Born To Run was the album when success came knocking for Bruce Springsteen. It was his third album, huge-sounding and jubilant. It signalled the artist’s ambitions as well as his drive to get up, get out, and to move on in this world, both topically and musically. Born To Run became a gigantic success, becoming a Top 3 hit on the US album chart. In October 1975, Springsteen appeared on the covers of both Newsweek and Time in the same week.
After years of toiling, every rock’n’roll dream was finally becoming true. It wasn’t just a hit that came and went. With this album (and song), Springsteen succeeded in building a huge and potentially lasting following. It was the point where he made a wide yet personal connection with blue-collar rock’n’roll America, and he had done it on his own terms.
To outside eyes it might have looked like success hit him quickly, but he had spent years as a struggling artist before finally making it. He had formed his first band as early as 1965. In the late 60s, he was performing in the power trio Earth in clubs in New Jersey, with one major show at the Hotel Diplomat in New York City.
In the early 1970s, he performed with the band Child, which was the first band that would also feature members that would later be part of the E Street Band – Springsteen’s well-known backing band. He played in several others during this time, but soon enough ended up fronting the Bruce Springsteen Band. His debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., was released in January 1973. Springsteen had paid his dues well before Born To Run changed things forever.
Success was welcome, but the changes it brought with it also gave Springsteen pause. He found that when you’re a struggling artist one day, and a success story the next, everybody starts looking at you differently. It started becoming hard for things to stay like how they were before.
The documentary The Promise chronicles this time and the making of his follow-up album Darkness On the Edge of Town. In the documentary, Springsteen talks about the questions he started asking himself around that time, saying: “The success we had with Born To Run immediately made me ask, ‘Well, what’s that all about? What’s that mean for me?’ The success brought me an audience. It also separated me from all the things I had been trying to make my connections to my whole life. It frightened me, because I understood that what I had of value was at my core, and that core was rooted into the place I had grown up, the people I had known, the experiences I’d had. If I move away from those things into a sphere of just freedom as pure license, to go about your life as you desire without connection, that’s where a lot of the people I admire drifted away from the essential things that made them great. And more than rich, and more than famous, and more than happy, I wanted to be great.”
There were two clouds that hung over the writing and recording of Darkness On the Edge of Town. One was that cloud of success, where Springsteen struggled to accept the things that had happened to him without letting them distort his idea about who he was and what he wanted to do.
The other cloud was a threat to Springsteen’s artistic future, in the shape of a lawsuit from Mike Appell.
It came to a head in January 1976. Appell had been Springsteen’s manager and producer. He was also his friend. They had signed a publishing and production contract during the time when it was customary in the business for artists getting a record deal to give away half their publishing. Appell is generally credited for his aggressive tactics in getting Springsteen’s career started, but he had a definite vision about the music which started clashing with Springsteen during Born To Run. Springsteen sought to replace Appel as both manager and record producer with Jon Landau.
The actual court order was that Springsteen couldn’t go into the studio with a producer not approved by Mike Appel. In the early stages of that lawsuit when things didn’t go well, his only form of protest over this was just not to go in at all.
“It wasn’t a lawsuit about money, it was a lawsuit about control,” Springsteen said in The Promise. “Who was going to be in control of my work and my work life. Early on I decided that that was going to be me. The bottom line was, it would be my ass on the line, and I was gonna control where it went and how things went down. That for me was what the lawsuit was about. If I don’t go in the studio, I don’t go in the studio. I don’t go in under somebody else’s rules. If I can’t go in the studio and make the music I want to make, I won’t make music. We played live, we survived playing the live shows as best as we could, but things got very, very difficult. What it came down to is, you can lose the rights to your music, the ability to record, the ownership of your songs, but you can’t lose that ting that’s in you.”
Not being able to return to the studio after the Born To Run record and tour was heartbreaking to Springsteen as well as the E-street Band. The family feeling in the band was strong and they rallied around each other. During that time, they rehearsed every day at Springsteen’s house in New Jersey. New songs started appearing during this time. The determination and desire to doing things his way became even greater.
It took a long time, but in June 1977, Springsteen’s situation with his former manager was decided conclusively. He got control of his music and ultimately his career. This was a defining moment of his young career. He had withstood the rigors of someone literally trying to take his future away.
“These were the things that I would have fought to the death for,” Springsteen said, “because without them, at that time, I felt I had no life. I knew I was gonna take it the whole way. And… you’re fighting a friend. I wish it on nobody. The loss of Mike’s friendship was a terrible loss. I don’t think our working relationship would have continued the way it had, but the friendship was tremendously enjoyable. When we see each other now I still enjoy being with him very much.”
The band could finally go back into the studio and started working on the album. As he had intended, Springsteen formed a new production team with Jon Landau, who would work with Springsteen in that capacity until the mid-1990s.
A lot of songs had accumulated over the past few years, and even more kept coming over the course of the studio sessions. Springsteen had come a long way since the previous album. He was now in a totally different headspace, with no intention of writing the next Jungleland or Backstreets. There was a conscious moving away from the big wall of sound and sheer momentum towards a sparser, more cinematic musical landscape.
“That was pretty much what I was after,” Springsteen said in The Promise. “A leaner sound, an angrier sound. I wanted to toughen up the songs. I wanted the record to have a very relentless feeling. It was a little more heartland, rural.”
The process during those days was to rehearse a song in the studio, record it, and once it became coherent, return to the control room to listen to it. Then they began honing it individually and collectively. In those days it was about as much the live performance of the take having something special. When they sat down it wasn’t just by rote, they were going out to create magic.
On Born To Run, there had been a detailed focus on what they referred to as ‘parts’. Everything was meticulously worked out, to the point that Springsteen worked out specific parts for people to play, added things where they could fit and built very set arrangements. This approach changed drastically for Darkness, which was a lot more freewheeling as well as a lot sparser. This time, parts were discouraged from being added, or even removed.
The album they were making almost ended up feeling like a counterresponse to the previous album. On Born to Run, he sings about being a young racer, experiencing life and love and hope. On Darkness on the Edge of Town, he sings from the perspective of older and more world-weary characters, staying connected to root values, and the struggle to honour the past while also making a stand.
In the liner notes from the expanded edition of Darkness On the Edge of Town, Springsteen was very clear about this: “After Born To Run, I wanted to write about life in the close confines of the small towns I grew up in. In 1977, I was living on a farm in Holmdel, New Jersey. It was there that I wrote most of the songs for Darkness On the Edge of Town. I was 27 and the product of Top 40 radio. Songs like The Animal’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place were infused with an early-pop class consciousness. That along with my own experience, the stress and tension of my father’s and mother’s life, they came with the difficulties of trying to make ends meet, influenced my writing. I had a reaction to my own good fortune, and I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountability to the people I had grown up alongside. I began to wonder how to address that feeling. All of this led to the turn my writing took on Darkness.”
They’re still racing out at the Trestles
But that blood it never burned in her veins
Now I hear she’s got a house up in Fairview
And a style she’s trying to maintainWell if she wants to see me
You can tell her that I’m easily found
Tell her there’s a spot out ‘neath Abram’s Bridge
And tell her there’s a darkness on the edge of town
There’s a darkness on the edge of town
The album is dark, gloomy, and full of night metafors. The road that was such a strong symbol on the previous album is still there as a metafor, but on these roads you don’t get anywhere.
Bruce at the time was a tremendous rewriter. He made alternate versions, alternate verses, alternate endings. He was always creating choices for himself. The band recorded a lot of music. Song after song, take after take.
On Born To Run, they had ended up with nine songs which were meticulously sculpted, of which eight made the album. For Darkness, they ended up with over 70 songs. The explosion of creativity was one thing, but primarily the approach to songwriting was drastically different. “He would write five songs to get one song,” Clarence Clemons said, referring to how parts would get salvaged and used if they fit in.
Plenty of times, the band would say ‘hey, that’s a great song! We’re gonne use that, right?’ whereas Springsteen would say ‘no, I’m not sure if that one will make it.’
The song Darkness On the Edge of Town emerged late in the sessions. Springsteen brought it to the band in April 1978 – well after the album’s recording was considered finished, and just a month and a half before the album would be released. He walked in and told his engineer that he had a brand new song he wanted to record – one that would basically “close” the album.
As with many songs he wrote at the time, Springsteen came up with the title for the song first. He said: “I had that title and said, ‘Well, I’d better come up with something that deserves that title.’ That’s what I was always very, very good at – I didn’t have any problem thinking really hard about what I was doing.”
Springsteen describes the track as a meditation where you ask yourself: with whom, and where, are you going to stand? The final chorus is crucial in that regard, summarizing not just the track itself but the mentality behind nearly every song he wrote during that time.
Springsteen says in The Promise: “The song builds to that one big moment: ‘I’ll be on that hill ‘cause I can’t stop / I’ll be on that hill with everything I got’. That was the only answer I had at the time. Not forsaking your own inner life force. You know, how do you hold on to those things? How do we keep those things? How do we do justice and honour to those things? That was the question that that record asked over and over and over again. Adam Raised A Cain – how do we honour our parents? Promised Land – how do we honour the community and where we came from? Factory – how do we honour the life of our brothers or sisters and parents? For some reason that was something that really mattered to me. It mattered to me a lot.”
Tonight I’ll be on that hill ’cause I can’t stop
I’ll be on that hill with everything I got
Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost
I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town
In the darkness on the edge of town
Springsteen explained that song dealt with the idea that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end of your rope. He said, “That was a sort of big… it’s a reckoning with the adult world, with a life of limitations and compromises. But also a life of resilience, and commitment to life. Through the breath in your lungs. How do I keep faith with those things? How do I honour those things? Darkness was a record where I set out to try to understand how to do that.”
Many of Springsteen’s earlier songs, particularly on the Born To Run album, deal with hopes, dreams, and escape from the mundane. Darkness On The Edge Of Town is when harsh reality sets in. The guy in the song has been beaten down – he’s lost his money and his wife – but he’s resilient, still making a go of it out where most folks don’t venture. In spite of all the bleakness, the Darkness album is not about giving up. It is about the fight, the refusal to give up, and about the struggle to get through to the other side. Springsteen had been through some hardships of his own, and giving up was never an option. The album reflects that mentality.
After this final track was recorded, Bruce dropped The Promise and Don’t Look Back from the album’s track listing. The former dealt too closely with his recent legal woes, which by now was already well in the rearview mirror, and the latter would have made the second side of the album too harsh. “I didn’t want any distractions from this is the narrative and the stories that I was telling,” Springsteen said. “Also, I wanted to have a sort of apocalyptic grandeur.”
The album’s cover art would reflect the simple, naked, revealing nature of the music on it. In The Promise, Frank Stefanko who was the photographer remembers: “He came down to my house, he said, ‘What should I bring?’ I said, ‘Just bring some changes of clothes so we can get several looks.’ He came in with a crumpled-up paper supermarket bag. In it was some some flannel shirts, some jeans, and some t-shirts. That was his wardrobe for the shoot. We had just moved into this old house in Haddonfield, New Jersey, with that flowered wallpaper and the cabbage roses and everything, and we just did some test shots. That very first day, some of the test shots that we did up in the bedroom, with the cabbage-rose wallpaper, ended up being the cover for Darkness On the Edge of Town.”
Springsteen described the cover as “Incredibly revealing. Very stripped down, kind of like what I thought the record was. The images were very blue-collar, like the record, and I thought ‘Yeah, that’s my story, and that’s the character in my story.”
The album was released on 2 June 1978. It was up against some stiff competition, as its release coincided with new albums by the Rolling Stones (Some Girls), Bog Seger (Stranger In Town) and Foreigner (Double Vision). Instead of going head-to-head with these big sellers, Columbia Records promoted the album minimally at Springsteen’s request. It still reached #5 on the US Billboard album charts, where it remained for an impressive 167 weeks. In the UK, it charted at #14, which was a big step up from Born To Run which managed #36.
Three songs were released as singles from the album: Prove It All Night, Badlands, and The Promised Land. The title track certainly is one of the best tracks on the album, but some tracks just don’t have the characteristics or qualities that a single track should have. It is also a pretty bleak track, even for Springsteen at the time, to put out as a single.
It has however become one of Springsteen’s most beloved tracks from his early years, and it continues to defend its inclusion in his live shows. Springsteen is as fond of playing it live as audiences are of hearing it. He has stated that the track is best expressed in concert because “the audience allows you to attack it with a lot more intensity.”
When Springsteen was asked in a 1978 radio interview whether he felt good about how the album had turned out, he said “I like it, which is a hard thing to do. I think it is an honest record, which is basically what I was trying to make.”
At the end of the day, Darkness On the Edge of Town stands as one of Bruce Springsteen’s best and most classic albums. Many fans have it as their favourite. The Boss himself is certainly proud of it, especially highlighting its sincerity and honesty. In an essay he wrote for the album’s deluxe box set, he ended with: “Most of my writing is emotionally autobiographical. You’ve got to pull up the things that mean something to you in order for them to mean anything to your audience. That’s how they know you’re not kidding. With the record’s final verse, ‘Tonight I’ll be on that hill…’ my characters stand unsure of their fate, but dug in and committed. By the end of Darkness, I’d found my adult voice.”
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