One night a few weeks ago, a rock legend, Bruce Springsteen,
came here to the South Bank in London to present a film
about the long and troubled creation
of his 1978 album, Darkness On The Edge Of Town.
Darkness, Springsteen's fourth album, was three long years in the making.
He was struggling with a lawsuit with his first manager
and was determined to follow the success of the celebratory Born To Run album
with something quite different, something significant, something profound.
Springsteen wrote over 40 songs for what would be the ten-song Darkness album,
wrestling with lyrics on his notebook, swapping phrases, concepts and lines
as he built his big statement.
If Born To Run was a cry for freedom,
a sophisticated update on the adolescent joy of '60s pop,
Darkness was determined not to run away,
but to show that rock'n'roll and Springsteen himself could grow up.
He wanted to write about the fallout of the American Dream,
about the ties that bind in disillusioned mid-'70s America,
not a million miles away from the "me" America of today,
which makes this a timely and strangely prescient film.
We've made a special edit of Thom Zimny's film for Imagine
which takes you inside the process of creating this make-or-break album.
As the extraordinary archive footage that laces the film shows,
there were many struggles and wrong turns on this intense journey
to find the "darkness on the edge of town".
This thing ain't nine to five. This thing is 24/7. It was a mission.
We were messianic in our approach.
It was like, "This movie is going to save the world."
The work ethic that surfaced on Darkness was even more intense than anything that had gone on before.
This was our lives. This was everything to us.
There were no wives or families or girlfriends that mattered that much, so we were there all the time.
But the obsessive/compulsive part of my personality
was such that I would be driving you crazy just because I could.
I was a dangerous man to be around.
Bruce is a man with a vision and, at the same time, he's a person in search of a vision.
More than rich and more than famous and more than...happy,
I wanted to be great.
After Born To Run, I wanted to write about life in the close confines of the small towns I grew up in.
In 1977, I was living on a farm in Holmdel, New Jersey.
It was there that I wrote most of the songs for Darkness On The Edge Of Town.
I was 27 and a product of Top 40 radio.
Songs like The Animals' It's My Life and We Gotta Get Out Of This Place
were infused with an early pop class consciousness.
That, along with my own experience, the stress and tension of my father's and mother's life
that came with the difficulties of trying to make ends meet, influenced my writing.
I had a reaction to my own good fortune
and I asked myself new questions.
I felt a sense of accountability to the people I had grown up alongside.
I began to wonder how to address that feeling.
All of this led to the turn my writing took on Darkness.
# Tonight I'll be on that hill
# Cos I can't stop
# I'll be on that hill
# With everything I got
# 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... #
That was just sort of a big...
That's a reckoning with the adult world, you know,
with a life of limitations and compromises.
But also a life of kind of... of just resilience and commitment to life.
You know, to...
You know... To the breath in your lungs, you know.
How do I keep faith with those things?
How do I honour those things?
Darkness was a record where I set out to try to understand how to do that.
# Cos tramps like us Baby, we were born to run... #
You've had Born To Run in 1975.
That was the biggest hit
that any of us had any connection to ever.
The success we had with Born To Run immediately made me ask, "What's that all about?
"What is that... You know, what does that mean for me?"
# ..these velvet rims and strap your hands across my engines... #
The success brought me an audience.
It also separated me from all the things I had been trying to make my connections to my whole life.
And it frightened me because I understood that what I had of value was at my core
and that core was rooted into the place I'd grown up, the people I'd known,
the experiences I'd had.
If I move away from those things into a sphere of just...
..freedom as pure licence to go about your life as you desire,
without connection...
That's where a lot of the people I admired drifted away from -
the essential things that made them great.
# Tenth Avenue freeze-out
I'm talkin' about...
# Tenth Avenue freeze-out Talkin' about that... #
The success at that particular moment was so dream-like.
# Aaaah!
# Say it, say it, say it... #
All of the rock'n'roll dreams that I had held as a kid
have finally come true.
All of a sudden, the band was noticed.
We really started building a following
and everything was going good.
We were so excited about that type of success
that we felt we'd made it.
We were finally in a studio making records.
We got it made.
Then all of a sudden, things just stopped.
There were two clouds that hung over the writing and the recording of Darkness On The Edge Of Town
and one was just the success we had.
Let's face it. You're one thing one day,
then all of a sudden, you're post-Time and Newsweek, post-Born To Run
and everyone looks at you entirely different than what you are.
You were a struggling artist one day. Now you're a real success story.
I enjoyed it plenty along the way, tried to accept the things that had happened to me,
but not let them distort my idea about who I was or what I wanted to do.
I had to disregard my own mutation. That was the cloud of success.
The other one was just the lawsuit that I ended up in with Mike.
In January of 1976, events had occurred
that had led to a fracture in the relationship between Bruce and his former manager Mike Appel.
The main problem we had initially was we couldn't record.
I was signed to Mike's production company
and that gave Mike the power to decide basically all the essentials
about how we recorded, who we recorded with. I was kind of his property in that area.
I couldn't make those decisions on my own, so therefore, we couldn't go into the studio.
With regard to the legal situation,
the actual initial court order was that Bruce couldn't go in the studio
with a producer not approved by Mike Appel.
In the early stages of that lawsuit when things didn't go well,
his only form of protest over this was just not to go in at all.
The litigation that was going on, we weren't really a part of it, but certainly we were affected by it.
We were all broke. Nobody had any money. We were going day to day.
It wasn't a lawsuit about money.
It was a lawsuit about control - who was going to be in control of my work and my work life.
Early on, I decided that was going to be me.
The bottom line was that it would be my ass on the line and I was going to control where it went
and how things went down.
That, for me, was what the lawsuit was about.
If I don't go in the studio, I don't go in the studio. But I don't go in under somebody else's rules.
# It's my life and I'll do what I want
# It's my mind and I'll think what I want
# Show me I'm wrong
# Hurt me sometime
# Some day I'll treat you real fine
# Don't push me
# It's my life and I'll do what I want... #
If I can't make the music that I want to make, I won't make the music.
We played live. We survived playing the live shows as best as we could, but things got very, very difficult.
When it came down to it, you can lose the rights to your music, you can lose your ability to record,
you can lose the ownership of your songs,
but you can't lose...
..that thing, that thing that's in you.
Ready?
Not being able to return to the studio after the Born To Run record was just heart-breaking.
You hear a lot of talk about bands being family, teams being family.
At that time, it really was that because what we had truly were our relationships
and the music that Bruce was writing.
# Now, in the olden days
# When the Mongolian gangs rode along Route 9
# We go runnin' scared
# And driven way down south through the pines
# Weekends in the sun in that cheap motel
# Out by the Dynamo
# We loved each other till there was nothing left
# And we drove that old car as hard and fast as she would go... #
During that time, we rehearsed every day at Bruce's house in New Jersey.
We could play into all hours of the night.
It was far enough and big enough and away from other houses that we could make all the noise we wanted.
My sense of his reaction to this road block in his career
was that determination, that will, that desire to do it his way
became even greater.
Maybe his way of working it all out was to write songs.
# And I take her round easy
# Looking for a moment when the world seems right... #
While there was a lot of pain because I was trying to sort out
what had happened between Mike and I in the lawsuit, it was also a time of re-finding myself and freedom,
the freedom I found back where I felt like I belonged.
# And I picked this chick up hitchin'
# She hung her head out the window and she screamed
# She was looking for someplace to go
# To die or be redeemed
# Well, you can ride this road till dawn
# Without another human being in sight
# Cos baby, everybody's gone lookin'
# For something in the night... #
Bruce had been away for a year since he made Born To Run, this big record to live up to.
It was like the clock was ticking.
The plan was to do Darkness fairly quick.
These days, two or three years between records, people don't think about it much,
but in those days, I made two records in the first year that I had a contract
and another record shortly after that. Two or three years in between records then, you disappeared.
I read many articles, "Whatever happened to... Flash in the pan."
For all I knew, that might have been true.
The stakes were even higher in certain respects.
What was this guy going to do next?
The future was pretty cloudy.
We'd had one success. A lot of people, that's all they have.
If I'd had that one success, I'd have gone back to Asbury Park millions of dollars in debt,
rather than the other way round.
You didn't know if this may be the last record you'll ever make.
Everything I'm about and think about, I've got to get it out now on this record
because there is no tomorrow.
There's just this moment.
One, two, three, four!
# Cold rain running down the front of my shirt
# I'm flat on my back wheels in the dirt
# Angel makes her face up out on Baker Street
# She's straddling the shifter in my front seat... #
In June of 1977,
Bruce's situation with his former manager was decided conclusively.
He got control of his music and ultimately his career.
It was probably, in my view, the defining moment of his young career
because he had withstood the rigours of someone literally trying to take his future away.
These were the things that I would have fought to the death for
because without them, at that time particularly, I felt I had no life,
so whatever it was, I knew I was going to take it the whole way.
Finally, we went back into the studio to start recording the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album.
It was a sense of "we can finally start working on this thing
"with the proper production team of Bruce and Jon Landau".
When we sort of got together and started talking about Darkness,
I had vaguely assumed that we would in some way pick up from where we left off.
I think even us, as well as the record companies, after Born To Run...
felt the next record would sort of follow in the same footsteps, you know,
and propel us a little further along. That would seem like a formula to me.
He wasn't planning to write the next Jungleland or the next Backstreets.
I think that was one moment. He was in another moment.
I think that a lot of this album had to do, ultimately,
with Bruce's own personal growth
and trying to come to terms with his idea of what it meant
to be a man.
So I was trying to write music that both felt angry and rebellious,
yet that also felt adult.
That was a big thing that shaped that record.
One, two,
three, four!
INTRO TO "The Promised Land"
# On a rattlesnake... # MUSIC STOPS
One, two,
three, four!
THEY PLAY INTRO
It was quite experimental that we didn't go into that record
with an absolutely specific idea of what we wanted from it
and how we were going to get there.
I remember him telling me he really wanted to downsize the scale,
that big sound of Born To Run.
Suddenly, everything got very sparse
where the Born To Run album had this sort of, you know,
our take on the "wall of sound".
Now you had this vast cinematic landscape.
The record maintains that kind
of ominous, potentially hopeful feel throughout.
It doesn't break that focus.
You know, one phrase that we would use to discuss the sound of the record
as it evolved...
..was "the sound picture".
What kind of picture was the sound of the record suggesting?
We did want a certain feeling of loneliness,
a certain unglamorised, to mix languages, you know, sound.
There was no "sweetening",
you know, a lot of overdubbed, especially strings and horns.
We didn't want any sweetening.
We wanted the coffee black.
# Well, I'm riding down Kingsley... #
And that was pretty much what I was after.
I was after a leaner sound, a little bit of an angrier sound. I wanted to toughen up the songs.
When you're first beginning and first making records,
you so think that you need this big production and this big sound,
so I think Bruce was a little futuristic in saying, "Let's just be simple."
I wanted the record to have a very relentless...feeling.
# Nothing is forgotten or forgiven
# When it's your last time around
# I got stuff running round my head
# That I just can't live down... #
You're very preoccupied with parts.
On Born To Run, Bruce wrote all those parts.
The way to get it just the way he wanted it was to focus on each individual part.
We had these very, very set arrangements on Born To Run.
Darkness was a little bit more freewheeling.
HE HUMS NOTE
DRUMS PLAY
A bit like... SINGS LINE
'We just simply didn't rehearse any more.
'I would give the guys the chords,'
count into the song and before they could come up with parts,
they'd have to play.
So the first two or three takes, you didn't get people recording, you got people playing.
Very often I didn't have the words. Like I remember Badlands, I think I had "Badlands".
HE HUMS TUNE TO "Badlands"
Bruce was at that time a tremendous rewriter
of alternate versions, alternate verses, alternate endings.
He always created choices for himself.
All right.
PLAYS INTRO TO "Badlands"
I had that riff,
so I would...we'd count it off,
then I would sort of imagine... imagine a verse.
You know, an "A" and a "B" section, though I wouldn't have any lyrics yet.
I was just following whatever worked musically, whatever felt exciting musically.
That was the first real E Street Band record.
I think in many ways his first two albums were solo records.
Stop, stop.
How do you capture that great live thing in the studio?
It was still a bit of a mystery.
In the '70s, somebody decided that all ambient sound was bad.
Everything was carpeted, everything was dead. Nothing was allowed to breathe.
We wanted to capture the sound of the band live.
But studios created this completely unnatural environment
with not a hint of any reverberant sound coming off of anything.
If you listen to a lot of records from the '70s, the deadness on them, I find it makes my skin crawl.
# You don't like... #
# Well, you don't like... #
We didn't know how to get any sounds. That was our problem all along.
'Nothing seemed to be working. We were just babes in the woods
'trying to figure out how to make a record that sounded like live,'
like we hear in our heads, but not really knowing the technology or having the wisdom to figure it out.
'The drum sounds on Darkness...'
That was quite a fiasco.
We literally spent weeks just trying to get drum sounds.
An incredible amount of discussion and attention devoted to the subject of Max's snare sound.
He would be sitting next to me
and Max would be out there and he'd say, "Again." And Max would hit it.
And all Bruce would say, over and over again, was, "Stick." He could hear the stick on the drum.
It got to a place where we were analysing this so carefully that everything sounded like...
Stick! It's like hitting it with a stick.
"Stick. Stick." I mean hours!
We put the drums every place you could put them in that building. We put the drums in the elevator.
You would hear the whole reverb of this whole big stairwell, which made no sense.
I was waiting for a phone call to come back to the studio and start work again
while they're 10 hours a day hitting a drum trying to make it sound like a drum. It was pretty sad, really.
The problem was this:
I fantasised these huge sounds.
And so we went to pursue them,
but they were always bigger in my head!
And so we constantly were chasing something that... was somewhat unattainable.
The thing that I didn't understand was the fundamental equation at the time -
if you get big drums, the guitars sound smaller. Get big guitars, the drums have to...
Something has to give. There's only so much sonic range. But we didn't know this.
We just assumed everything could sound huge.
PLAYS DRUMS ON "Badlands"
In those days, our process was to rehearse a song in the studio,
lay it down - record it,
and once it became at all coherent go back into the control room to listen to it
and start honing it, individually and collectively.
It was about as much the live performance of the take.
When you sat down, it wasn't just by rote. You went out to create magic.
PLAYS "Promised Land"
You just interpreted the songs more in your own way and the sound reflected that.
It was much more stark. There was less saxophone.
SAXOPHONE COMES IN
'The sax became a bit of an issue on that record. Take Born To Run.
'The basis of the record was the Brill Building, Phil Spector
'and urban popular music.
'When you went to Darkness On The Edge Of Town, it was a little more heartland, rural.'
So I then began to say, "How do I use the sax?" It's a very urban instrument. How do I integrate
what Clarence is doing into this context?
He had definite ideas about certain solos and certain songs.
CLARENCE PLAYS NOTES
PLAYS IT LOWER
'He would direct me by telling me a story, then he'd hum it.'
"Like this, Big Man." HE HUMS
PLAYING SAX SOLO ON "Badlands"
I remember we had mastered the record with no sax solo on Badlands. It was just a guitar solo.
At the end of the record, we didn't think we had enough saxophone.
We took the guitar out. It would have been a terrible mistake.
Its presence is so strong in the places where it appears,
it feels like the sax is on much more of the record than it is.
# O-oh-oh-oh...
# Little darlin'...
# Yeah...
# No matter what I do Girl, you know it's true... #
We recorded a lot of music. Reels and reels and reels of tapes and songs. It went on for days
and days and days. Just recording songs. He was very prolific, like he exploded.
Born To Run, there were only like nine songs. Eight made the album.
On Darkness, there were like 70 songs. That was a big difference.
If you think about that, somebody sculpting eight songs
and then all of a sudden the next album they write 70 songs.
Basically, the first good 10 songs you write, that's your record.
This... That process would end.
Forever. And never came back.
He would write five songs to get one.
There was a lot of multi-versions of all kinds of things.
'We were always pulling things apart. I had a big junkyard of stuff as the year went by.'
If something wasn't complete, I pulled out the parts I liked.
Put them in the other car, so that car runs!
# End of the day factory whistle cries...
SEGUES INTO NEW SONG WITH SAME TUNE
Bruce, to this day, has notebooks He's always diddling, always writing, very aware of things around him.
The magical notebook! An endless stream of songs coming out of it.
What are you looking in this book for? All it gives is more work!
After the sessions, Bruce would say, "Let's go to the book. I've got more songs. Let's go through them."
So we'd literally sit at the piano and he'd open up a book of...ideas, you know.
And he'd have...twenty-five ideas in there.
# Your mama's yappin' in the back seat
# Tell her to push over and move them big feet
# Every Monday morning I got to take her down to the unemployment agency
# Tell her this morning I ain't fighting... If she don't shut up
# Tell her I ain't fighting Tell her I give up
Yeah, baby! # And it's the last time her ass is gonna be ridin' with me
You know that's the truth, baby!
# We've got a hot sun beatin' on the blacktop
# She keeps talkin' she'll be walkin' that last block
# She can take a taxi back to the ghetto tonight
All right! # Cos I got some beer and the highway's free
# And I got you and, baby, you got me
# Hey, hey, hey... #
You know, you'd go, "Hey, what a great song!
"We're gonna use that, right?" And then he'd go, "No, I don't know if that's gonna make it."
'Ideas that I was interested in concentrating on'
would have been diluted at that moment if I'd made more of a miscellaneous grab bag of music,
no matter how entertaining it was.
PLAYING INTRO TO "Independence Day"
You realised after a while that the albums were made up of songs that had an emotional thread.
Not a collection of what the artist would think was going to play well on the radio.
# oh-oh-oh-oh
# I quit, little darling
# Yeah
# No matter what I do You know it's true... #
Those songs wound up being cut later on the River album.
We went back to those and pulled some of those out and some had to wait for Tracks.
It's really hard to write a good song.
For him to write good songs, that possibly could have been hit songs, and not put them out, put them aside,
it took an enormous amount of discipline and willpower to do that.
It's a bit tragic, in a way. He would have been one of the great pop song writers of all time.
# Oh, every night I see a light shine up in your window
# Oh-oh-oh
# Every night you won't answer when I come knocking
# At your door
# And your daddy won't ever let me in
# And I see from the street your silhouette sittin' next to him
# What must I do
# What does it take to get to you
# Oh, talk to me
# Until it's all over... #
'Steve was... He had a great ear and he still does.
'He loves the... the classic sort of pop.
'A lot of things that ended up on Tracks, an enormous amount,'
The River outtakes and Darkness were his favourite things.
And he was a big... It's the three-minute pop single for Steve.
# ..little girl and talk to me
# Until it's over... #
Play the bridge.
I think part of what pop promised and rock promised was the never-ending now.
The always... "No, no, no, it's about living NOW.
"You need to be alive RIGHT NOW."
# I just don't understand what you say
# What must I do
# What does it take to get to you
# What's all the fuss
# Why can't you just, girl, talk to me? #
With those three minutes, it was all on, you know.
It was... All of a sudden you were lifted up into a higher place of living and experiencing.
And there was this beautiful, ever-present now.
# Baby, I've been working hard each day
# Well, come on... #
'He just can do anything. He can write anything, for anybody.
'And he just very much took that for granted,'
which is how a lot of our popular stuff ended up not being released.
'I mean, one great example, which I think would have fit on Darkness is a song called Because The Night.'
I was recording Patti Smith at the time, as well as Bruce Springsteen. I wanted to be a record producer.
So I started producing the record in-between Bruce's stuff.
Got toward the end and we were at the hotel, me and Bruce, and he said,
"Hey, man. How you doing with Patti?"
I said, "I don't have the song that'll make everybody listen to the album."
He said, "You don't have the single." I said, "That's right." He said, "What are you gonna do?"
I knew I wasn't going to finish the song because it was a love song.
And I really felt like I didn't know how to write them at the time.
There were so many out there. I figured I'd do something different.
Also, a real love song like Because The Night I was reticent to write.
I think I was too cowardly to write it at the time.
But she was...she was very brave.
She had the courage.
I was in my apartment
and having a long-distance romance with Fred "Sonic" Smith who later became my husband.
He was supposed to call me. I waited for him to call me for hours.
I thought, "I'll listen to that darn song."
It was so accessible, it had such an anthemic tone,
it was in my key and I kept letting it loop and play.
And I still tried to resist it, but I filled in the blanks
and in the blanks it tells the story of me waiting for Fred to call and of my love for Fred.
# Have I doubt when I'm alone
# Love is a ring, the telephone
# Love is an angel disguised as lust
# Here in my bed until the morning comes... #
Fred did call about three in the morning... and I wasn't made at him, though,
because by the time he called I had written my share of the lyrics of my one and only hit song.
# Can't touch us now... #
The two biggest songs that were written for the Darkness album and recorded by us -
Fire and Because The Night -
didn't make it onto the album.
One thing about Bruce is, I think, if he thought something was going to be a hit
and he didn't want to be represented by that hit, he'd just leave them off the record.
Bruce was going for something and, like on Born To Run, he had something in his head.
Until he got that thing in his head on tape,
he would just keep going and going and going.
Everybody put in their two cents about the music, the production,
maybe where something should be or shouldn't be and a lot of times Jon or Bruce or Steven huddled up.
There are a lot of people in the control room - a producer, Jon Landau, the artist who is a producer,
and Steve Van Zandt, so I held back.
I'm looking at the piano fader on the console and Steven's looking at the guitar fader.
Everybody wants to lean over the engineer and push themselves up a little bit.
That made for, at times, some pretty funny discussions.
Sometimes some pretty tense discussions.
Probably more tense than funny.
Steve is generally, "It's my way or it sucks!"
You know? It's like, "Hey, man! This is a major tragedy!
"Stop! We're wrapping this whole thing up right now!"
'A transition was taking place at that point
'and everybody would be finding what role to play.
'I was just doing what a friend does.'
I'm just gonna give you my opinion, you know?
And try to discover what it is you want to do.
'The basis for our situation in the studio was
'that Jon is a formalist,'
for the most part. He's kind of a pop formalist.
'It has all roots in gospel and soul,'
but they were also well-performed, well-sung, well-played records.
'Steve likes things trashier and noisier.'
He's the garage guy, you know.
And so I tend to like things in the middle somewhere. It was just two varying opinions.
And I enjoyed them both.
I didn't want any one person having too much control
over the direction the music was taking. So...
I would yin/yang a little bit. It was just the way I played it.
'A couple of different things came together at a certain time to form my approach towards the record.'
The explosion of punk dawning in '77,
which actually I felt quite a bit for. I felt some similarity in spirit somewhere, you know?
'I started listening to country music, which I hadn't really done before that.
'For the first time, I really connected with Hank Williams.'
What I liked about that was that country music had tackled the adult concerns.
One of the elements that was so striking between Born To Run and Darkness,
on Born To Run characters said, "Baby, we were born to run."
In the ensuing three years, it was made painfully clear that you can't just run away.
He was starting to have some conversations with Jon Landau that I think helped a great deal.
He kind of was drawn back to a more solid time,
that John Wayne character in The Searchers. "I know who I am. I know right from wrong."
That sort of clarity that I think we all search for.
Darkness On The Edge Of Town, it's a meditation on where you're going to stand.
With who and where will you stand?
# Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop
# I'll be on that hill with everything that I've got
# Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost
# I'll be there on time ready to pay the cost
# For wanting things that can only be found... #
That song builds to that one big moment.
# And I'll be on that hill 'Cause I can't stop
# I'll be on that hill with everything I got... #
That was the only answer I had at the time. Not forsaking
your own inner life force.
You know, how do you hold on to those things? How do you hold on? How do we keep those things?
How do we do justice and honour to those things? That was the question the record asked
over and over and over again.
Adam Raised A Cain - how do we honour our parents?
You know, Promised Land - how do we honour the community?
Factory - how do we honour the life that, you know, our brothers and sisters
and parents live?
For some reason, that was something that really mattered to me... and it mattered to me a lot.
# The whistle blows... #
Factory...
That was just the paradox of earning your living
and getting life from a place that also takes... takes a lot out of you,
which is just something I saw as a kid. My dad lost his hearing.
As a child, I'd bring him his lunch. He was working in the plastics factory at the time.
The machines were whirring and whirring, huge machines, and he was cutting big, long pieces of plastic.
These days people would wear those big headsets, but in those days, no.
He didn't even see me for minutes because the noise was so great.
His back was to me and I was saying, "Dad,"
but he couldn't hear me because the machines were so loud. He stopped and I walked around
and I'd hold the lunch bag and he'd nod his head and... we walked out.
I go back to most of my writing before Greetings and it all appears simply terrible to me.
You're still writing a lot of bad words. You know, you're writing a lot of bad verses.
So you're trying to learn how to write well, but your artistic instinct
is all you... It's what you're going on. Your artistic intelligence hasn't been developed yet.
'Hopefully, that increases and develops over a long period of time
'which gives you an ace to play down the road as you get older.'
At the time, I'm going on artistic instinct and...
that's a wide open game.
So I'm following all kinds of paths and roads, going, "That doesn't feel right. That doesn't feel right.
"That doesn't feel right." That's how I'm judging.
"Lights out tonight and you're all alone..." I didn't save that one!
"Baby's on the street, you're getting pushed around."
That was my opener for that one!
"Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland." There it is. Finally! I don't know how many pages in.
Racing In The Street, I'm sure there's a million versions on that.
There was one where there was no girl. There was no girl in it.
The continuance of the story of the two guys in the first verse, I asked two people what they thought.
I asked Obie Dziedzic, one of our earliest fans.
He said, "I love the one with the girl in it."
And I asked Steve and Steve says, "Oh, the one with the girl in it."
I said, "Really?" I thought he was going to go for the other one.
He says, "Yeah, that's what happens in life. Two guys are pals,
"then the girl comes along and that's it."
When I inserted the relationship in the last verse,
it made sense of the journey that the guy is taking.
You know, a lot of the songs deal with my obsession with the idea of sin
and what is it? What is it in a good life? Because it plays an important place in a good life also.
How do you deal with it? You don't get rid of it.
How do you carry your sins?
That's what the people in Racing In The Street are trying to do.
# Tonight my baby and me we're gonna ride to the sea
# And wash these sins off our hands
# Tonight, tonight
# The highway's bright
# Out of our way, mister, you'd best keep
# The summer's here and the time is right
# For racing in the street... #
'Life is no longer wide open. Adult life is a life of a lot of compromise.'
And...and that's necessary. There's a lot of things that you should be compromising on.
And there's some essential things where you don't want to compromise. So figuring those things out.
What's the part of life where you need to compromise to whatever - to pay your bills,
to get along, you know, to feed your kids, to make your way through the world?
What's the part where there's a part of yourself you can't compromise with or you lose yourself?
Sometimes you wondered if the end was ever going to actually happen
because you'd record 50 or 60 songs
and I guess then Bruce would collate all his thoughts
and try to decide what the story was.
When I did my running order for that album,
I don't know if any of the songs that wound up on the album were my picks.
Nobody knew until the end, really, how it was going to turn out. I don't think Bruce or Jon did.
This was the beginning of Bruce being very meticulous about the sequencing as well.
He would have sequences made up.
He would have four or five sequences and he'd listen to them through.
We always were concerned with our cornerstones - the first and last cut on both sides.
So that was our narrative device.
After the year of recording, listening to all the stuff that we had,
I stripped the record down to really its barest and most austere elements.
And I decided I wanted something that felt like a tone poem.
And I didn't want any distractions from the narrative and the stories that I was telling.
And also I wanted to have a sort of apocalyptic grandeur.
# In the darkness on the edge of town
# In the darkness on the e-e-edge of town... #
I think Born To Run and Darkness, they're the beginnings of the story.
I'm beginning to tell the story that I tell for most of the rest of my work life.
When we finally got to perform on the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour after the record was finished,
it was almost like a wave of relief that we had been able to withstand the pressure...
..of not recording, of not being able to do what Bruce wanted.
It's amazing to me how he was able to withstand it and never crack
and never really show at all how disturbing the whole thing must have been.
'I ain't got one regret about...about...
'you know, one second of the past three years
'because I've learned a lot from it.
'You can hear it on the record, I hope.'
PLAYS GUITAR SOLO
CHEERING
The Darkness album and the Darkness tour was such an important part
of the Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band story
because, in my view, it really seemed like the first time
that it is possible to do it your own way
and there was a ferocity in the band
when we finally went out and started playing again that perhaps wasn't there earlier.
It was just an absolutely "take no prisoners" approach.
# Mister, I ain't a boy No, I'm a man
# And I believe in a promised land
# And I believe in a promised land... #
Every one of these albums is a search for that vision of now.
That's what ups the ante.
That's what makes some of these records...
What made them so difficult was they weren't done
until he had advanced his vision.
Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd 2010
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