What Springsteen Kept to Himself

By ANTHONY DeCURTIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
November 4, 2010

Colts Neck, N.J.

OVER the course of nearly four decades Bruce Springsteen has become such a reassuring figure that he once wearily noted that people seemed to think of him as Santa Claus, with New Jersey serving as the North Pole. The notion, then, of Mr. Springsteen leaping onto a conference table in a Midtown law office and screaming obscenities at a lawyer who was questioning him during a pretrial deposition hardly corresponds to his inspirational image.

But in the summer of 1976 Mr. Springsteen, who less than a year before had been on the covers of Time and Newsweek to mark the release of his album “Born to Run,” now a classic, had grown desperate that his career was being derailed. He and the man who had been his manager and producer had become embroiled in bitter lawsuits, and Mr. Springsteen’s control of his life and work hung in the balance.

Bruce Springsteen, right, with the E Street band in 1978 on the roof of the building in Manhattan where they recorded "Darkness on the Edge of Town," the album released after his legal battles. (Frank Stefanko)

The raw emotions of that period partly account for the continuing power of “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” the album Mr. Springsteen released in 1978, after the lawsuits had been settled. An elaborate three-CD, three-DVD boxed set, “The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story,” scheduled for release on Nov. 16, tells the tale of how that album came to be. The collection includes a documentary on the making of the album, a two-CD set of previously unreleased tracks that will also be available separately, two additional DVDs of live material, and a remastered version of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” itself.

The dread and exultation woven through all that material reflects the contradictions of those times, as well as the twin poles of Mr. Springsteen’s work since then.

“Those are our specialties,” he said with a laugh, as he recalled that period. Wearing black jeans and a light-blue-plaid shirt open to the middle of his chest, with chains and medals hanging around his neck, Mr. Springsteen sat on a high stool in front of a fireplace in a 300-year-old cottage on his property in Colt’s Neck, near Asbury Park. Mr. Springsteen, relishing the heat from the fire, would hunch over and look down when he was thinking and look straight ahead intently when he found his train of thought.

If the highly romantic “Born to Run” had been a final howl of adolescence for Mr. Springsteen, the 10 songs on “Darkness” marked his entry into the troubled, compromised, ambiguous world of adulthood. It was not an easy transition, as the 21 songs on “The Promise,” all of which Mr. Springsteen recorded while working on “Darkness,” make clear.

“I loved all of that music tremendously,” he said about the dozens of songs he recorded while finding his way to the rigorously spare “Darkness.” “It was in me, and I had to get it out. And I’m glad I did.

“It’s filled with melody and the Brill Building and soul music and English pop music.”

At the time, however, Mr. Springsteen was concerned about being labeled a “revivalist” because of his love of those classic genres. “I felt that would have been a diminishment of what my abilities might be,” he said. Critics had viewed him as the savior of rock ’n’ roll, but he was determined to carve out a future, not simply restore what the music had meant in the past.

“The only thing I was always nervous about was not living up to what my potential might be,” he said. “That frightened me the most. I didn’t think I was the most gifted performer or singer. I felt like I was given a heavy dose of journeyman’s talents, and that if I worked those things with everything I had, they could coalesce into something that was specifically mine.”

Mr. Springsteen, who was in his late 20s, had just begun to define his vision with “Born to Run,” and he wanted to make sure his next step extended his creative reach. “I was chasing my own voice, and I was also concerned with adulthood,” he said. “In 1977 the ceiling on the age for rock musicians wasn’t 70 years old, as it is today. It was about 33.

“Plus, I was becoming interested in music that dealt with the pressures of the adult world: work, family entanglements, social forces arrayed for or against you.”

Mr. Springsteen hit that target hard on “Darkness.” Songs like “Factory” and “Racing in the Street” portray the lives of the working-class people he had grown up with in stark, existential terms. The choices available are a grim descent into numbness or exultant, if potentially destructive, sensation seeking:

Some guys they just give up living

And start dying little by little, piece by piece,

Some guys come home from work and wash up,

And go racin’ in the street.

It was a worldview that was coming into focus in the 70s, a time of gas lines, narrowing economic horizons and what President Jimmy Carter characterized as a national “malaise.” The director Martin Scorsese and actors like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino (whom Mr. Springsteen strongly resembles in the cover portrait for “Darkness”) portrayed blue-collar lives with force and dignity in the movies.

Mr. Springsteen created an album very much in tune with those cultural currents, but he paid a price in the many worthwhile songs he set aside in order to do that. “The Promise,” a song that had become a favorite of Mr. Springsteen’s fans in performance, lost its place on the album, Mr. Springsteen said, because he believed it to be too autobiographical, too tied to his legal troubles and therefore too narrow in its focus. “I don’t write songs about lawsuits,” he had snapped at the time, but, at least in part, he had, and that was the song’s demise. It has now been restored to prominence.

“It was a song about defeat, and it was self-referential, which made me uncomfortable,” Mr. Springsteen said about “The Promise.” “I didn’t want it to overtake the album, which, in the end, was not my personal story. I wanted ‘Darkness’ to be completely independent of that. So I left it off. But I remember saying to myself, ‘This is something I can sing later.’ The distance really helps it now.”

Jon Landau, who is Mr. Springsteen’s manager and who co-produced “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” describes another critical decision Mr. Springsteen made in selecting the songs for “Darkness”: “The album had no hits. The songs that were pretty obviously going to be pop hits, ‘Fire,’ ‘Because the Night,’ ” songs that Mr. Springsteen gave to the Pointer Sisters and Patti Smith. “Bruce took them off at a very early stage. He did not want what he was trying to do with the album to be overshadowed.”

Mr. Springsteen’s versions of those songs are now on “The Promise,” which in both Mr. Springsteen’s and Mr. Landau’s view stands as a coherent work, not simply a collection of outtakes. “We organized, sequenced and finished these 21 songs as an album,” Mr. Landau said. “It is the album that might well have come during that three-year time between ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Darkness.’ ”

As difficult as the years leading up to “Darkness on the Edge of Town” were for Mr. Springsteen, the story has a happy ending. He and Mr. Landau solidified their working relationship, and collaborate to this day. With the lawsuit long ago settled, Mr. Springsteen has reconciled with his former manager, Mike Appel, and they are friends once again. Much of the work that Mr. Springsteen cast aside to hone his vision for “Darkness” is seeing the light of day.

And, most important, “Darkness on the Edge of Town” itself is now regarded as a classic, a breakthrough into a world that, as Mr. Springsteen hoped, is specifically his own. “I went back to where I was from, and I looked into that world and those lives, which I understood was only tangentially going to be my life from there on in,” he said, as the fire behind him burned. “But if I was dedicated to it, and if I thought hard enough about it, and if I put in my time, I could tell those stories well. And that’s what I did.”