Bruce Springsteen never intended to wait three years to follow up his landmark album Born to Run. The record had landed him on the covers of both Time and Newsweek and had catapulted him from cult hero to rock savior back in 1975. He was anxious to build on the momentum and prove himself more than just a one-hit wonder. But Born to Run would be a fitting soundtrack to his life at a time when a legal smackdown with former producer and manager Mike Appel barred the singer from the studio for nearly two years, forcing Springsteen and his E Street gang to bide their time on the road, touring extensively throughout the US like a band of traveling gypsies.
Springsteen also spent a considerable amount of that downtime crafting songs—70 of them, give or take. Holed up in his rented New Jersey farmhouse, he and his band knocked out four albums’ worth of material while waiting out their legal woes. Songs with bold, evocative titles like “Racing in the Streets” and “Badlands.” Draft after draft, Springsteen would often stay up all night writing furiously in pursuit of just the right image, the precise word that would make a song click. When the lawsuit between him and Appel was settled in 1977, Springsteen faced the daunting task of sifting through the mountain of material amassed over the band’s forced hiatus to come up with the ten songs that would comprise the album to finally follow in the wake of Born to Run.
Darkness on the Edge of Town, Bruce Springsteen’s stark 1978 masterpiece, marked a critical juncture in the singer-songwriter’s growth as an artist. Although many of the songs initially written for the album still clung to Born to Run’s naïve vision of romance, redemption, and wanderlust, Springsteen was chasing something else entirely on his next record. “Darkness on the Edge of Town came out of a huge body of work that had tons of very happy songs,” said Springsteen at the Toronto Film Festival in September. "It was all music that we recorded, we wrote and made a very distinct decision to not use." He eventually farmed out to other artists the songs that spoke to a bygone innocence and came out swinging with music that was inspired by a mix of the rising punk movement, old Hank Williams’ records, films noir like The Grapes of Wrath, and his own burgeoning defiance. At age 27, Springsteen had taken a turn into a world more stark and forbidding than the wide-open one of Born to Run. His more mature perspective on Darkness on the Edge of Town addressed working-class communities such as the one in which he grew up and once tried to escape. Springsteen was bringing it all back home—the responsibilities, compromises and broken promises of adulthood closing in around him.
Now, with the recent release of The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story, we get a glimpse of what might’ve been as Springsteen revisits his classic album and the extremism of a period when his life was devoted solely to music. We get to see what went down during that tumultuous though fertile time and hear the substantial body of work that was ultimately left behind. The new box set is a lavish addition to the Springsteen canon, surrounding a re-mastered version of Darkness on the Edge of Town as it was released in 1978 with a rich array of archival material. The set includes a DVD documentary that has already shown at film festivals and on HBO; a selection of live performances including an entire 3-hour concert from 1978; and The Promise, subtitled The Lost Sessions: Darkness on the Edge of Town, which is also available on its own as a double-CD. The 21-song collection of previously unreleased material demonstrates how wide-ranging Springsteen's musical interests and abilities were at 27. Two of the tunes he gave away became hits for other acts: Patti Smith took “Because the Night” to No. 13 on the Hot 100 singles chart, and the Pointer Sisters rode "Fire" all the way to No. 2. Studio versions of each appear here along with the mournful, more autobiographical title track, and a wrenching alternate take on "Racing in the Street." The collection comes packaged in a spiral-bound notebook, the CDs and DVDs tucked into subject dividers surrounded by facsimiles of pages full of hand-scrawled lyrics from Springsteen's own notebooks, possible track lists and photographs.
The first of the three DVDs features a full-length documentary on the making of the album with archival studio and performance video footage. The narration by Springsteen and interviews with band members, producer Jon Landau, Patti Smith, engineer Jimmy Iovine, and even Mike Appel provide an intimate look at an intense and often frustrating period in the career of Springsteen & the E Street Band. The viewer can feel the places where confusion reigned given the sheer amount of material. Piles of notebooks from which song lyrics and ideas were cobbled are perched everywhere. The fact that a single album came from this mountain is amazing in itself; that Darkness emerged is a miracle.
The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story is the ultimate gift for the hardcore Bruce fan on your list this Christmas—if you can get your hands on one.
