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Trollheart · 01-10-2023, 06:47 PM

997

Album title: Darkness on the Edge of Town
Artist: Bruce Springsteen
Nationality: American
Year: 1978
Genre: Rock
Chronology: 4 of 21 (to date)
What this album means to me: I think it may have been the third or fourth Springsteen album I bought, and I loved every track on it. Still do. Some stone-cold classics and some incredibly mature, and dark, songwriting on it.
Highlights: Almost everything
Lowlights: Adam Raised a Cain
Lyric of the album: You’re born with nothing, and better off that way/ Soon as you got something they send someone to try to take it away” - “Something in the Night”

I’m sure nobody agrees, but I don’t care; I see this as the third in a trilogy of Springsteen album that really made his name and brought him from being just another songwriter and on the road to being a treasured American icon. Bowie has his “Berlin Trilogy” and well, I’d call this “the Jersey Trilogy” except that doesn’t make any sense, but for now it will do till I think of something else. Basically what I’m saying here is that after two, to be fair, reasonably mediocre albums, the third of which had to work or he would be dropped, New Jersey’s favourite son came up with a formula on Born to Run that just worked and cracked the market for him, but it wouldn’t be until the album after this that he would have a proper radio presence and hit singles. Nevertheless, I feel that here the Boss tied down the overall theme that forever after ran through about eighty percent of his songs, and which was somewhat snidely referred to by Prefab Sprout on their hit single: cars and girls.

Look at Born to Run: it’s a superb album, yes, no question, and it opens with a car in the first song, but the car is never identified. It’s merely a way of getting out of the one-horse town, a literal vehicle for escape, and almost a metaphor for freedom. I think there’s one car named - or one vehicle brand anyway - on the whole album, and that’s in “Jungleland”, the closing track, where he throws out the name Dodge. But here we have songs about cars being raced in the street, with a lot of technical details about "fours on floors" and "fuely heads" and such, cars being “burned in one last fight”, and it leads into a repeating motif that starts to run through his work, with “Candy’s Room”, “Racing in the Street”, “Prove it All Night” and the title track all featuring girls or women, where on the previous album, again, they were there but kind of only bit-players. Well that’s not fair: Mary is the possibly unattainable prize in “Thunder Road” and Wendy is the wild thing in “Born to Run”, but the album isn’t overly concerned with the female of the species. After this, you can’t turn around without bumping into a hot chick or a hot rod.

But the writing on this album is perhaps darker than on any other Springsteen effort until maybe The Rising, with morose ruminations on (again) being stuck in a one-horse town, trapped in a bad relationship, fighting for your love and eventually skulking in some nameless town poring over your regrets. Like the other three albums in this so-called trilogy I’m inventing, the album starts with an uptempo song and ends on a downbeat one. The characters that people Springsteen’s songs are, like those of Waits, broken people, down on their luck or stuck in a rut trying to get out. They are not heroes. They never will be. They never can be, and he doesn’t want them to be. They’re ordinary folks going about their ordinary business, just trying to survive. And like most of Springsteen’s songs, it’s the ordinariness, the commonness of the protagonists that make them so deep and so personal, and so memorable.

The thing about Darkness on the Edge of Town is that it isn’t a happy album. The songs deal with loss, regret, frustration, anger. Even the “love song” on it is nothing more than a man trying to assert his manhood by sleeping with a girl and strutting about it afterwards. The next album would see Springsteen level out the songs somewhat, with some real catchy and upbeat ones, thus a number of hit singles and his profile going even more worldwide. But there’s a cloying, claustrophobic feel about this album that, leaving aside for the moment the slab of acoustic wonder that is Nebraska, I believe he never really recaptured, not even on the bleak album to end all bleak albums, Nebraska. Could be that his attitude towards life changed, or he just decided the - commercial, record-buying - world wanted more happiness in their lives and not so much tragedy, but Darkness on the Edge of Town stands as a kind of monument, I feel, to an artist standing staring over the precipice, and wondering where he goes from here.

For further reading

01-10-2023, 06:47 PM	#9 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	997 Album title: Darkness on the Edge of Town Artist: Bruce Springsteen Nationality: American Year: 1978 Genre: Rock Chronology: 4 of 21 (to date) What this album means to me: I think it may have been the third or fourth Springsteen album I bought, and I loved every track on it. Still do. Some stone-cold classics and some incredibly mature, and dark, songwriting on it. Highlights: Almost everything Lowlights: Adam Raised a Cain Lyric of the album: You’re born with nothing, and better off that way/ Soon as you got something they send someone to try to take it away” - “Something in the Night” I’m sure nobody agrees, but I don’t care; I see this as the third in a trilogy of Springsteen album that really made his name and brought him from being just another songwriter and on the road to being a treasured American icon. Bowie has his “Berlin Trilogy” and well, I’d call this “the Jersey Trilogy” except that doesn’t make any sense, but for now it will do till I think of something else. Basically what I’m saying here is that after two, to be fair, reasonably mediocre albums, the third of which had to work or he would be dropped, New Jersey’s favourite son came up with a formula on Born to Run that just worked and cracked the market for him, but it wouldn’t be until the album after this that he would have a proper radio presence and hit singles. Nevertheless, I feel that here the Boss tied down the overall theme that forever after ran through about eighty percent of his songs, and which was somewhat snidely referred to by Prefab Sprout on their hit single: cars and girls. Look at Born to Run: it’s a superb album, yes, no question, and it opens with a car in the first song, but the car is never identified. It’s merely a way of getting out of the one-horse town, a literal vehicle for escape, and almost a metaphor for freedom. I think there’s one car named - or one vehicle brand anyway - on the whole album, and that’s in “Jungleland”, the closing track, where he throws out the name Dodge. But here we have songs about cars being raced in the street, with a lot of technical details about "fours on floors" and "fuely heads" and such, cars being “burned in one last fight”, and it leads into a repeating motif that starts to run through his work, with “Candy’s Room”, “Racing in the Street”, “Prove it All Night” and the title track all featuring girls or women, where on the previous album, again, they were there but kind of only bit-players. Well that’s not fair: Mary is the possibly unattainable prize in “Thunder Road” and Wendy is the wild thing in “Born to Run”, but the album isn’t overly concerned with the female of the species. After this, you can’t turn around without bumping into a hot chick or a hot rod. But the writing on this album is perhaps darker than on any other Springsteen effort until maybe The Rising, with morose ruminations on (again) being stuck in a one-horse town, trapped in a bad relationship, fighting for your love and eventually skulking in some nameless town poring over your regrets. Like the other three albums in this so-called trilogy I’m inventing, the album starts with an uptempo song and ends on a downbeat one. The characters that people Springsteen’s songs are, like those of Waits, broken people, down on their luck or stuck in a rut trying to get out. They are not heroes. They never will be. They never can be, and he doesn’t want them to be. They’re ordinary folks going about their ordinary business, just trying to survive. And like most of Springsteen’s songs, it’s the ordinariness, the commonness of the protagonists that make them so deep and so personal, and so memorable. The thing about Darkness on the Edge of Town is that it isn’t a happy album. The songs deal with loss, regret, frustration, anger. Even the “love song” on it is nothing more than a man trying to assert his manhood by sleeping with a girl and strutting about it afterwards. The next album would see Springsteen level out the songs somewhat, with some real catchy and upbeat ones, thus a number of hit singles and his profile going even more worldwide. But there’s a cloying, claustrophobic feel about this album that, leaving aside for the moment the slab of acoustic wonder that is Nebraska, I believe he never really recaptured, not even on the bleak album to end all bleak albums, Nebraska. Could be that his attitude towards life changed, or he just decided the - commercial, record-buying - world wanted more happiness in their lives and not so much tragedy, but Darkness on the Edge of Town stands as a kind of monument, I feel, to an artist standing staring over the precipice, and wondering where he goes from here. For further reading __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018 Last edited by Trollheart; 01-12-2023 at 12:07 PM.