By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic
http://www.latimes.com/
October 7, 2010
Bruce Springsteen is the subject of the documentary "The Promise: The Making of 'Darkness on the Edge of Town.' " (Frank Stefanko, Sony Music Entertainment)There was a time when major figures of pop and rock were willing to let people with movie cameras follow them around just to see what they might see, but the contemporary rock-doc is more likely to represent an act of managed self-promotion than of reckless self-exposure. (Reality television, which uses dirty laundry to bolster flagging careers, does not count.) You should not expect to see another "Don't Look Back" (D.A. Pennebaker watches Bob Dylan toy catlike with reporters, fans, friends) or "Gimme Shelter" (the Rolling Stones clueless at Altamont, as seen by the brothers Maysles) or "Let It Be" (Beatles rehearse breakup on camera for Michael Lindsay-Hogg), or even Madonna's less-than-flattering "Truth or Dare" anytime soon. At the same time, there's nothing wrong with a portrait of an artist from the artist's perspective — if the artist has one.
There are few musicians more compulsively or articulately self-reflective than Bruce Springsteen; "Know thyself" could stand as the motto for his whole career, and the 61-year-old product of that long refinement is your guide for "The Promise: The Making of 'Darkness on the Edge of Town,'" which looks back at the creation of what is in many ways his most important, if not actually his most successful album. The film, which premieres Thursday on HBO, about a month before it appears as part of a three-CD, three-DVD expanded reissue, was born as a promotional piece. (A similar documentary, "Wings to Wheels" — directed, like this one, by Thom Zimny — was included in the 2005 reissue of Springsteen's "Born to Run.") But it's an interesting and lively one.
If this is a piece whose primary appeal will be to fans, that is still a whole mess of people, and strangers who wander in will find some compelling music and a remarkably articulate rock star whose aims and priorities will seem remarkably distinct from what they might imagine rock star aims and priorities to be. (Compare and contrast the recent "Stones in Exile," assembled to accompany a rerelease of the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street.")
The songs on "Darkness," says Springsteen, were made in part as "a reaction to my own good fortune" and to satisfy "a sense of accountability to people I'd grown up alongside" — the people who, but for the grace of a Fender guitar, he might still be among.
After the success of "Born to Run," the singer had been kept from recording for a year and a half as a result of a legal battle with a former manager. When he finally got back in the studio in the fall of 1977, after much touring and woodshedding — we see shirtless rehearsals of new songs at his New Jersey farmhouse — he had something different in mind from the Turnpike operas and alley-ballet scores he was famous for, a "music that felt angry and rebellious yet it also felt adult," informed, spiritually if not sonically, by punk rock on the one hand and country music on the other. The very sound of the record, stripped and stark and evocative of "the players fighting for space" (in the words of Chuck Plotkin, who mixed the record) obliges Springsteen's theme of a "life of limits and compromise but also a life of resilience and commitment to life."The heart of "The Promise," which takes its name from one of the many songs that didn't make the album's final cut, is the black-and-white video footage shot in the studio during those months of recording. We see it in snippets rather than in scenes, but it gives some indication of the tediousness and intensity (and the technical issues) that make up making a record. There is some allusion to creative tensions, but this is more declared than shown — there are no thrown chairs, or petulant ultimatums, or sudden walk-outs — and it's no revelation to learn that the Boss can be a demanding boss.
For the most part "The Promise" swaths a difficult time in a warm glow of remembered good times, older selves recalling younger, content in the knowledge that the thing they have together is good. There's a lot of laughter, in the new footage and the old. Even Mike Appel, the manager who kept Springsteen from recording all those years ago, is a friend again — a perfectly appropriate conclusion to the story that "Darkness" begins.
robert.lloyd@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
Shedding Some Light on ‘Darkness’
By MIKE HALE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
October 6, 2010
A lot of motives might have been at play in “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ ”: nostalgia, vanity, a desire for documentation or benediction. One thing that’s undoubtedly on display, though, is bravery.
For much of the documentary, making its debut Thursday night on HBO, the director, Thom Zimny, cuts between a contemporary interview with Bruce Springsteen and footage shot more than 30 years ago of the young Bruce, an intense and beautiful creature who looks like the Robert De Niro of “Mean Streets,” but friendlier.
Frank Stefanko/Sony Music Entertainment Bruce Springsteen in “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town,’ ” on HBO.
Mr. Springsteen, now 61, is aging remarkably well, but still — how many of us, at that age, would want to spend an hour and a half being compared with our 28-year-old selves?
Those scenes of Mr. Springsteen and the E Street Band in the studio during the year they worked on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” their fourth album, were shot in grainy black and white by Barry Rebo, a future cinematographer and producer. Along with old color home movies of the Springsteen family, they give “The Promise” a surface resemblance to Bruce Weber’s great musical documentary “Let’s Get Lost,” about the trumpeter Chet Baker.
“The Promise,” however, is much smaller in scope. It’s a standard making-of documentary, proceeding chronologically through the tribulations and triumphs on the road to the 1978 release of “Darkness,” three years after “Born to Run” — an agonizingly long gap at a time when new songs on the radio were the only way to reach a mass audience.
What elevates the film are its subjects, both the artist and the album, which established a style and a set of themes that would define Mr. Springsteen’s subsequent career. Punk, which was developing at the same time, may get all the credit for revolutionizing popular music, but Mr. Springsteen’s determination to move away from the highly engineered and sterile perfectionism of 1970s rock made “Darkness” just as innovative in its own way.
Springsteen fans — a particularly knowledgeable and devoted audience — will be mesmerized by Mr. Rebo’s footage, which, according to HBO, has never been shown publicly. Those of us who remember where we were when we first heard the album can indulge our nostalgia while taking in the evidence of Mr. Springsteen’s stubborn yet calm determination to find exactly the sound he was seeking.
Happiest of all will be the Springsteen completists, rewarded by nuggets like his singing of “Candy’s Baby” (an earlier version of “Candy’s Room”); an alternate verse of “Something in the Night” or the never-released “What’s the Matter Little Darling”; or songs that went to other artists, like “Because the Night” (Patti Smith) and “Talk to Me” (Southside Johnny).
In the background of one shot Mr. Zimny identifies the fan Obie Dziedzic, who advised his hero to record the version of “Racing in the Street” that included a verse about a girl he met — thereby helping preserve some of Mr. Springsteen’s most romantic lyrics. (“Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea/and wash these sins off our hands.”)
In addition to the interview with the latter-day Mr. Springsteen “The Promise” includes reminiscences by most of the core members of the E Street Band and the producers Jon Landau and Jimmy Iovine. Mr. Springsteen is as intelligent and articulate a commentator as always, but he doesn’t have much to say that sounds new. On the themes that underpin “Darkness,” like sin or “deep despair, resilience, determination,” you’d rather just hear him sing.
More enlightening is Chuck Plotkin, who was brought in to help Mr. Iovine mix the album and who describes how Mr. Springsteen communicated the sounds and effects he wanted to achieve through visual, cinematic images. More amusing is Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist and latter-day “Sopranos” star, who still gets testy on the subject of the 70 new songs he had to learn before Mr. Springsteen chose the 10 that would make it onto the album. (“The Promise” was one of the rejects, after the band had spent three months rehearsing and recording it; it would show up 21 years later on “18 Tracks.”)
“The Promise” (the film) fits on the shelf with other friendly documentaries released in the past few years about great rock songwriters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Tom Petty. It doesn’t approach the complexity or panache of Martin Scorsese’s movie about Mr. Dylan or Jonathan Demme’s films about Mr. Young, but in its modest way it’s a fitting tribute to an album meant to be lean, angry and unadorned.
Shedding light on Bruce Springsteen's 'Darkness on the Edge of Town'
By Jay Lustig
The Newark Star-Ledger
http://www.nj.com/
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town(Thursday night at 9 on HBO, with 12 other airings on HBO and HBO2 through Oct. 30)
Tomorrow is a big day for Bruce Springsteen fans, with the debut of “The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town” on HBO.
But the really big day is more than a month away.
The 90-minute documentary is just one part of the three-CD, three-DVD reissue of Springsteen’s classic 1978 album, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” which comes out Nov. 16 (and is similarly called “The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story”). The documentary is well-made and fascinating, but it’s still just a minor attraction compared with the 21 previously unreleased tracks and pristine 1978 concert footage that will be included in the package.
Springsteen always has been a prolific songwriter. But in the “Darkness” era, he was a songwriting machine, churning out some 70 songs for the project before narrowing them down to 10 that conjured the stark, desperate mood he wanted. “We didn’t want any sweetening; we wanted coffee, black,” says Springsteen producer-manager Jon Landau in the documentary, which was recently shown at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Songs that didn’t fit the mood got left off, no matter how worthy. Some, such as “Fire,” “Because the Night” and “Talk to Me,” became hits for other acts (the Pointer Sisters, Patti Smith and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, respectively).
At a New York press screening of the documentary on Monday, eight of the boxed set’s tracks were also previewed. These were:
“Ain’t Good Enough For You.” An upbeat party song reminiscent of “This Little Girl,” the 1981 Gary U.S. Bonds hit that Springsteen wrote and co-produced. There are some funny lines here (“I tried to change, I got a job in sales/I bought a shirt uptown, in Bloomingdale’s”).
“Outside Looking In.” A tough, fast, hard-rocking song about alienation (“You’ve got all the answers, you and your friends/And I’m on the outside looking in”).
“Gotta Get That Feeling” and “Someday (We’ll Be Together).” Two songs that evoke Phil Spector’s famous wall-of-sound productions. The latter, in particular, sounds like a slowed-down Ronettes melodrama, with unabashedly romantic lyrics that anticipate Springsteen’s love songs of the future.
“Racing in the Street.” A less desolate, more anthemic version of the “Darkness on the Edge of Town” track, with some different lyrics (“Some guys, they do it for the money/Other guys do it ’cause they don’t know what else they can do”).
“Talk to Me.” A big, raucous sound. Totally Jukes-worthy.
“Because the Night.” When Springsteen has performed this song in concert, over the years, he has used his original lyrics (in 1977, he sent his demo to Smith, who added some lyrics). In this version, he sings Smith’s words, too, and makes them sound so personal they seem like his own.“The Promise.” An aching ballad about betrayal that Springsteen spent months perfecting, and that could have been a “Darkness on the Edge of Town” centerpiece. But he “felt too close to it,” he says in the documentary. (A different version of “The Promise” was included on his 1999 rarities collection, “18 Tracks.”)
The documentary creates a vivid portrait of Springsteen in the late ’70s: totally focused on his music (“I didn’t have a life” he says), frustrated by his legal wrangling with ex-manager Mike Appel, and freaked out by the success of “Born to Run.” Driving everyone around him crazy as he obsessed over sonic details (particularly amusing is his quixotic quest for the perfect drum sound, which bassist Garry Tallent dourly deems “pretty sad, really”). Being inspired by the punk explosion, and connecting to country music (specifically, Hank Williams) for the first time.
Burning not just to have another hit, but to make timeless music.
“It sounds okay,” says Springsteen, in one typical studio segment. “It could probably sound better.”
The 80-page booklet for the boxed set will not be a standard one. Spiral-bound, it’s intended to look like the beat-up notebook that Springsteen used to rewrite songs, play around with potential track orders for the album, and make other notes related to the project. In the documentary, Springsteen’s notebook practically becomes a character unto itself. E Street Band members wince when they see it, knowing their boss will be asking for yet more revisions, yet more takes (at one point, they start taking bets on his “whims of the day”).
The documentary also captures the moment when everything comes together — with a big assist from an 11th-hour white knight, sound mixer Chuck Plotkin, who is able to get the sounds Springsteen is hearing in his head onto vinyl. The band, relieved to be done, finally hits the road and starts rocking in public again, presenting some of its best shows ever.
There is a reason “The Promise” was shown at a film festival: It has a dramatic arc few making-of-an-album documentaries can match.
Jay Lustig; (973) 392-5850 or jlustig@starledger.com
Springsteen, a true son of N.J., reflects on his career
By Ellen Gray
Philadelphia Daily News
http://www.philly.com/
October 7, 2010
NEARLY EVERY week brings some fresh insult to the state of New Jersey, host to an ever increasing number of shows that suggest what's grown in the Garden State is fertilized with a noxious mix of mascara, alcohol and hair spray.
So it's a relief to be reminded there are people and memories not even Snooki or the so-called "Real Housewives" can sully.
HBO tonight offers just that as it presents Thom Zimny's Bruce Springsteen documentary, "The Promise: The Making of 'Darkness on the Edge of Town,' " a thoughtful portrait of the Jersey artist as a young man at a turning point in his career.
In 1977, Springsteen was living on a farm in Holmdel, N.J., writing the songs for the E Street Band that would eventually make up "Darkness on the Edge of Town," his fourth album and the follow-up to 1975's hugely successful "Born to Run."
Released in 1978, nearly three years after "Born to Run" - at a time when such gaps were far less common - "Darkness" represented a shift in Springsteen's driving style just as he was wresting control of the wheel.
"I had a reaction to my own good fortune," Springsteen says. "The success [of 'Born to Run'] brought me an audience. It also separated me from all the things I'd been trying to make connections to my whole life. And 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'd grown up, the people I'd known, the experiences I'd had. If I move away from those things into a sphere of just treat 'em as pure license, to go about your life as you desire, without connection, that's where a lot of the people I admired drifted away from the essential things that made them great.
"And more than rich, and more than famous and more than happy," he says, with a laugh, "I wanted to be great."
It's the laugh that does it.
Because one of the things that distinguishes "The Promise" isn't the footage from the studio and the house in Holmdel, or the interviews, with Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, Danny Federici, Stevie Van Zandt, Clarence Clemons, Jon Landau, Nils Lofgren, Patti Scialfa and even Mike Appel, the former manager whose legal battle with Springsteen kept the band out of the recording studio for nearly a year.
It's the coming together of the sometimes angry young man and the older one who can look back and own his past while forgiving others their trespasses.
"It wasn't a lawsuit about money, it was a lawsuit about control, who was going to be in control of my work and my work life. Early on, I decided that was going to be me," Springsteen says.
But "the initial contracts, rather than evil, were naive," he says. "You wouldn't put that kind of stress and tension on a relationship. It was bound to be destructive," and though he won, "the loss of Mike's friendship was a terrible loss."
More than three decades later, neither side appears to be nursing a grudge, at least not for the camera, and there's a kind of relief in that, given how much face time people with Jersey accents and far less serious grievances get these days.
Ultimately, of course, it's the artistry that impresses.
In "Darkness," "I'm beginning to tell the story that I tell for . . . most of the rest of my work life," Springsteen says.
Of the change in sound, stripped and simplified from the "wall of sound" he'd worked to achieve in "Born to Run," he says, "I wanted the record to have a very relentless feeling."
Zimny manages to capture both the chaos and brilliance of the process, which produced more songs than might have fit on five albums - Patti Smith talks about the hit she got from one of the discards and we eventually find out why the film is called "The Promise" - while providing glimpses of some special moments, including the story behind the album's iconic cover, shot in an upstairs bedroom of photographer Frank Stefanko's old house in Haddonfield that was wallpapered in cabbage roses.
Of the chaos that preceded that quiet picture, Landau, Springsteen's longtime producer, says: "It's starting to seem funny now. At the time, there was no humor there at all."
Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.
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