This next album is a ‘desert
island’ album, meaning if I were stranded on a desert island and could only
have a small number of records, this would be one of them. Hopefully I'd also have a record player.
Disc 612 is…. Darkness on the Edge of Town
Artist: Bruce
Springsteen
Year of Release: 1978
What’s up with the Cover? I feel like someone
should’ve told The Boss that he was having his photo taken for the cover of his
new album. Maybe then he would have put on something nice. At the very least he
could’ve run a comb through his hair.
How I Came To Know It: My friend Casey put me on to this album. I was
enjoying Sheila’s two Springsteen albums (“Tunnel of Love” and “Born in the
USA”) and I was eager for a recommendation of what to get next. Without
hesitation, Casey said “Darkness at the Edge of Town.”
How It Stacks Up: We have ten Bruce Springsteen albums. There are a
lot of good ones in there, but none better than “Darkness at the Edge of Town.”
Rating: 5 stars
When a record is so good that you can make another
two four star albums out of just its discarded outtakes (see Disc 305),
you know you’ve got a good record.
This album is Springsteen’s crowning achievement. On
it he captures all the heartbreak and triumph of working class America. It
isn’t just relatable to the late seventies or just to Americans either. It
stands outside of time and space in a place of its own, accessible to any
generation.
This is a record about the long lonely intervals between
the so-called events in our lives, and how those spaces are events in
themselves. The music is perfectly suited to the task. The album is subdued,
and relies on sparse instrumentation. The star of course, is Bruce’s voice,
which is never better in his career. He sings with an earnest, back-throated
power, bringing the poetry of blue collar experience to life with a slow
deliberateness.
Accompanying Bruce for the most part is Roy Bittan’s
piano, which is the underappreciated co-star of the record. On other albums
Clarence Clemons’ sax is the poignant counterpoint to Springsteen’s dirges, but
here it is Bittan, tinkling the keys in a gentle almost meandering way, that
punctuates the emotional touch-points of the songs.
Where the sax or (Steve Van Zandt’s excellent guitar)
do rise up in the mix it is to deliver perfectly timed solos or riffs that add
dashes of colour, but never overly saturate the canvas. Clemons’ work on “Promised Land” and Van Zandt on “Streets of Fire” are both fine examples.
Thematically, the album builds on Springsteen’s
previous work, “Born to Run” (reviewed back at Disc 574). “Born to Run” is
about being young and restless in a small, blue collar town, yearning to get
out. “Darkness at the Edge of Town” is that same experience years later, when
you’re still trapped by fate and circumstance. The opening track, “Badlands” characterizes the experience
in this way:
“Workin’ in the fields
Till you get your back burned
Working ‘neath the wheel
Til you get your facts learned
Baby, I got my facts
Learned real good right now.”
“Promised Land”
and “Factory” are two of the finest
workin’ man songs I’ve ever heard. “Promised
Land” develops the themes initiated on “Badlands”
and pushes back as the worker bristles at his fate (“Mister, I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man/And I believe in a promised land”)
even as he revels in the quiet nobility it provides him. “Factory” is more resigned, the rolling cadence of the song
capturing the day to day drudgery of shift work.
Like everything on “Darkness...”, “Factory” provides both sides to the
experience:
“Through the mansions of fear,
through the mansions of pain,
I see my daddy walking through
them factory gates in the rain.
Factory takes his hearing,
factory gives him life
The working, the working, just
the working life.”
The factory exacts a toll, but the men who go there
provide for their families and bear it all with a quiet stoicism. I’ve had such
jobs, and to my chagrin I did not bear them so well as the overall-clad men
featured in “Factory.”
Springsteen gives equal attention to the activities
outside of the working life, where these same dusty, weary men find a small
measure of solace in women and fast cars.
Women are the focus on “Prove It All Night” and “Candy’s
Room” with these songs capturing the defiance that exists in finding
someone and trying to hold on despite all odds. It is uncomfortable to hear the
man in the song assume that Candy loves him more than the others, but worse still
to hear Springsteen describe Candy herself:
“There’s a sadness hidden in that
pretty face.
A sadness all her own, from which
no man can keep Candy safe.”
In the past this song felt weak to me, but like the
whole album, it has simply grown better and better with repeat listens.
The biggest escape in this little town, however, is
the allure of street racing. These men don’t only love desperately, they race
desperately. Themes first developed on “Born
to Run” are fleshed out to their fullest extent on “Racing in the Street” which begins with Springsteen’s voice
painting a perfect picture:
“I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a
396
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the
floor
She’s waiting tonight down in the
parking lot
Outside the Seven-Eleven store.”
The song is supposedly about racing, but it is
really about holding onto what is important. Our narrator wins his girlfriend
in a drag race, but he can only hold onto her by giving up the sport. The song is
also about how love changes over time. His girl ages, as she sits on the porch
of her daddy’s house wondering when her man will come home from the road that
has always claimed him. The song is beautifully constructed and ends on a
message of hope, as he returns for his girl, picks her up and takes her on a
drive down to the water; the car still being their common ground after all
these years.
“Racing in the
Streets” is the pivot to the whole record, and also the perfect setup for
the album’s final song, “Darkness on the
Edge of Town.” Here the street racer, desperate to give his life meaning on
a ribbon of darkness, has in the process lost his girl. Again, the song begins
by painting the perfect image, this one writ a little larger:
“They’re still racing out at the
Trestles
But that blood it never burned in
her veins
Now I hear she’s got a house up
in Fairview
And a style she’s trying to
maintain
Well, if she wants to see me
You can tell her I’m easily
found,
Tell here there’s a spot out
‘neath Abram’s Bridge
And tell her, there’s a darkness
on the edge of town.”
This invitation to darkness could be seen as
desperate or destructive, but in the world of “Darkness at the Edge of Town” it
is a force of renewal. We forge forward into the darkness, because even if you
don’t know where you’re going, you know you’ve got to go somewhere that isn’t
here, if only for a little while.
The world the album inhabits can be a harsh one, and
the endings aren’t always good ones. The record pulls no punches, its
characters working hard all day so they can find an ephemeral escape in their
pastimes and passions and maybe hold out the hope that if they go far enough
they can finally clear orbit and escape for good.
Usually, the effort fails, but like Sisyphus
standing at the top of the mountain, watching the boulder roll back down the
other side, there is still a recurring and timeless victory. Sisyphus knows
he’ll just have to push the boulder up the hill again, but in that moment of
respite, as he chooses his fate and accepts it, in that moment he is strangely free.
And that moment is an eternity if you choose to view it that way.
“Darkness at the Edge of Town”
reminds you that escaping life isn’t the goal, actively living it is. Despite
all the grimness and disappointment you can never fully drive away from town,
and nor would you want to. Because that place you think you’re leaving is
really just a state of mind, and it gave you some of the values that you’re
going to need out there in the darkness. Having a copy of this record in your
car stereo can’t hurt either.
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