, the album still didn’t stick. Lead single “Prove It All Night” peaked at number 33, while the next try, “Badlands,” sputtered at 42. “Darkness was kind of floundering,” Landau recalls. “It didn’t have legs. And it certainly wasn’t having the impact of Born to Run.” Worried that the album would be seen as a commercial failure, Bruce reexamined his resistance to publicity. “I realized that I worked a year—a year of my life—on somethin’, and I wasn’t aggressively tryin’ to get it out there to people,” he told Dave Marsh. “I was superaggressive in my approach toward the record and toward makin’ it happen . . . And then when it came out, I went, ‘Oh, I don’t wanna push it’ . . . It was ridiculous to cut off your nose to spite your face . . .”
Realizing that many of the postrelease problems he and Darkness were having resulted from lacking a full-time manager to help plan and execute such complex campaigns, Bruce turned to Landau for help. They’d already spoken in theoretical terms about his coproducer signing on for an ongoing role in Bruce’s organization. But, as Landau admits, he was an unlikely choice to become anyone’s manager. For while he had picked up some expertise in the ways and means of the record industry, Landau lacked the formal business and accounting training that a top-
shelf artist would require from his or her most highly placed associate. But when Landau pointed out his obvious weakness, Bruce just shrugged. “You’re a smart guy. This stuff is not rocket science. We trust each other, and that’s all that matters.” They worked out a basic agreement in a matter of minutes, Landau says, and agreed to give each other a six-month tryout before making everything official. “And,” Landau concludes, “there was no looking back.”
With one close friend in the manager’s chair, Bruce helped shift the Darkness campaign into higher gear by opening up to Dave Marsh, then an associate editor at Rolling Stone, to fuel a cover story about the new album and tour. Published in mid-August, Marsh’s story (“Bruce Springsteen Raises Cain”) played out across Bruce’s dayslong tour stop in Los Angeles, where a series of shows, parties, and Fourth of July celebrations allowed Marsh to gaze deep into the artist’s past, abiding philosophies, and passion for rock ’n’ roll. The most vivid portrait of Springsteen to date, the article was also striking for its unabashed advocacy of its subject. “I always saw myself as an advocate journalist,” Marsh writes in an e-mail. “I have never, ever, adopted the pretense of ‘objectivity,’ which I think is silly and does more harm than good.”
So while neither Marsh nor Rolling Stone mentioned the author’s friendship with Bruce, or his longtime relationship with Landau, or his integral role in introducing the musician to his coproducer-manager,3 his account of Bruce’s trip through Los Angeles bristled with thoughts, adventures, and acts of rock ’n’ roll so pure and beautiful they read like mythology even though they’re so obviously true. So here’s Bruce arm in arm with his fans in the front of LA’s Forum arena, ordering security guards to back off from his communion with the audience during “Spirit in the Night”: “You guys work here or something?” he shouted into the microphone. “Get outta here—these guys are my friends.” Over here we find Bruce in the same venue shrugging off the rave reviews his concerts had received: “Big deal, huh? I gotta tell you, I only levitate to the upper deck on Wednesdays and Fridays. And I don’t do no windows.” When news breaks that Bruce’s next appearance will be a surprise show at the four-hundred-seat Roxy on Sunset Boulevard, here are a thousand fans jostling for position outside the box office. When it turns out that a significant percentage of the seats for the show have been set aside for industry figures, here’s Bruce starting his performance with an abject apology. “I’d like to say I’m sorry, it’s my fault,” he declares. “I wasn’t trying to turn this into a private party, ’cause I don’t play no private parties anymore, except my own.” Huge cheers, and then he snaps the band into a supercharged cover of Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” the start of a three-and-a-half-hour rock ’n’ roll extravaganza that leaves LA Times critic Robert Hilburn in a panic, wondering how he can tell readers that this night’s show was even better than the previous night’s show at the Forum, which he’d just called one of the best musical events in the history of Los Angeles.4
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