A Promise Kept

Earlier this month, Bruce Springsteen released a box set of a re-mastered edition of Darkness On The Edge Of Town. This is the album that established Springsteen as a grown-up and a serious artist. Also included in the box is a two CD set called ‘The Promise’, which contains "outtakes" from the Darkness recording sessions. The Promise provides enough great music that, if released before hand, might have cemented his commercial appeal. However, at the time of the recording of Darkness, commercial appeal was something that Springsteen wanted nothing of. He was wary of fame because of things like the Newsweek and Time simultaneous covers, the incredible full court press of the Columbia Records PR machine, being known as "The Boss" and the god-like adulation of the audience ("Bruuuce!!"). Springsteen had always wanted to be a success, yet now that it was within in his grasp, he began to question the changes that were happening around him and to him personally.

Darkness became a collection of songs that Springsteen decided would define him as an artist. He was a guy in a dark place. The lawsuit with his former manager was not only preventing a follow up to the springboard of Born to Run, it could have prevented Springsteen from controlling his professional life in the future. All that he had ever dreamed of could be over before it really got going. He was not going to release any composition that would be construed as pop. He was going to make his stand. People were going to accept him on his terms…or not.

In the end of the documentary DVD of the recording of the Darkness album, Steve Van Zandt, his running buddy from the Shore, delivers the film’s most startling line. “It’s a bit tragic, in a way,” he muses in hindsight, referring to Springsteen’s decision to make concept-album art like Darkness on the Edge of Town at the expense of hits, "Cause he would have been one of the great pop songwriters of all time.”

In the box set are also DVD's of live performances of the E-Street Band performing the album in various venues, another is the 1978 Darkness Tour stop in Houston and the third of those performances is the band performing the album in a rehearsal of Darkness in the empty and historic Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, N.J.

Growing up on the Shore, the Paramount Theater/Convention Hall sat halfway between the Old Garden in New York and the Convention Hall in Atlantic City. It was as close to big time concert going as we could hope for. I saw the Dave Clark Five and the Rolling Stones perform there. I was even on that stage myself, once, as my high school basketball team competed in a Christmas Classic. Now, thirty years later, a kid from the Shore was big enough and famous enough to rent out the Hall to practice.

I have yet to see the video. But I have heard the soundtrack. I believe that the Darkness recorded there is not only one of Springsteen's best records, but that this live version may be Springsteen's best album ever.

One wonders what Mozart would do, if he would have been able to revisit his Clarinet Concerto in A Major thirty years after he wrote it? In modern music, the jazz musician continually evolves his music, depending on what he is experiencing in his personal life.

In Rock, however, we continually search for the next thing. Artists who revisit their work are considered lazy or, worse, without anything to say, musically. By going that route, they are considered passé or sellouts. Playing “Darkness” on the Paramount disc in chronological order, Springsteen rips into these 10 songs again like its 32 years ago, with the verve of a younger man but nuanced with the worldliness of a 60 year old. Is there any wonder why we revere artists like Neil Young and Springsteen? It is their refusal to stray off course, remaining true to their audience and their art. Unlike some stars that now use TV show panels to stay relevant, Springsteen uses his catalog to experiment with different musical idioms.

He grabs this chance to revisit the music that defined his entry into adulthood. The maturity of another thirty years of life's ups and downs, as well as the power and musicianship of he and his band, after thirty years of playing together, Springsteen now expands these songs with authority. Like Springsteen himself, he no longer is the skinny kid from the Shore talking about adulthood as he observed it. He is now the adult he hoped he might be, singing the songs he now fully owns.

To hear the band in their element is to reveal a secret Springsteen might have never wanted to give away: the Paramount performance I heard is the Darkness album he was struggling to make in 1978.