Wall of Paul

“Darkness on the Edge of Town” was released 30 years ago, on June 2, 1978, when both Springsteen and the myth were still young. At the time, he’d come to realize that the working-class existence he’d been positioned to inherit from his father lent itself to insights that had barely been touched by rock music. Springsteen’s soul pulsed with Chuck Berry riffs, but he consciously transformed Berry’s cartoon terrain into an ongoing novel of immense power, a hard-hitting journey of self-revelation that reflected back on the fans who recognized him as one of their own.

Springsteen - this skinny, slightly goofy kid from Freehold, NJ - observed the fury, loss, and psychological brutality of his father’s world, and would spend the most significant stretch of his career articulating it for those who never found their own voice, or were simply too beaten-down to try to raise the one they had.

It doesn’t have the lush, romantic sweep of 1975’s “Born to Run,” but “Darkness on the Edge of Town” is a vastly different work than that particular masterpiece. “Darkness” is Springsteen trapped and shooting from the hip. It’s one of the truly great rock records, a work of such sustained passion you can get drained just listening to it.

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You can’t really discuss “Darkness” without mentioning a personal ordeal Springsteen experienced shortly before writing and recording the album. After the critical and commercial success of “Born to Run,” he discovered that his manager and co-producer, Mike Appel, pretty much owned his ass. In a fit of youthful naiveté, Springsteen had signed a contract (literally on the hood of a car in a parking lot) that assured him of a life not much different from the one being endured by his bus-driver father. After fighting to establish a distinct identity as a songwriter, guitarist, and performer, he found that he could still be lorded over. And his music, which, at this point in his life, was his sole reason for existing, essentially belonged to somebody else.

Enraged by what he considered to be an absolute betrayal of trust, Springsteen entered into a prolonged lawsuit against Appel, during which he was barred by a judge from recording any new material. Two years later, when the case was over, he emerged a free but fundamentally changed man. Finally able to re-enter the studio with producer Jon Landau, who seized the reigns from Appel and supplied much-needed guidance when the “Born to Run” sessions were horribly bogged down, Springsteen was now his own man. But he had done some hard growing up in the process.

At the age of 27, Springsteen recognized that the system was designed to hold certain people down, to keep them forever crouched in a defensive stance. He finally understood where the anger in his father - a non-communicative man who could be found smoking cigarettes in the family’s darkened kitchen in the middle of the night - originated. And he was ready to reveal that story through his music, to tear a breach in “the mansions of pain” that were inhabited by Douglas Springsteen and so many others like him.

In effect, with his guitar, Springsteen would save himself, and deliver some measure of redemption to his father. Coming from a former long-haired, draft-dodging child of the Sixties, it’s a remarkably big-hearted gesture. But such heroic empathy is a touchstone of Springsteen’s music. His records from this period sounded “big” because they were simultaneously ambitious and populist. They needed to be big to embrace so many people.

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“Factory,” a third-person examination of the toll that working class drudgery can take on a man’s life, is one of the more overtly autobiographical songs in the Springsteen canon, but track after track of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” is steeped in its author’s relationship with his father and his community.

Loneliness and betrayal hang like a spectral presence— the majority of the album’s characters are preoccupied by what was supposed to be, a better life that never materialized. But that sense of loss repeatedly scrapes up against blind rage and blind faith, as if Springsteen can’t accept such terms, and refuses to let the people who inhabit this landscape fade quietly. The often blazing, slashing music that accompanies their stories reflects that defiance.

Whereas “Born to Run” is driven by Roy Bittan’s ringing piano and Clarence Clemons’ old-school sax breaks, “Darkness on the Edge of Town” is first and foremost a guitar album. Springsteen lets fly with a handful of jaw-dropping solos on this record, and they’re anything but pretty. Along with his raw, impassioned vocals - full of wordless moans and cries in the night - it makes for a perfect storm of high drama.

“Adam Raised a Cain,” in which a tormented son realizes he’s destined to inherit the pain that engulfed his father, opens with Springsteen’s Telecaster driving right through the middle of the tune, like a red-hot drill bit. This anguished musical figure returns several times, amidst a series of power chords and feedback bursts that serve as an aural facsimile of the anger and sorrow that overwhelms the main character. Feedback is also a pivotal element of “Streets of Fire,” which features a pissed, primitive solo break that sounds like a metal beam being twisted into knots by God Almighty. And “Candy’s Room” collapses into a sexualized guitar rampage that suggests a stomping night of passion mixed with a bare-knuckle brawl.

Throughout the album, Springsteen, who was always a funky, underrated performer on guitar, plays the instrument as if it’s receiving signals directly from an exposed nerve ending. His approach to playing was transformed during this period.

Hardcore Boss fans know that “Prove it All Night,” which serves as a relatively minor piece of connective tissue on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” was re-created as a howling barn-burner during the ‘78 tour promoting the album. A squall of electrified ferocity, Springsteen’s extended intro to the tune may well be the single most staggering thing he’s ever done. Until he sees fit to officially release it - and people have been clamoring for years - find a bootleg.

You can also see him perform it on YouTube.

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The lyrics on “Darkness” have been vastly pared-down from the ones geared to Springsteen’s earlier hipster-poet persona. Although he would further pull back in the coming years (some would say to the eventual detriment of his work) there’s a highly effective, plain-spoken melodrama to “Darkness”’ stories.

Springsteen has professed to being influenced by the Westerns of the brilliant film director, John Ford, both in form and content, and you can certainly hear that on this album. Both the lyrics and the instrumentation come at you at gut-level while dealing with broad issues that are woven into the fabric of American life. The effect can be shattering— after a while, you see the punch coming, and it still floors you.

It’s unfortunate that song-shuffling iPods have obliterated the concept of a cohesive album, a work that holds together as a series of interlocking gestures. Springsteen, as much as any songwriter of the rock era, has thrived on collections of tunes that tell a larger story. He’s often returned to previously-created characters and storylines on later albums; if you’re a big enough fan, there’s a thrilling rush when you recognize his reference points, or surmise that he’s revealing another chapter of a narrative that you thought had been put to rest.

Back when it was originally released on vinyl, side one of “Darkness” ended with a tune called “Racing in the Street;” the second side ended with the title track. These two songs, when taken together, tell the story of a forgotten man who has to find a way to hold on while the woman he loves retreats into herself, battered by their unforgiving life.

This devastating passion play reveals a unique form of rock & roll artistry. It's Springsteen doing what he does best— bringing grace and dignity to characters who have been incrementally pushed to the outer boundaries of the only world they’ve ever known.

“Racing in the Street” is a mournful piano-based ballad told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator who, with his best friend, Sonny, has built a hot rod that he races “through the northeast state.” Every night after work, he gets cleaned up and hits the road, hoping to find a temporary outlet for his stifled passion. Back home, his young wife sits on the porch and stares into the night, unable to explain how she’s lost track of her spirit, and heartbroken that she’s unable to retrieve it. As the narrator clings to his nights of power-driven adventure, the chasm between the two people widens, until, in the final verse, they take a last stab at reconciliation:

"For all the shut down strangers and hot rod angels rumbling through this promised land / Tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea / And wash these sins off our hands"

You want this ending to be hopeful, but when the album closer, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” appears, you realize that we’re back with the narrator of “Racing in the Street,” and his world is in tatters. Now he stands alone, beneath an old bridge leading to nowhere, ruefully recounting the story of a wife who’s left him for “a style she’s trying to maintain.” He’s been lied to. He’s been cheated. He’s been betrayed. But within his fury, he recognizes that he can’t quit. To back down now would be to admit that they’re right, that he really is worthless, and his dreams of escape have no weight. Springsteen’s screaming vocal pounds against a fortress of frustration. But even in this utter blackness, there’s the will to continue:

"Tonight I’ll be on that hill, ‘cause I can’t stop / I’ll be on that hill with everything I’ve got / With lives on the line, where dreams are found and lost / I’ll be there on time, and I’ll pay the cost / For wanting things that can only be found in the darkness on the edge of town"

Then he walks off alone, searching for another person to receive him, another warm embrace, another open highway.

Another reason to believe.

Download Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” (1978) in its entirety, then listen to the tunes in sequence. You’re welcome.

Paul Tatara