Springsteen's Promise

The film of the making of Darkness on the Edge of Town (The Promise) has been given the premiere treatment in Canada, the USA, London and Rome.  It is compelling viewing, by turns funny, moving and painful.  There is something of the home movie quality to it (which is essentially what it was) and it offers a glimpse of something extraordinarily revealing and intimate.  From the outset there is the stark reminder of the years having slipped away so fast in the footage of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, all looking so young (and so skinny). This is accentuated throughout by inter-cutting the old footage with contemporary film of the band members (spookily including many scenes with the steady blue-eyed gaze of the late, great and much missed band member Danny Federici).   It is amazing that such a visual document of this time exists at all, but that it has been left pretty much untouched for over 30 years is astonishing.  So too is the insight it provides into the craft of Springsteen’s song writing – the endless notebooks with their repeated reworking of songs until they are honed to perfection.  His description of taking bits from here and there and putting them together as if he were fixing up an old car with spare parts from the breaker’s yard, does not do justice to the complexity and intelligence of his mission.

There are some wonderful joyful moments of the band clearly having a lot of fun together, but there is also the exhaustion of endless repetition, trying to capture a sound and feel that was stubbornly elusive, something that Springsteen had an image of in his head but couldn’t fully articulate either to himself or to anyone else. As he acknowledged following the screening at the British Film Institute in London, “of course, I couldn’t explain that at the time to the other guys so they just thought I was driving them crazy.” In some ways the band made light of the toll this took – running a book on what weird demands or bizarre behaviour would emerge each day, but beneath that it is remarkable they stayed together and stuck it out.  This was a painful and exhausting process which consumed every moment of their lives.  These days (whether the result of therapy or just maturity) Springsteen has developed the self-awareness and emotional intelligence to recognise the demons that drove him, and to understand their importance in his work.

Not only did the selection of songs for Darkness have to be just right regardless of what ended up being dropped, but the way it sounded needed to offer a coherent narrative.  In the documentary Springsteen describes something of what he was trying to achieve – the album wasn’t just about music, but about songs that had individual and collective integrity.  There are multiple influences that can be unravelled – both literary and from film noir, as well as the powerful autobiographical strands from growing up in a working class catholic immigrant community; there is a cinematic quality to the entire album that set out to tell a story. That story is about becoming an adult, taking responsibility, following a demanding work ethic, dealing with morality, guilt and redemption, and - above all - being true. The tone couldn’t be more different from its predecessor Born to Run and for a time that was part of the problem. As Bruce explained – many of the tracks they were struggling to locate grew out of that album’s ‘wall of sound’ method and had too much melody, too much richness of arrangement that just didn’t suit the mood and values of this dark place.  Darkness belongs resolutely to its time and yet is timeless; the story it tells is the one that “just doesn’t let you go” that Springsteen needed to tell, and keeps on telling.  Put together during the austere times and badlands of a 1970s recession, the themes and bleakness have an obvious resonance with present times. Darkness had to be the album that it was, but the 70 or so songs that could have made the cut were not a miscellaneous ragbag of outtakes or inferior material, they were left out for good reasons.  They may never have seen the light of day, although some surfaced over the years in live performance, but the fact that they have survived and will finally be issued as a collection is something to celebrate.  Not only does The Promise offer fans these precious lost sessions, but it provides a unique retrospective and access to an astonishing creative power.  Springsteen is notorious for holding onto the archive of his work in all its detail; the triumph of The Promise is that he did so.

The Promise: the darkness on the edge of town story, 3CD and 3 DVD set is released by Columbia on November 16.