Bruce Springsteen
"Darkness on the Edge of Town"
(Columbia, 1978)

By JOYCE MILLMAN "Darkness on the Edge of Town" is the album where Bruce Springsteen forgot he ever heard a Dylan record or saw a Scorsese movie. The tumbling wordscapes and jolly, lovable losers of his previous three records are gone. The Big Man blows his sax on only two cuts. Springsteen's voice sounds deeper, angrier, sadder. He's as alone here as he looks on the album cover, standing pale and scowling in a room with fading wallpaper. The house seems to be closing in on him. "In the darkness of your room/ Your mother calls you by your true name," he sings on "Adam Raised a Cain," in a voice halfway between a snarl and a sob. All through this album, Springsteen reveals his true name, and it ain't The Boss. On stage, he may have been 100 percent showman, but "Darkness" marked the emergence of a pitch-black, nakedly depressed side, that has surfaced only once since -- on his stunning, bleak 1987 wedding album "Tunnel of Love." Most of the time, now, Springsteen channels the dark stuff through other characters. But on "Darkness," he was as uncompromisingly absorbed with his own pain as a teenager. "Darkness" is as palpable a throb of adolescent frustration as Elvis Costello's "This Year's Model," which came out the same year. The lyrics on "Darkness" are plainspoken, direct. The music is like Phil Spector melted down and mixed with backroads gravel to model a new kind of folk music, an urban folk music that quotes rock and roll the way Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams quoted black and Appalachian spirituals. The hip-wiggling drum beat of "Be My Baby" becomes a dying heart on "Something in the Night," in which suburban kids drive around, get wasted, and drive around some more. And the melody of "And Then He Kissed Me" becomes the elegiac keyboard refrain of "Racing in the Street," in which the narrator surveys his dead-end job and crumbling marriage, sighs, and takes off in his powered-up '69 Chevy for another night of two-lane blacktop oblivion. He's still at it in "Racing's" companion song, the album-closing title track, yowling, "Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop...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." "Darkness" is filled with the illusion of movement. In nearly every song, characters are behind the wheel, driving, driving, driving, trying to outrun what they fear is their destiny -- trudging off to the factory, like their fathers, prisoners of "the workin' life." There are flecks of hope here: "I believe in the promised land," "It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive." In the Nowheresville, USA of "Darkness," hope is a form of defiance. Who ever said Springsteen wasn't a punk? And in this dislocated world where movement is a rut, it makes sense that darkness is really the light. Springsteen uses "darkness" the way an earlier songwriter used "over the rainbow." The darkness on the edge of town is the thing that lies just out of reach, that pulls you out of bed in the morning, that seems to get further away the faster you drive toward it but, still, you gotta have it. The darkness feeds your ambition. The darkness is your dream. Or that's how it sounded to me as I wore down the grooves of this record in my bedroom in my parents' house in the shriveled-up factory town, writing, writing, writing, and wondering, How the hell am I going to get out of here? When am I going to be somebody? I'm a long way from home and I have the career I wanted so badly back then. But now I know what Springsteen found when he finally caught up to the darkness and came out the other side. He got what he wished for. And it's never enough.

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