Bruce (38 page)

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.”

F
INISHED 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 Town
²
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

And even cooler, as if anything could be cooler, here’s Bruce in the wee hours of the fifth of July, leading an assault on the embarrassingly large
Darkness on the Edge of Town
billboard on Sunset Boulevard, which he, Clemons, and Tallent, along with an eager platoon of crew members, deface with a hand-scrawled “
PROVE IT ALL NIGHT
” sprayed across the bottom, the work signed with a slightly smaller “
E STREET
.” “I wanted to get to my face, and paint on a mustache,” he told Marsh a few hours later. “But it was too damn high.” All of which reads as screen ready as Bruce’s own cinematic lyrics. Until Marsh poses a question about the billboard caper that, purposefully or not, compels Bruce to reveal the canniness behind his rowdiness:

MARSH:
“Were you worried you’d get caught?”

BRUCE:
“Naw, I figured if they caught us, that was great. And if we got away with it, that was even better.”

In other words, if he had to get arrested in order to reestablish himself as rock ’n’ roll’s truest anticelebrity and regular guy, that would not be a problem.

• • •

The raves for the Darkness tour had started with the opening show in Buffalo, on May 23, 1978, and didn’t ease up from the first swing through the usual East Coast hotspots (Boston, Philadelphia, the New York–New Jersey corridor), the Midwest swing, and the first West Coast haul down to Los Angeles in early July. Still, ticket sales didn’t always follow suit. So while most of the theaters they visited were smaller than the ten-thousand-seat Kiel Auditorium in Saint Louis, where more than a third of the house went unsold, large sections of the country had either
forgotten about Bruce since
Born to Run
or had never experienced the E Street show before. “We got nothing in the South, really,” Van Zandt says. “Austin was good, some other places in Texas were okay. Philly was good, Boston, Cleveland, some places in Texas. The rest of the country was soft. I remember playing to a lot of empty houses. A
lot
of empty houses.”

But as Premier Talent’s Frank Barsalona made clear, the point of this tour was to make the entire country a hot spot for Bruce. Not by publicity or the grace of album reviews and national coverage but by showing up everywhere that would have them and playing as hard as they could, night after night, until every significant city or crossroads had a chance to experience their power. As if Bruce, or anyone in the band, needed to be told the virtues of working the road. But given the chance to wreak rock ’n’ roll havoc everywhere and take prisoners nowhere, Bruce’s natural intensity became all the more overpowering. “It all ties in with the records and the values, the morality of the records,” he told Marsh. “There’s a certain morality to the show, and it’s very strict. Everything counts. Every person, every individual in the crowd counts. To me.”

Increasingly obsessed with the technical quality at the shows (particularly in the larger halls), Bruce extended the afternoon sound checks into three-hour marathons of jamming, correcting mistakes heard at the previous night’s show, rehearsing whatever new song(s) he wanted to add for the evening, and staging new theatrical bits to add dimension to his more grandiose comic stories. Then came Bruce’s painstaking ritual of patrolling literally every section and corner of the theater or arena, microphone in hand, listening for gaps in the amplification, drum tone, and, worst of all, echo. And if it turned out that things weren’t just exactly right, for whatever reason, Bruce stopped everything until they, and he, had gained control over that subsection of the hall. Such were the dimensions of Bruce’s expectations, and his overwhelming need to fix every problem and right every wrong that might stand between himself and his audience. He owed them his best, just as he owed it to Barsalona, Landau, every member of the band, the crew, and especially the fans who came out every night in search of something more perfect than they could find
in their daily lives. In Bruce’s mind, the burden was as tormenting as it was inspiring.

“Everybody had pressure on them, but mostly it was Bruce, because it was his name out there,” says Garry Tallent. “He [became] very dark, sometimes difficult to be around. Just in a bad mood a lot of time, always ready to hit somebody.” True enough, steely-eyed perfectionism had always been a central pillar in Bruce’s musical career. But what became increasingly clear as the tour rolled into the summer was that Bruce’s performances had gone from being displays of poetic craft and visceral release to something more like a crucible, a ritualistic ordeal of baring his own soul, reaching out for the communion and creating an energy powerful enough to carry the audience, and himself, to a kind of rock ’n’ roll salvation.