1978: Bruce Springsteen, Darkness On The Edge Of Town
By Sergio Lopez
“For all the shut-down strangers and hot rod angels…”
Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town is the album I have listened to more than any other. Here’s what I think about when I listen—
When I was a boy, my father bought a white 1970 Datsun 510. My father worked three or four jobs at a time; we were a working-class immigrant family, living in the California Bay Area; this was prior to the loss of our home to foreclosure and my father being laid off, meaning we still had a home, with a two-car garage, and therefore space for his cars. But soon, as more and more replacement parts were needed, our driveway seemed to pile up with rusted Datsuns—one, two, three cars. When my father wasn’t working—which wasn’t often—he would invariably be under the hood of the Datsun, or driving to the junkyard to find spare parts.
The 510 is a popular model for collectors because its parts are easily interchangeable, making it a simple matter to fix and upgrade, and soon he had the L16, four-cylinder engine working like new. As a child, I knew cars were the realm of men, and at best I would hang nervously around the periphery when my dad was working, afraid to get too close. The Datsun’s inner workings seemed like magic to me; I remember how it would hum to life in the hot afternoon sun, the hood of the car warm under my fingers.
When my father had finally done all the work he could, it was time for the car to get a brand new paint job—fire engine red. Because it was cheaper, he drove it all 2,000 plus miles down to Mexico and into his own past, winding down the California coast and into Central Mexico—the opposite route of the one he had taken over two decades earlier, when he first came to the United States. And after he came back, he drove that car everywhere.
One day, though, my family got a call. My father had been driving the Datsun—chrome fixtures glinting immaculate in the California sun—on his way from work, when out of nowhere, he was T-boned by a distracted driver. He was only stunned, but the car was totaled.
He gave up on building cars after that. He still worked three or four jobs.
“Badlands, you gotta live it every day…”
Darkness on the Edge of Town—Bruce Springsteen’s fourth studio album—was released in June of 1978. It wasn’t the first Springsteen album I ever heard, but it was the first that I felt was my own. How was it that this album by a skinny kid from Jersey had so much to say to me?
Bruce adopted a new language on Darkness, switching from the language of the tragic, the epic, to a tougher and leaner language informed by Hank Williams and Flannery O’Connor. Part of the power of the record also lies in a new narrative device that Bruce employed on Darkness. While the first person predominated on his previous albums, on Darkness he makes greater use than ever before of the second person. Often the songs begin in the first person, switch to the second, and then back again—setting the scene and then placing you square in the middle of the action. Often the effect is ambiguous, and it’s unclear whether the singer is addressing you, himself, or someone else entirely.
In so doing, Darkness took the raw turmoil of my own life and blew it up to CinemaScope. This quality comes through not just on the lyrics, but in the music itself; in fact, if you could listen to an instrumental version of a song like “Badlands,” you would hear—you could almost see—an entire narrative arc unfold.
There’s the opening prelude or the drums (this is when the MGM lion roars or the Fox searchlights would shine); the sonata of the guitar and piano chords over which the title proudly announces itself (picture Martha in the doorway in The Searchers or James Dean dropping down to play with a teddy in Rebel); then the thrumming engine—not a 396 but one more ruthlessly efficient—of the guitar during the verse, not even bothering to play full chords but just slicing at the bass notes instead (maybe this is a Terrence Malick or Scorcese flick, after all); the chorus, which just further builds the tension and establishes the stakes (you’re playing for keeps, there’s no other way); after the first and second acts have unfolded, there’s the triumphant dueling guitar and sax solos, the feeling of freedom, each one barreling the film forward; but then comes the end of Act Two, the moment when everything falls into question. The tension stretches to unbearable lengths. You’re on the ropes, a little punch-drunk. When it really counts, when the stakes are highest, do you have what it takes? In answer: the final chorus, unstoppable, relentless, defiant. The credits roll on this particular story.
And that’s just the opening track.
“I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain…”
There was one song that Springsteen often linked, during the Darkness tour, to his own father. “I wrote this song for him,”[1] he said. “Factory,” Springsteen later said, was about “the paradox of earning your living and getting life from a place that also takes a lot out of you.”[2] Often dismissed as one of the slighter tracks on the album, it is clear from his interviews and live shows that to Springsteen, the song played a crucial role in its narrative—one I understood completely.
For the entirety of my childhood, my father worked more jobs than I could really keep track of: bagging groceries, delivering newspapers, washing cars. Often my mom and I would drive to meet him for work and eat lunch with him—the only time of day I might see him. In the rare glimpses at home I did get, I also saw, over long years, how my father’s body seemed to break down before my eyes as he worked relentlessly.
On the album, Springsteen sings:
Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
The working, the working, just the working life.
But on an earlier recorded version, that penultimate line was subtly different:
Factory takes his hearing, but he understands
‘Cause he’s a working, a working, he’s a working man.
I understood, too—this was just the way it was for people like us.
Those verses, and others on the album, raise complex feelings—pride of place versus the desire to get out and get ahead; honoring thy father versus striving for something more. There is a responsibility, Springsteen makes clear, to the time and place from where you come, even as you make your own path forward—a cost no matter which choice you take.
“You’re born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else’s past…”
There’s one lyric on Darkness, from “Adam Raised a Cain,” that, until very recently, I’d never realized I misheard, having sung the words wrong countless times: “You inherit the sins, you inherit the name,” I thought. But no, that last word was “flames.”
The album was written in the midst of the Carter recession; while most music critics note the acrimonious lawsuit that consumed Springsteen’s time during this period, they tend to overlook the socioeconomic unrest that was happening at the same time, which, for someone as as attuned as Springsteen to the emotional landscape of his audience and his country, could not help but contribute to the bleak emotional landscape of the album. As a child of the Great Recession, I felt viscerally the desperation in the songs, born of factors that seem to be larger than yourself; factors that are apocalyptic, even, like flames or a freak storm, a twister on a rattlesnake speedway, coming to blow everything down.
But what Springsteen understood, which the politicians never could, is that the external—the twister or the recession, it’s all the same—becomes the internal as well, because the loss of economic security, of hope itself, has a corrosive effect on the soul, rotting relationships from the inside out. This is the unnameable affliction, the blind spot on your periphery, that is the throughline to the album: from the turmoil of “Badlands”; to the father in “Adam Raised a Cain” who “walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame”; the unnamed protagonist of “Something in the Night” with something “running ‘round my head that I just can’t live down”; the street driver in “Racing in the Streets” whose baby “cries herself to sleep at night”; to the dangerous loner of “Streets of Fire” who screams that “in the darkness I hear somebody call my name.” What these characters share is the way they are trapped by the weight of what they cannot or will not name, by the forces bearing down upon them ceaselessly from above. “Everybody’s got a secret, sonny, something that they just can’t face,” Springsteen sings on the title track.
This is part of the legacy you inherit, the legacy that gets passed down from one generation to the next—both the name and the flames.
“And I believe in a promised land…”
On a pale, foggy morning in the California Bay Area, I was jogging along the banks of a river that ran a few miles up ahead into the sea—but that morning, the waters of the river seemed to stretch on forever.
“The Promised Land”—a centerpiece of the Darkness album—came up on my headphones. Though I must have listened to the song hundreds of times before, that morning I seemed to hear it for the first time. “On a rattlesnake speedway…” Through the fog and on the waters, I saw reflected my father’s story which, just like the river, stretched out before me, and I thought of all the dusty highways—crossing continents, even—that my father traveled to get to where he was. “I’ve done my best to live the right way…” I saw my own life reflected, too. Then, suddenly, I saw the lives of my father, and his father before him, and his father before, and so on, all these stories alongside, and in front of, and behind, and in the midst of one another, stories overlapping, stories without end like a series of Biblical begettings, stretching out in front of me and into the sea.
At this point I need to correct the record: Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town is the album whose songs I have screamed at the top of my lungs, driving down the highway late at night when everything stretches out ahead, voice bloody and raw the next morning, more than any other.
Darkness on the Edge of Town is an album that asks, how do we honor the legacies we inherit, even legacies of pain? Can we or should we decide to carry up these burdens, or do we set them down and make our own path—or is that a false choice? And what is the cost of the choice taken?
I don’t have an easy answer to these questions because Darkness on the Edge of Town does not offer one—certainly nothing that could fit in either 2000 words or on a 40-minute vinyl record. What it offers instead, mixed in with its tales characters at the end of their line, is a sense of defiance amidst the struggle. So sometimes all you can do is to drive, or to write, or to sing, or just yell at the top of your lungs—’cause it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.
[1] Cleveland 08/09
[2] The Promise documentary
Sergio Lopez is a first-generation American and the first in his family to graduate from college. He attended Yale University and serves his hometown of Campbell, CA as City Councilmember. Read more of his work here or follow him on Twitter @LopezForCA.