E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (28 page)

The projections made for sales—and marketing budget—certainly suggested the label’s faith in their main man was undiminished by the lack of an obvious hit single, or a refusal on his part to do TV appearances or promotional videos.
*
Their internal unit sales projection as of May 30, 1978, was for domestic sales of
Darkness
to total two and a half million in the next ninety days, rising to three million by year’s end. Given that the artist in question had to date sold 1,278,589 copies of
Born To Run
, 534,865 of
The Wild, the Innocent
and 419,764 of
Greetings from Asbury Park
, one wonders on what basis such predictions were made. Or who, this time around, was hyping whom.

CBS were not even sure, right up until the moment the record was
mastered in early May, that Springsteen had finally delivered his first album under the new deal. In response to Nelson‘s question, “When did you actually know what the ten songs were?” Landau admitted, “The day we mastered the record.” Even after Bruce chopped “Don’t Look Back” and dubbed on a sax part for “Badlands,” he would not let go. As Wingate recalls, “The album was brought to LA to master. He was up against the release date, but he [still] decided to go back to New York to put the guitar solo [on ‘The Promised Land’] back in.” It left the label pinning its commercial hopes on positive press from the shows keeping the album in the charts; a second (and hopefully third) single surpassing the stilted studio “Prove It All Night” in airplay and chart action; and, perhaps most important of all, that the rock critics again did their work for them, reviewing a Springsteen record as if it were the Second Coming and Holy Grail wrapped into one.

By assigning the already indentured Dave Marsh to review
Darkness
,
Rolling Stone
were certainly doing their bit. On line two of his rave review, Marsh compared this record to
Are You Experienced, Astral Weeks, Who’s Next, The Band
and “Like A Rolling Stone.” If that wasn’t enough to break
any
camel’s back, he went on to suggest that “in the area of production…[it] is nothing less than a breakthrough.” A breakthrough no-one reprised or took further, not even Springsteen. But then, here was a man who was determined to hear echoes of Robbie Robertson’s apocalyptic 1966 riffs and Yardbirds-era Jeff Beck in Bruce’s guitar parts.

He was also prepared to be a voice in the wilderness, celebrating (not lamenting) the fact that “ideas, characters, and phrases jump from song to song like threads in a tapestry.” Some other US reviewers who agreed with this part of Marsh’s critique thought it showed a paucity of imagination. Peter Knobler, a long-term apostle who took on the thankless role of Judas this time, suggested in a two-page
Crawdaddy
review that the album’s main flaw was his “repeated use of scenes and frameworks that [he] pioneered years ago and everyone from Meat Loaf to Billy Falcon has savaged since…[He] uses all the same settings—night, cars, driving—[while] quot[ing] liberally from himself—chord changes, guitar riffs, vocal tone.” He even dared to wonder aloud whether “
Born To Run
really had been as far as he could go.”
NME
’s Paul Rambali also found a number of songs “where he narrowly escapes self-parody;” while an exasperated Mitch Cohen in
Creem
pondered, “Doesn’t this guy ever get in the car just to go get a pack of cigarettes? It’s a major production every time he turns the ignition key.”

Such criticisms clearly stung Springsteen. He alluded to them in assorted interviews that summer, insisting, “The action is not the imagery, you know. The heart of the action is beneath all that stuff. There’s a separate thing happening all the time. I sorta always saw it as the way certain people make certain kinds of movies.” Yet even Landau had at one point asked him, mid-session, “What’s all these cars? Why are these people always in these cars?” He found himself required to explicate his underlying aesthetic to his own producer: “Well, you know, the idea is they’re always in a state of movement…destination unknown.”

What even the more carping critics couldn’t have known was that
Darkness on The Edge of Town
, for all its pugnacious power and V8 vroom, was a muddied melange of Albums #4 and 5. Even Springsteen admitted, the week of its release, that “most of the new songs were written while we were recording the album. I was formulating a concept in the studio.” The result was neither one thing, nor the other, neither an Atlantic cross-stitch, nor a full record of time spent at the Plant. As Landau broke it down for Nelson, “‘Badlands,’ ‘Adam Raised A Cain,’ ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Factory,’ ‘Prove It All Night’ were all completely conceived and executed after the album began.” Of the others, “Streets of Fire” was a spontaneous studio combustion, “Candy’s Room” had stripped two superior songs of their spare parts, and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “Racing In The Street,” originally intended for “Album #4,” were recrafted lyrically in order to gain an invite to this beggar’s banquet. That left just “Something In The Night” representing an untainted “Album #4.”

“Album #4”—the one he sketched out in his notebook, endlessly shuffling the already-engorged deck—was a would-be artifact it would take him thirty-three years to get (back) to. In the meantime, there would be just hints as to what might have been, notably the rerecording of various key songs from the Atlantic period—“Drive All Night,” “I Wanna Be With You,” “Independence Day,” “Sherry Darling” for
The River
; “Frankie” and “Darlington County” for
Born In The USA;
and, even, “The Promise” for
18 Tracks
. Without this halfway house,
Born To Run
’s successor was always likely to be a shock to the fan system. (Dylan was himself guilty of rerecording inferior versions of three “basement tape” cuts for a second greatest hits, before realizing these songs were of a piece, and releasing them that way.)

In 1978, Springsteen continued dropping hints about what had
prompted this dramatic shift in lieu of that missing album: “I started with basically the same imagery as before, the same frames of reference, but what’s happened to the characters is a little different.” With
Darkness
, he struck a vein he would mine for the remainder of the E Street era. There would be no more seismic stylistic shifts. As he told Marsh the next time around, “I don’t really have a desire to experiment for the sake of experimentation…I’m not really that concerned with style.” From now on he intended to create a body of work that was as full of “warmth, fidelity, duty” as John Ford’s:

In a sense, he had only just begun. Meaning, he would have to sell himself to fans all over again. It was high time he started pitching this born-again aesthetic to the heartlands. Even this “hyper-conscious kid” knew the “record ain’t gonna sprout legs and walk out the door, and jump on people’s record players and say listen to me.” The problem was that as soon as he started playing songs from the album—and every show received a near-lethal dose of
Darkness
in the first half, before more familiar fare revived older fans’ spirits—he realized what they had needed all along was road-testing, not months in a sterile studio. The immediacy that came with an audience, an amphitheater and an audio feed was a pattern that had served him well to date. Yet it was one to which he would never now return.

Instead, he pushed the fixed-to-disc
Darkness
like there was no tomorrow, determined to get his message across
after the fact
. Once he delivered the album, the only time he planned to hear those songs again was with the roar of the crowd in his ears. Not surprisingly, their acclaim would stop him from seeing
Darkness
—for all its capital-A Attitude—as falling short of his oft-expressed long-term goal: “To make the greatest rock & roll record ever made.” By 1981—when promoting an Album #6 that
contained more elements from “Album #4” than its precursor—he was insisting, “I simply consider the
Darkness
LP a failure.” He even had some sense of where he had gone wrong, telling Nick Kent, “
Darkness
was the one where we deliberately left off all the fun rock & roll songs. But I don’t think a lot of the songs on
Darkness
were fully realized.” By then, all ten songs—even “Factory”—had been “fully realized,” just not necessarily when the tapes were rolling:

In 1975, at the end of his tether after
three
months’ solid work on
Born To Run
, Springsteen threatened to just scrap the whole record and record the self-same eight songs at The Bottom Line. He never did. It would have been the wrong album, anyway. If ever there was an album that came alive
live
it was
Darkness
; and in a large part, this was because in concert there was also a place for “all the fun rock & roll songs,” the songs he gave away and those he held over to use next time. Context, as this “hyper-conscious kid” once
instinctively
knew, was all. It was time to let in some light, to allow hope and glory to filter through those drawn Venetian blinds.

^*
When
The Clash
was finally released in the US, in 1978, it was with a revised track-listing that incorporated nonalbum singles and deleted punkier paeans—including the contentious “I’m So Bored With The USA.” Both versions would eventually be released on CD.

^*
Sony’s logs do not indicate the studio (apparently, such information was not deemed “necessary”), so it is not clear when the switch was made for good, but it does appear that through August and into September some work was still being done at Atlantic (presumably on tracks previously recorded there).

^*
The January 16 sequence was as follows:

Side 1: Badlands. Don’t Look Back. Candy’s Room. Something In The Night. Racing In The Street.

Side 2: The Promised Land. Adam Raised A Cain. The Way. Prove It All Night. The Promise.

^*
There were a handful of brief news snippets on local TV stations in 1978, but Springsteen continued to nix any live TV performances, even on the ever-popular
Saturday Night Live
.

With Elvis out for the count, Springsteen set out at the end of May 1978 to claim another crown, that of living legend James Brown. Night after night, over six months of solid, relentless touring, he demonstrated who
really
was the hardest working man in show business. The shows he played at this time—a hundred and ten of them, criss-crossing North America from northeast to southwest, coast to coast and back again—have rightly become the stuff of legends. At a time when his latest album was struggling to pass total sales of
The Wild, the Innocent
, let alone the platinum
Born To Run
—it peaked at five in the
Billboard
chart, two places shy of its predecessor and by the end of 1978 had only sold around 600,000 Stateside—the hype surrounding the shows successfully masked this chastening reality, while serving to reaffirm all the previous hyperbole expended on the E Street Band show that Springsteen had gone to such pains to dampen.

If CBS privately despaired at Springsteen’s resolute refusal to do TV, his willingness to donate his most commercial songs to others (the most aired Springsteen song on AM radio that spring was Patti Smith’s version of
“Because The Night”), and the austere nature of the only press ads he would approve, they could have no complaints about the way he was promoting the album at the shows, night after night, or talked up the album in press interviews whenever the subject came up. From day one he insisted he always knew
Darkness
“might be a harder album for people to like than
Born To Run
, because it has less surface warmth or optimism. [But] it’s been misinterpreted as being a pessimistic album, which it’s not at all meant to be.”

He was determined to drive its defiantly dark message home. On opening night of the tour, with the album still not officially out, he played nine of the ten songs (wisely dispensing with “Factory”). And he did not stop there. Both “Fire” and “The Promise” came up for air, and in the former’s case quickly became a nightly rockabilly ritual. If the latter’s inclusion merely reaffirmed a belief among fans that he had left off another masterpiece, it proved a less durable inclusion. An early first encore, it passed from the set the gig before his first radio broadcast of the year, July 5. Performed solo at the piano, à la “For You,” here was the definitive rendition. But coming at the end of two and a half hours of rabble-rousing it seemed to take those last ounces of strength and throw them all away, making its mark at the expense of “Born To Run,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and whatever frat-rocker he closed the show with on a given night.