Head Butler - Music

Darkness at the Edge of Town
Bruce Springsteen

September 23, 2004: Bruce's 55 th birthday. Butler is startled. It was only yesterday that he and the best friend he no longer talks to and the woman who should have been at least his first wife piled into a rented limo, champagne chilled to near ice, and headed out to the Nassau Coliseum to see Bruce and the E Street Band play the songs from their new album.

There are evenings that are memorable, and then there are evenings seared into your brain. This one came branded, it was that hot. And not because of Butler and his pals. A few years earlier, Bruce had released “Born to Run,” a record so exciting, so packed with instant classics, that he found himself on the cover of Time and Newsweek on the same day. After two critically praised but low-selling albums, he was a star.

He couldn't have been less thrilled.

In l972, in a parking lot, Springsteen had signed a devastatingly unbalanced management contract. Now he wanted out. That meant lawyers. That meant almost three years without recording.

So Bruce and the band played concerts, making their wall of sound so tight it hit you like a fist. And Bruce wrote --- not just the ten songs that appear on “Darkness,” but “Fire” and “Because the Night” and about twenty more. Four days after the lawsuit was settled, Bruce and the band went into the studio.

Pent-up? Try: enflamed. But not with the teenage anger that, balanced by teen joys, fueled his earlier albums. This was the anger of a 29-year-old bard who was watching his generation get screwed --- decent kids having their hopes sandpapered to dust in dead-end factory jobs, relationships souring, a short sprint on the back roads the only relief. The American dream of endless youth and a four-lane highway with no speed limit: that was over. Now the challenge was not to surrender, to find some workable definition of manhood in a system that reduced you to a cog. Dignity in defeat --- that was the new goal. And, just maybe, if you held on to your dreams, you might get lucky, you just might sneak through…..

So this is a record of screaming guitars and thundering bass and a drummer determined to beat clear through those skins. And it's a record of whispers and regrets, promises in the night, last-chance romance and the desperation underneath that longing. Anger wrestles with hope at every turn --- this record couldn't be more serious.

A #1 hit? Bruce's producer, Jon Landau, once said, "Bruce had no interest in whether there was anything he could call a single. He was totally committed to making a record that was true to his own feelings. When you consider he had, but didn't use, songs like ‘Fire' and ‘Because the Night,' you've got to assume he didn't really want ‘Darkness' to be a big record. If success was what is was like with ‘Born to Run,' Bruce didn't want that. He didn't want one song that could be taken out of context and interfere with what he wanted the album to represent."

The irony is that, over time, “Darkness at the Edge of Town” has become a big record --- in the Butler pantheon, it's right up there with “Born to Run.” And not for reasons of nostalgia and personal regret. Because you just can't fault Bruce's analysis of our lives --- and the hopes that even the hardness of life can kill.

"For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside, that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive" --- count Butler in.

--- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

To buy "Darkness at the Edge of Town" from Amazon.com, click here.