The Top 30 Albums of 1978: # 12

Bruce Springsteen
Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Coming off the heels of Born To Run, Bruce's breakout album that brought him to a thousand radio stations and millions of new listeners, lost in the savagery of production problems, in-fighting with record labels and "sound in my head", Darkness On the Edge Of Town was recorded with the full band, all at once, sometimes minutes after the songs were written. It's all legend.

Except it's not completely true.

While the talk surrounding the recording process of Darkness lends a veneer of rebellion and iconoclasm to the story, the truth was that the album was recorded over an extended period of time beginning in 1977, and while Bruce was in a sort of "recovery" from the explosive success of Born To Run, Darkness isn't some kind of raw-dog punk album where he smartly put the haters in their place by showing that he there was more to him than barn-burner working man rock--no, that wouldn't happen until Nebraska showed up. It's a fun story though. Darkness, as raw as it can be at times, isn't a slap-dash recording of anger and rage. There's horns on it, for god's sake. The songs were recorded with the full band at once after Bruce wrote them, sure, but that points to an artist who just knew what he was doing in advance, an improvisation in the fabled Jay-Z "freestyle writing" category. The years of war with his former manager put him on the road with Born To Run, and by the time he made it back into the studio for the Darkness sessions, something had changed, and you can tell he knew it too: no longer just a down-home Jersey boy, he'd toured the world, he'd torn down his own promotional posters, he'd seen a poverty and powerlessness that he'd previously only read about. While it would be years before the explicitness of his disgust would become more apparent as fully realized concept, Darkness On the Edge Of Town was his first real shot at it. The album art--a photograph of a surly, wide-eyed kid at home--told a story, sure, one about a cocky, tired kid. But there's an out-take snap from the same session that tells it better, where Bruce can't hold back the image any longer, and what glares into the camera is a skinny, exhausted guy, unsure of what it was he was doing, and unsure of where it was he was going. It wasn't that Bruce was giving up on his love of music, but it would be years before age and maturity would return the type of shameless, grinning joy expressed on the cover of Born To Run's. He didn't plan to abandon his sound to make a Clash album, but that didn't make him any less cantankerou--that's not to say he avoided it though. There's a the petulance to Darkness, with the lyric a  "...a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything" from "Badlands", a fiery condemnation of the world that conceieved, raised and lied to him on "Adam Raised A Cain"--not to mention a full minute intro of a decidedly unfriendly-to-top-40 wailing--even the song that became the main single, "Prove It All Night", speaks of a love between two people who, just to survive, already had to learn what it was "to steal, to cheat, to lie". Personally, I don't believe that Bruce finally made good on the promises hinted at on Darkness At The Edge Of Town until the release of Nebraska. But in 1978? That was enough.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

Comments

[Noah Berlatsky]

Springsteen and AC/DC, huh? I think you've got a lot more patience for the working-class rawk than I do. (Not that I hate them, but I'd have trouble putting either of them in the top 30 for any year, even if it's Nebraska or Back in Black.)

You've only got eleven left. Willie! Willie!

Though if Van Halen is number 1, all will be forgiven.

[Guy Smiley]

Interesting. I am a heavy Springsteen fan, and I don't recall hearing the tale that he recorded Darkness in such a rush. Several songs that ended up on that album were showing up on the Born to Run tour, so the gradual evolution always seemed clear to me.

Just checked Wikipedia, and it cites that rumor with a link to Steve Van Zandt at Rolling Stone, but Steve is clearly not laying out exact chronology, but speaking off the cuff and with a certain hyperbolic effect. Sounds like even more a bullshit rumor than you call it as.

Yeah, Darkness as an album, key songs mixed among the party rock on The River, and then Nebraska ... that's a dark ride.

For me, the beauty of the album is the furious warhorses like Badlands and Adam Raised a Cain mixing so well with more intimate or momentary snapshot portraits like Factory and, especially, the brilliantly told Racing in the Street. That's a heartbreaking piece of work, that is.

These music countdown series you guys do are so intense with detail and thought, seriously, they're a great achievement. You could probably maintain your hits and your blogospheric adulation by mocking every six-minute read that is a Battle For The Cowl issue, but instead you offer these impressive undertakings. Thanks.

[Tucker Stone]

Thanks Guy. I read that wikipedia stuff too--and then i read stuff saying it wasn't true, and then i read stuff that said it was, and so on, and so forth. The thing I thought was so interesting about the variation was how the fiction of it allowed me to maintain my own interpretation of the album, which is, of course, not true either. I don't listen to Darkness and hear some kind of crazy ass punk album that's "recorded immediately", but I love that there's an argument for that out there. I love it even more when I can go online and find out that it's sort of bullshit. Out of all the albums on this list, this is the only one where I can point to a copy handed off to me from my dad's old record collection--it's 'special', even more so because we both like it for completely different reasons.