Record Details - RecordDB

Record ID 2105

Artist Bruce Springsteen

Title Darkness On The Edge Of Town [Remaster]

Field / Genre Rock

Year Recorded 2011

Label Columbia

Pressing Am

Rating ****

Discs 5

Media CD/Blu-ray

Date Bought 20 Jan 2011

Cost ¤120.00

Cover Name —

Review The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story is a three-CD/three-DVD deluxe collection that includes a completely remastered version of the Darkness album and two more discs entitled The Promise, containing 21 unreleased songs recorded during the period.The remastered version of the album by Bob Ludwig is sonically righteous; it resists the temptation of the era's technology to make everything sound flat. Its dynamics and warmth mirror those on the original vinyl edition. The two discs of unreleased material (available separately as well) offer an aural view as to what might have happened had Springsteen been able to record immediately after Born to Run. (He was barred from doing so for two years due to a lawsuit with his former manager.) While many lyric themes here reflect the brokenness and hard choices found on Darkness, others sound more triumphant. All of these songs contain a more maximal attitude in production. They also lack the knife-edge, searing, angry guitar work that saturates Darkness. Included are his versions of singles farmed out to other artists -- "Because the Night" (and while this version is terrific, it means something else in the end; Patti Smith's remains definitive) and the soulful, gritty "Fire" given to the Pointer Sisters. "Gotta Get That Feeling" summons Jack Nitzsche's production ears with its big mariachi brass. Many others openly recall Phil Spector's "sha-na-na-na" backing choruses. Clarence Clemons' saxophone is much more prevalent here than on Darkness. His meaty tone adds heft and groove to these songs. "Ain't Good Enough for You" is pure handclap, call-and-response, verse-and-chorus joy, approaching a doo wop celebration. The poignant love poetry in "The Brokenhearted" and "Spanish Eyes" could have been written by Doc Pomus, and reveals the influence of Jerry Lieber's "Spanish Harlem." "Candy's Boy" begins lyrically in the same place as "Candy's Room," but becomes a very different song. "Racing in the Street" contains some different words and David Lindley's violin makes the track a bit less personal, more anthemic; it's absent the shadow of doubt that makes the Darkness version so emotionally devastating. "The Promise" is the only cut that may have added something to Darkness that isn't already there. Its sense of bewilderment, betrayal, uncertainty, and regret is total. That said, the addition of strings draws it outside Darkness' more skeletal purview, underscoring that Darkness is perfect as it is.The first of the three DVDs features a full-length documentary directed by Thom Zimny on the making of the album, with fantastic, amazing archival studio and performance video footage by Barry Rebo. The narration by Springsteen and interviews with producer Jon Landau, bandmembers, Patti Smith, engineer Jimmy Iovine, and even Mike Appel provide an intimate look at an intense and often frustrating period in the career of Springsteen & the E Street Band. The viewer can feel the places where confusion reigned given the sheer amount of material -- over 70 songs were written and demoed; piles of notebooks from which song lyrics and ideas were cobbled are perched everywhere. The fact that a single album came from this mountain is amazing in itself; that Darkness on the Edge of Town emerged is a miracle. The second DVD here contains a complete 2009 performance of the album at the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, NJ on the first half. While the performance is flawless and stirring, the lack of interaction with an audience feels a bit strange. That said, hearing Springsteen play the hell out of his guitar again, making it scream and snarl as it did during the tour for Darkness, is not only welcome, but akin to the sound of an old friend's voice after a prolonged absence. Bob Clearmountain's mix is stellar. The band's instinctive playing is tight and intuitive. The rest of the disc features footage from the Thrill Hill Vault, including rehearsal footage, recording snippets, and some concert performances from New Jersey, New York, and Phoenix from the tour. The final DVD is a complete three-hour concert by Springsteen & the E Street Band from Houston in 1978. It's called a “bootleg cut” on the cover for a reason; the video is fine, but the audio is basically board sound and a bit thin. That said, the performance is dynamic and riveting, and only audiophiles are gonna care -- it rocks top to bottom. This box set also includes an 80-page spiral-bound reproduction of Springsteen's notebooks documenting the album sessions, plus an original, insightful essay. It's the ultimate fetish item for hardcore fans and rock historians.— Thom Jurek<hr/>Sometimes reissues add a few demos or outtakes, sometimes they add a bonus disc with a live show or additional music, and sometimes they go so far with the bonus material they become something else entirely. The Promise, a name given to two sets based around unheard music from Bruce Springsteen dating to 1977 and 1978, when he was writing and recording the seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town, doesn't fit easily into typical reissue categories. There's a 2xCD, 3xLP set that contains 22 unreleased songs from the period, and then there's a deluxe box set that augments the unreleased material with a remastered version of Darkness and three DVDs. And the latter is housed in a faux spiral-bound notebook with facsimiles of Springsteen's handwritten studio notes from the time. Taken all together, we're talking 10 hours plus of video and audio, along with the booklet. So calling this a reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town is not accurate. This is a trove, a vast clearinghouse from a fertile period, the product of which turned out to be one terrific album. And in addition to containing its share of treasure, The Promise ultimately confirms that Springsteen is a brilliant editor of his own material.That much is clear when listening to the album itself, which is in danger of being overshadowed by everything released around it. Where the Born to Run box from 2005 looked intently at the album proper (there were few outtakes from those sessions anyway) and portrayed what resulted as a landmark, The Promise focuses on a period of time that produced one memorable album but could have produced others. Much of the material was written when Springsteen was embroiled in a lawsuit with his former manager, and a lot has been made of the impact the legal proceedings were said to have on Springsteen's muse. He made a bleak and bombed-out album, the story goes, because he was feeling lost in the world himself, fearful that he was losing control of his career. And since the lawsuit kept him out of the studio when he wanted so badly to record, he kept piling up songs while he waited for the smoke to clear.Even more than the lawsuit, Darkness seems like Springsteen's instinctive recoil from the Born to Run hype. That's partly why he burned to cut another record—to "find out what he's got," to quote a line from "Badlands" that particularly appealed to him. The Promise documentary included with the box, which combines black-and-white video footage taken in the studio while the album was recorded with recent interviews, makes clear that he wanted to make an "honest" record that people would take seriously. He was embarrassed by the hype that had put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek simultaneously in 1975, and he didn't want to be the "next big thing."Indeed, it's striking just how different Darkness is from its predecessor in tone and theme. Where Born to Run was about drama, with a sense of bombast that pushed past cinematic and wound up somewhere closer to Broadway, Darkness, despite its share of rockers, is about grim acceptance and pressing on in the face of doubt. In "Racing in the Street", the bittersweet ballad that ranks with the best songs Springsteen has ever written, the narrator's girlfriend "Stares off alone into the night/ With the eyes of one who hates for just being born." But she's not going anywhere. The darkness that envelops the town keeps the characters in and the rest of the world out. Where the characters in Born to Run were racing against death, the characters here are cursed with the burden of survival. So like all Springsteen records in the early part of his career, there are many songs about cars and driving, but these people seem to be going in circles, idly moving from one place to the next. "You can ride this road 'til dawn, without another human being in sight," goes a line in the richly emotional mid-tempo rocker "Something in the Night". With no chance of escape, you have to figure out how to deal with what's in front of you.The stark reality of the songs is reinforced by the album's production. Darkness is in its own way as sonically consistent and coherent as Born to Run; but where that album drew inspiration from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Darkness tries to do as much as possible with a minimum of embellishment. A few tracks break from this dry and barren template. "Candy's Room" and "Something in the Night" have the tinkling piano and glockenspiel that might have helped them to fit on Born to Run, while "Racing in the Street" has a very particular and hugely effective atmosphere, with just the right touches of reverb and backing vocals to make it sound like an elegy. As for the remastering, I'm not hearing a lot of difference here, but Darkness always sounded good. From the opening drum fill of "Badlands" to the grim fade of the title track, there's not a weak song on the album and it deservedly ranks with Springsteen's classics. Which means that it ranks with rock's classic albums, full stop.And it took a long time to get it that way. The music on the 2xCD set The Promise, which was written during the Darkness sessions, shows what Springsteen had to leave behind to get the record that he wanted. That meant no big pop songs. There's "Because the Night", given to Patti Smith before being completed, which she then improved and turned into her biggest hit. And then "Fire", which Springsteen gave to the Pointer Sisters, and which went to No. 2 on Billboard. It also means no songs about easy times, hope, and escape. So "Gotta Get That Feeling", an appealing mid-tempo track with horns and sweet backing vocals and lines like "We ain't got no money but we don't care" was shelved. (In Darkness, people have no money but they do care, a lot.) And "Save My Love", a catchy piano-led tune, isn't going to make Darkness with lines like "If we open up our hearts/ Love won't forsake us." Tell that to the couple in "Racing in the Street".The Promise is also a good demonstration of how Springsteen mines his unused songs for material, and shows how many ways he tried to record things before figuring out how they worked best. The set kicks off with "Racing in the Street ('78)", a version that begins as an austere ballad but builds into a rock song. It's nowhere near as effective as what came to be on the record, but it is riveting, showing just how elastic Springsteen's melodic and thematic ideas could be. An early version of "Candy's Room" is here, too, and it's called "Candy's Boy"; instead of the original's dark and explosive sensuality, here it's a clean, shuffling guitar-pop tune, charming but without a lot at stake.The tracks on The Promise CD aren't left out just because of subject matter or tone—they also sound different. As with some songs on Tracks, some of these songs had parts added later. "Where needed, I worked on them to bring them to fruition," Springsteen writes in the notes. "Many stand as they were recorded all those years ago." The re-touching is at its most extreme on "Save My Love", which was written in the 70s but cut in 2010. In other places, the vocals and music sound fundamentally different from the recordings of the era. Certainly, the arrangements are thicker than what wound up on Darkness, which makes sense since some of the songs left behind were R&B-based bar-band songs and swooning songs of love and lust. Still, despite the lack of consistency, the 22 new songs (there are 21 tracks, but "The Way" is a hidden bonus track at the end) are mostly very good and occasionally great. None feel like they should have been on Darkness, but almost all of them hold up to repeat plays and stand on their own as very good Springsteen—easily on the level of mid-level stuff on The River, say.On the visual side, one DVD has a bizarre recording of Springsteen and the E Street Band playing Darkness on the Edge of Town straight through in an empty theater in Asbury Park in December 2009. I suspect that this decision was inspired in part by the notion that the album is about loneliness and open spaces, but there's something off about seeing this band, known so well for its deep connection to its audience, playing by themselves in a large room without people.More interesting on the same disc are the live odds-and-ends from rehearsals at Springsteen's rented Jersey home in the 70s. The band is packed into what looks like a small bedroom, Springsteen is shirtless, with the familiar guitar around his neck, standing before a microphone taped to a stand. And the band is running through a couple new songs in an intimate space with no sense at all of posterity. (They are so casual, Steve Van Zant isn't even wearing a hat!) Also on this disc are songs from a 1978 show in Phoenix, including the famous clip for "Rosalita" that got some play in the early days of MTV. These Phoenix performances are generally superior to the three-hour set from a 1978 show in Houston included on a separate DVD. The video comes from the arena's video feed and, given the quality of video in 1978, quality could be better. But it is a multi-camera shoot with good coverage and Springsteen and the E Street band were in amazing form throughout that year. So no complaints about more live Springsteen.Which leaves the documentary, which in one sense serves as the centerpiece of the project. As with the film included with the Born to Run box, there are interesting details about the technical aspects of the album. Chuck Plotkin's theory behind his approach to mixing vocals is fascinating, and explains why this album feels so balanced. We see fragments of songs, lots of exhaustion and sitting around, and get a look at how Springsteen works as a bandleader. There's a moment in the first scene where he looks tired and frustrated and a little pissed off and you realize that it would be scary to have him mad at you. He's not always an easy guy to work for. It's refreshing to see such a simple display of humanity when the documentary obviously has very specific points that it wants to hit.Still, there's something odd about these "making of" documentaries about albums coming from the artist themselves. In part because they seem so intent on directing how the music is heard. Sets like this and Neil Young's Archives reflect a desire for artists to take control of their legacy and shape the narrative of their careers. It's easy to understand this impulse, and doubly so when you are talking about people as controlling as Springsteen or Neil Young. And yet it's also futile. As listeners, our stories are what will ultimately matter, and by having the music in our lives, we give it significance and form. Darkness is the kind of record you sink into, an album of power and dignity and loss and just a hint at the possibility of transcendence, which is something Springsteen's fans have known all along, even without hearing a single detail of how it is made. We'll take it all and have loads of fun exploring all the ephemera, but Springsteen carved through all this—the pile of songs, the legal bullshit, the media image he wasn't comfortable with—to make that one magical record, which is the most impressive part of it all.— Mark Richardson, Pitchfork

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