Earlier this week a friend sent me an MP3 of Sleater-Kinney covering Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promised Land” (MP3 here or here)—one of my favorite Springsteen songs. The Sleater-Kinney cover is a lot of fun; I like the verse-trading attack they’ve adopted, and I especially like that they’ve revved the song up a little. If I’ve had one persistent complaint about Darkness on the Edge of Town as an album over the years, it’s that many of the songs tend to plod.
And yet . . . listening to the album again today, I think I might be mistaken about that complaint. I’ve always thought of the ploddier moments in songs like “Racing in the Street” or the title track as a missed grab at the magisterial. Now, though, I think they might be the (inconsistently successful) results of a conscious decision to introduce spaces into the music, to play with the ideas of absence and ambiguity.
The first three Springsteen albums are all about musical and lyrical density, about overflow and excess. You could say that Darkness has a “leaner” sound, but that would suggest a uniform and proportional reduction in volume. Darkness plays more like the Blue Fairy gave 1973’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle its wish to be a real boy and then dipped him in pirahna-infested waters until he was just ragged chunks of flesh hanging from clean white bones. Some songs are fleshier than others, to be sure. It’s like someone scattered droplets of acid on the master tapes, so that, say, at the end of “Something in the Night,” what would have been 7 guitar parts, a brass band arrangement, an organ riff, and Clarence shaking a sheet of tin to simulate a thundershower gets eaten away, leaving us with only Bruce’s moan. That aching wail is present in a lot of these songs, in fact, and is all the more striking in contrast to the words crowding every line in the earlier albums.
This experimentation with absence—the spareness of arrangement, the (comparatively) minimal lyrics of songs like “Streets of Fire” or “Factory”—is surely one of the reasons that I was long in learning to appreciate this album. (The other reason is because of its oft-noted country influences: even now, Roy Bittan’s piano in “Factory” calls up vivid memories of Sunday morning TV ads for The Best of Floyd Cramer. I began listening to Springsteen precisely because he wasn’t country, or so I thought. Country radio was all we had in my town in the late 80s and early 90s, and I hadn’t learned yet to distinguish between Travis Tritt and George Jones, or even between the George Jones of “High-Tech Redneck” and the George Jones of “A Picture of Me [Without You]”, and so fled from it all for a few years.)
But I digress: My Springsteen fascination began in high school, after all, when I was much more interested in escape than introspection. Those early albums share amongst themselves as many oddly named and outsize characters, as much ornate backstory, as any of the sword-and-sorcery novels I consumed obsessively. They’re too busy filling your head with people, stories, and images to give you much time to think about them, to raise any questions that you don’t know how to answer, and that was fine by me. Reflection wasn’t something I much knack or even desire for. I’d been jolted into rudimentary self-awareness when I gave a 6th-grade book report in sweat pants and with an erection, but I hadn’t gotten much further. “Do I have an erection right now, or am I likely to have one before I sit down again? What sort of pants am I wearing?” That was about the limit of my introspection. Which was fine by me at the time, even if that mindset did lead me into a somewhat disastrous first date with Contessa. The lack of self-awareness, I mean, not the part about the pants. Empty space was wasted space to my mind for a long time.
Although I don’t feel that way anymore, I can’t say my reservations about the album are totally unfounded—there are still a number of moments when I just want the music to be a little more interesting, when I want it show a little of the flash of the live show. But I do think I’ve been selling some of the songs a little short. Anyway:
MP3-NANZA:
A spacey, spooky “The Promised Land” was often performed as a set-closer on the Tom Joad tour; this one is from the 25 September 1996 show in Akron: here or here.
“The Promsed Land” from the justly renowned 19 September 1978 show in Passaic, NJ: here or here.
BONUS: “Prove it All Night” from the same show. Maybe the greatest thing ever: here or here.
I just re-read your birthday post to Contessa. Ridiculously sweet.
Going in the other direction careerwise, I see Darkness in many ways as a clearer predecssor to Nebraska than the half of TheRiver that doesn’t set up Born in the USA’s. I think it’s always been my favorite Springsteen record even when I might not have admitted it. Nowadays, Born to Run sounds like just such a testament to a certain era/production style, that the excessively bright moments really bug me in ways the used not to, but Darkness just kinda motors along.
and Prof. Props again for updating my 25 year old 3lp Piece de Resistance with the ful broadcast 3 cd Passaic Nights burn!
Glad to be of service! You know, even when I had little patience for Darkness, I always loved Nebraska, so I’m not sure how that fits into the little narrative I’ve concocted (except, of course, that most of the songs on Nebraska are pretty short—the music stops when the lyrics do, for the most part).
Darkness is our favourite album too…http://www.foryoubruce.com.
Sunday Alec Eiffel was asking me about Bruce albums—where to start, what to listen to. I could only recommend three full LP’s—Born to Run, Darkness, and Nebraska. The rest . . . well, unless you just gotta have some “Ramrod” with your “Atlantic City,” I think you can let me mix it up a bit.
What’s critical is that the two most perfect albums—in terms of the sequencing and “essentiality” of all songs—are bookends. And there’s a huge difference between the two. I wrote Prof. last nite and talked about how broken-hearted Darkness is. Where Born to Run was often praised for its Spectorian majesty and hope (Greil Marcus praising how it sounded like a “’57 Chevy running on melted-down Crystals records”), Darkness is the tonal opposite.
As Prof. so eloquently notes, there’s a lot more space, or absence, in between the notes on Darkness. What happened in those three years to take him from “we can make it if we run” to the spiritual and physical defeat of “Factory” or “Streets”? There’s a lot of loss in this record. The hero of the song “Born to Run” doesn’t know or care if there’s a promised land: he’s getting out whether the next down is just as lousy or not, and if you wanna come with, you better hurry up. The abstract contemplation is pretty simple—the dude is like, “we’re gonna get to that place/ Where we really want to go/and we’ll walk in the sun,” and that’s it, because getting out is the most important part, not where you’re going. And he knows they’re gonna get out.
Contra “Promised Land,” where the narrarator spends all his time in his daddy’s garage, just driving around at night. He still wants out—badly—but getting out is the abstraction. He’s one more step removed from freedom, and coupled with “Factory,” he may not even be able to take that step (because “somebody’s going to get hurt tonite,” just trying to make a living).
I also nominate “Born to Run,” “Promised Land,” and “Dancing in the Dark” as “holy trio of getting the hell out of here” songs. Great post! Thanks for making me think, as always! And, uh, can you send me a disc of those songs?? Yousendit = evil to my work filter.
Well said, g! And I second your gettin-outta-here song trilogy noms. And hey, at some point, shouldn’t you write about the significance of the DitD video being filmed in your hometown?
YES!! Courteney Cox as meta-metaphor for an entire generation of post-steel Birminghamians trying to get the hell out? I’ll roll those dice!
“Darkness plays more like the Blue Fairy gave 1973’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle its wish to be a real boy and then dipped him in pirahna-infested waters until he was just ragged chunks of flesh hanging from clean white bones.” Sentences like this are why people click on their Pretty Fakes favorites link and are delighted when they see you have posted, even if they don’t read comics or even don’t know much about Springstein.
Your comments about the experimentation with absence, reminds me of Satie whose work hangs, so much, not on the notes, but on the spacing between the notes, the absence. I love the story of John Cage (he being Satie’s greatest fan) playing a piece for someone in a rehearsal room that had a window open. When he finished, the person said, “Close the window and play it again.” Cage said, “I can close the window, but if I play it again, it will be a different piece of music.”
This absence is why I love the minimalists. I can understand your appreciation for it here.
By the way, Kamikaze, Contessa really is as fine as Fury says.
That reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Lisa sneaks out to a jazz club, where she confronts a patron who doesn’t care for the experimental music he’s hearing. “You have to listen to the notes he’s not playing,” says Lisa. Man: “Eehh, I can do that at home!”