Albums of My Life -1978 - Bruce Springsteen "Darkness on the Edge of Town"

by Steve Pick

In this, the 21st installment of the series writing about one album for each year of my life, we reach the point where I start buying them in real time.

In 1978, something drew me back to music in a big way after a few years of merely dabbling. I started buying records as often as possible, and I listened to the radio all the time, and I read rock magazines. Creem and Rolling Stone, mostly that year. I was learning that things were happening which hadn't happened in a long time, that rock music was saying things which mattered again, and that there were new sounds which fell squarely in the rock tradition while shattering all the rules of the day.

In addition to discovering the New Wave (in part because KADI FM played Elvis Costello and Patti Smith in heavy rotation), I discovered Bruce Springsteen, a kindred spirit albeit a horse of an entirely different color. I remember actually making the purchase of Darkness on the Edge of Town; I bought it at Peaches in Dellwood, and the clerk, a former neighbor of mine, complimented me on my taste.

I remember dropping the needle on the record and thrilling to the tom tom intro of "Badlands" before suddenly the sky opened up and the full throttle force of the E Street Band burst from my speakers. I remember playing the record over and over, knowing that this was something special, even if I didn't quite yet know why.

To this day, Darkness is my favorite Springsteen album. It remains the defining E Street template, even though obviously those guys could drop some serious science on songs dramatically different from the ones contained here. But, here we have the force of the E Street Band, the astounding invention and power of drummer Max Weinberg, the thick sound and rhythmic perfection of bassist Gary W. Tallent, the unobtrusive yet essential keyboards of Danny Federici, the array of melodic commentary from pianist Roy Bittan, the penetrating full-blown tenor sax of Clarence Clemons, and the dynamic blasts of Springsteen's own guitar (or is that Miami Steve Van Zant? I never know who plays which part).

And there's Springsteen's voice, which he pushes to extremes he never did before or again. Listen to the way he screams from the gut on "Adam Raised a Cain," or the way he sounds so intimate and well, horny on "Candy's Room," or the rich expression he brings to "The Promised Land." He sounds rawer, and he sounds more varied, as though each song required a specific new vocal approach to deliver the emotional content.

The emotional content of Darkness is pretty much a frenzy of hope and pain and drudgery and release and desire and love and passion and revenge and retreat. The characters in these songs are not simple, are not symbols but very specifically drawn human beings with complicated experiences.

"Racing in the Streets," is one of the most mocked of all Springsteen songs because of it's opening lines. "I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396 / Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor" was ripe for satire by those who thought Springsteen's songs were simply love poems to cars and girls. But the man in this song is trying to be in love with life itself - "Some guys they just give up livin' / And start dying little by little piece by piece / Some guys come home from work and wash up / And go racin' in the streets."

The catch is, he's torn between the thrills he needs from cheating death itself - for racing in the streets isn't exactly a guarantee of safety - and the pain he knows he brings to the woman he loves, who has shut herself down to a shell of the lively girl she had been. "Tonight my baby and me we're gonna ride to the sea / And wash these sins off my hands." It ain't easy to ask forgiveness when you believe the very sin you're committing is what keeps you from dying. This will be a baptism that doesn't seem likely to lead to Heaven.

Ah, well, Springsteen challenges perceptions and conventions. He sings of working class people not as heroic stereotypes, but as human beings faced with the challenge of finding meaning in life. When Springsteen sings "I believe in the promised land," at first it seems something akin to "Born to Run," when he wants to take his woman and break on through to the other side. But, there is an awareness here of a contradiction - "Blow away the dreams that tear you apart / Blow away the dreams that break your heart / Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted." Isn't the promised land itself such a dream? And yet, the song sounds so full of hope, so cocksure that the singer (and those of us who listen and sing along, either in our heads or at the top of our lungs at his concerts) can actually defeat the forces arrayed against him, and find the life he wants.

Ultimately, it is the awareness that the fight itself, or rather the experience of making a life out of the individual moments we live, which matters. "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 which can only be found / In the darkness on the edge of town." Not a simple moral, but a complex desire to wrestle with the powers that be, to keep searching til it's understood that these badlands are treating us good.