 In the 1990s, Bruce Springsteen occasionally performed “In
Freehold,” an unreleased song in which he reflects on
his youth in a small town. Some of the lyrics are nostalgic,
emphasizing that Freehold, New Jersey was the place where
Springsteen “had [his] first kiss at the YMCA canteen
on a Friday night” and played in his first rock-and-roll
band. Elsewhere, he accuses the town of harassing anyone who
happened to be “different, black, or brown” and
not showing much compassion when one of his sisters “got
pregnant” late in her teens. Springsteen’s rapid
shifts from lighthearted autobiography to poetic revenge are
at odds with his usual songwriting practices, but his complicated
view of his small-town origins should seem familiar to anyone
who has listened to Darkness on the Edge of Town
(1978). Throughout that album, Springsteen portrays the lives
of working-class Americans as an endless struggle. Some of
his characters convince themselves to persevere, believing
that better times may arrive in the future. Others chase after
excitement in the present through love, sex, and fast cars.
The album also contains a few traumatized characters who seem
unable to find any sense of purpose.
This article discusses Darkness’s representations
of working-class distress and suggests that the album casts
doubt on the notion that Springsteen’s music “celebrates”
working people. (This reading, which came to light around
the time Darkness was released, is still commonplace
in critical and journalistic discourse about Springsteen.
In A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working-Class Hero
from Guthrie to Springsteen, for example, Bryan K. Garman
asserts that Springsteen’s career has been, among other
things, a realization of Walt Whitman’s wish to inspire
future poets “who would celebrate the working class
and fulfill the promise of American democracy.” Similarly,
the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced in 2004 that
“Rock superstar Bruce Springsteen, whose songs celebrate
the working man, will join Joe Grushecky and the Houserockers
and other local musicians Dec. 2 at Heinz Hall in a benefit
concert...”) Springsteen’s empathy for blue-collar
Americans is unmistakable, but it does not follow that his
principal aim is to praise them. Darkness does not
offer purely positive remarks about “the working man.”
Springsteen’s small towns are complex, and his characters
embody many kinds of anguish and optimism.
Critics have often observed that Springsteen’s approach
to songwriting changed during the time in which he recorded
Darkness. Robert Hilburn interprets the album’s
relatively simple arrangements as a rejection of the Phil
Spector-style grandeur of Born to Run (1975): “Where
Born to Run was mixed at symphonic fullness, the
sound on Darkness was moodier. Songs like ‘Promised
Land’ still featured the dense mix of keyboards, guitars,
and drums, but the solos are short, the players who blew so
lustily on Born to Run are kept in
check. . . . Darkness
is not a recitation of the great party sounds. That would
have to wait until Bruce’s mood changed.” Other
commentators attribute the album’s somber tone to Springsteen’s
frustrations during his two years of litigation with his former
manager Mike Appel. In Dave Marsh’s August 1978 Rolling
Stone cover story on the Darkness tour, Springsteen
worried that his audience was hearing dejection and hopelessness
in his new songs:
It’s the title, [Marsh suggests]. “I know,
I know,” [Springsteen] says impatiently. “But
I put it in the first few seconds of ‘Badlands,’
the first song on the album, those lines about ‘I
believe in the love and the hope and the faith.’ It’s
there on all four corners of the album.” By which
he means the first and last songs on each side: “Badlands”
and “Racing in the Street,” “The Promised
Land” and the title song. He is clearly distressed.
He meant Darkness to be “relentless,”
not grim.
Another interpretation holds that the explosive drums, guitars,
and vocals featured in songs like “Adam Raised a Cain”
and “Candy’s Room” demonstrate that Springsteen
was writing under the influence of Patti Smith, The Clash,
Elvis Costello, and other punk and new wave musicians of the
time. Several critics have also pointed out that Darkness
marks the time when Springsteen stopped writing about
adolescents in abandoned beach houses and dusty arcades. Hilburn,
for instance, writes that the album’s characters are
“men well into adulthood caught up in the now-joyless
rituals of adolescence. Preeminent among these songs was the
stirring ‘Racing in the Street’ . . . The title
and chorus played on Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing
in the Streets,’ but there was little happiness for
the aging drivers on the dragstrip, or for their forgotten
wives and girlfriends. What’s left after youth and its
passions have gone?”
All of these observations are worth considering, but they
overlook Darkness’s central theme: the struggles
of blue-collar Americans who live in small towns. If you doubt
that the album is a meditation on working-class distress,
read Springsteen’s essay introducing the album in Songs
(1998). In the opening sentence, he recalls that after "Born
to Run I wanted to write about life in the close confines
of the small towns I grew up in.” Then he elaborates
on the subject matter he had in mind:
I was searching for a tone somewhere between Born
to Run’s spiritual hopefulness and ’70s
cynicism. I wanted my new characters to feel weathered,
older, but not beaten. The sense of daily struggle in each
song greatly increased. The possibility of transcendence
or any sort of personal redemption felt a lot harder to
come by. . . . I intentionally steered away from any hint
of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of
a community under siege.
A community under siege – that phrase captures the
spirit of Darkness on the Edge of Town. The album’s
characters are trapped, surrounded by various forms of pressure
that never seem to let up. And while they all feel the anxieties
of small-town life, they respond to those anxieties in a number
of different ways.
The response that probably comes to mind first for most Springsteen
fans is the mixture of determination and hope expressed in
“Badlands.” The words this character uses –
lights out, trouble, head-on collision, caught in a crossfire,
fear, waste – suggest that he feels as though his surroundings
were a combat zone. He seems convinced that his troubles are
inescapable, yet he delivers a high-spirited chorus that pulls
together stoicism, optimism, and slang: “Badlands, you
gotta live it every day / Let the broken hearts stand / As
the price you gotta pay / We’ll keep pushin’ ’til
it’s understood / And these badlands start treating
us good.” Later in the song, the character’s protests
give way to a secular prayer: “I believe in the love
that you gave me / I believe in the faith that can save me
/ I believe in the hope and I pray / That someday it may raise
me above these badlands.” Where does he find this love,
faith, and hope? The question is left unanswered. Springsteen
simply implies that there is something heroic about this character
– he has what it takes to keep moving forward. The same
could be said of the character whose story we hear in “The
Promised Land.” He admits that he feels powerless and
worries that he may be wasting time “chasing some mirage,”
but near the end of the song, in what A. O. Scott describes
as “a climactic vision of purifying destruction,”
he imagines that the future will take the form of a tornado
with the power to blow away his disappointments.
Springsteen’s examination of perseverance becomes more
complicated in “Racing in
the Street.” Early in the song, Springsteen’s
racer, like the drivers in “Don’t Worry Baby”
and “Little Deuce Coupe,” boasts about his success
on the dragstrip:
We take all the action we can meet, and we cover all the northeast
state
When the strip shuts down, we run ’em in the street,
from the fire roads to the interstate
Some guys they just give up living, and start dying little
by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up, and go racing in
the street.
The Beach Boys’ characters keep the focus on their
cars: “I got the fastest set of wheels in town . . .
comin’ off the line when the light turns green / She
blows ’em outta the water like you never seen.”
Springsteen’s racer, by contrast, emphasizes his own
ability not to be overwhelmed by his everyday struggles. His
life sounds exciting – and too effortless for the world
of Darkness – until the third verse. As Hilburn
observes, the racer understands that the satisfaction he finds
in competition does nothing to comfort his girlfriend, whose
unexplained despair causes her to stare “into the night,
with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.”
Suddenly, Springsteen inverts the relationship featured in
“Don’t Worry Baby”: in this song, the racer
seems confident and his girlfriend needs to hear some reassuring
words. Will she hear them? Again, the question is left unanswered.
The racer speaks mysteriously about riding to the sea and
washing away sins, but his closing lines focus on new possibilities,
not necessarily on reconciliation or relief.
For another group of Darkness’s characters,
love and sex provide temporary distractions. The young man
in “Candy’s Room” says a few ominous words
about “strangers from the city” and the “sadness
hidden in [Candy’s] face,” but throughout most
of the song his erotic daydreams force everything else out
of his mind:
We kiss, my heart’s pumpin’ to my brain
The blood rushes in my veins . . .
We go driving, driving deep into the night,
I go driving deep into the light in Candy’s eyes.
She says, Baby if you wanna be wild, you got a lot to learn
Close your eyes – let them melt, let them fire, let
them burn . . .
The character in “Prove It All Night” seems
more easygoing than his counterpart in “Candy’s
Room,” but even he feels the pressures that torment
every character on the album. His curiously old-fashioned
references to pretty dresses and long white bows are apparently
meant to console his girlfriend, but phrases such as you
deserve much more than this, pay the price, and what it’s
like to steal, to cheat, to lie continually darken the
song’s atmosphere.
“Something in the Night” offers a portrait of
resentment, isolation, and defeat. “You’re born
with nothing,” the character wails, “and better
off that way / Soon as you’ve got something they send
someone to try and take it away / You can ride this road ’til
dawn, without another human being in sight / Just kids wasted
on something in the night.”
“Streets of Fire” may be Springsteen’s bleakest
narrative. First of all, the doom-filled organ and slashing
guitar make the song the closest thing to heavy metal Springsteen
has ever recorded. “Streets of Fire” also stands
out because its main character is incoherent. Why doesn’t
he care anymore when the night’s quiet? What does he
mean when he says he’s dying and can’t go back?
His reference to being “strung out on the wire”
suggests that he may be an addict, but he isn’t even
able to make that clear. In one respect, however, this character
is representative of the album in general – he finds
it impossible to explain what has been troubling him. Springsteen’s
characters speak at length about their problems, but their
remarks about the sources of their problems are brief and
laced with abstractions. One character wants to tear this
old town apart. Another wants to spit in the face of
these badlands. A third, forced to settle
for a pronoun, says that it’s never over; it’s
as relentless as the rain. (Marsh suggests that the absence
of clearly defined antagonists on the album may be connected
to Springsteen’s admiration of the 1940 film adaptation
of The Grapes of Wrath: “For Springsteen, the
most striking part of [the film] is the early scene when the
Dust Bowl farmer is trying to find out who has evicted him
from his land and is confronted with . . . images of faceless
corporations. Similarly, a vague, disembodied ‘they’
creeps into songs like ‘Something in the Night,’
‘Prove It All Night,’ and ‘Streets of Fire’
to deny people their most full-blooded possibilities.”)
“Adam Raised a Cain” and “Factory”
begin Springsteen’s emotionally charged sequence of
“father songs,” which would later include “Independence
Day,” “My Father’s House,” and “Walk
Like a Man.” They might also help to account for Darkness’s
preoccupation with the fears and disappointments of working
men. Springsteen’s earliest exposure to working-class
distress was probably his childhood observation of his father,
who struggled to find steady employment and eventually gave
up on Freehold, moving the family (with the exception of Bruce,
who refused to leave his friends and the Jersey Shore music
scene) to California in 1969. The elder Springsteen’s
anxieties, then, could be the underlying model for these songs,
framed by the experiences of a variety of characters. Another
interesting feature of Darkness’s father songs
is that they are not, strictly speaking, about fathers. It
would be more accurate to call them narratives about young
men’s observations of their fathers. In “Adam
Raised a Cain,” the son snarls that his father, like
the father in the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of
this Place,” has been cheated out of the best years
of his life: “Daddy worked his whole life for nothing
but the pain / Now he walks these empty rooms looking for
something to blame.” We do not see the father in these
lines; we see the son as he catalogues the ways in which his
father has suffered. “Factory” also portrays a
father’s daily routine as an alarming spectacle. The
narrator watches his father leave home in the morning and
walk through the factory gates. At the end of a shift, he
thinks he can see death in the eyes of the workers. The son
does not comment directly on his father’s way of life,
but the words he chooses to evoke it – fear, pain, someone’s
gonna get hurt tonight – suggest that he despises “the
working life” and has no intention of following his
father’s path.
The title song closes the album with a strong dose of mystery
and ambiguity. The main character seems solitary, determined,
and resilient, but aside from those traits the audience learns
very little about him. How did he lose his money and his wife?
What does he mean when he says he’ll be “on that
hill”? Why, in these soul-searching verses, does he
spend so much time commenting on other people’s experiences?
(They’re still racing out at the Trestles.
They cut their secrets loose or let themselves be
dragged down. Some folks are born into a good life.
Other folks get it anyway, anyhow.) What is “the
darkness on the edge of town”? Is it a place? A state
of mind? What are the things he wants, and why can they only
be found in the darkness? This song, it seems to me, is one
of the most daring moves in Springsteen’s career, a
conclusion in which nothing is concluded. The title songs
of most of his albums – “The River,” “Tunnel
of Love,” “The Ghost of Tom Joad” –
are detailed introductions to some of the themes he wants
to examine. In this title song, Springsteen suggests that
words cannot express this character’s anguish. Part
of what he feels has to reach the audience through the sound
of Springsteen’s voice, his guitar, and his band.
The core of Darkness is a paradox: the album’s
characters are united by the fact that they all feel the pressures
of day-to-day life in small towns, but they are divided by
their responses to those pressures. Thus, to conclude that
Springsteen “celebrates” working people in these
songs is to miss the point. Darkness does not generalize
about the kinds of people Springsteen knew when he lived in
Freehold; it insists that their experiences and temperaments
are as diverse as those of people in any other community.
Springsteen’s commitment to complexity and ambiguity
may help to explain why listeners often find his representations
of small-town Americans even more compelling than those of
talented blue-collar songwriters such as John Mellencamp and
Steve Earle. The resentment of the farmer in “Rain on
the Scarecrow” and the critique of Reaganomics offered
by the disillusioned Texan in “Good Ol’ Boy (Gettin’
Tough)” are staged with clarity and passion, but they
seem two-dimensional, smaller than life, when compared to
the confessions of Springsteen’s characters.
Springsteen’s music has had had a cinematic quality
ever since he included “Lost in the Flood,” “Incident
on 57th Street,” and other story-songs on his first
two albums, but on Darkness Springsteen’s informal
but broad-ranging study of film begins to pay off in a new
way. How do John Ford’s characters feel about their
surroundings in the old West? How do Martin Scorsese’s
characters feel about turning to crime on dangerous city streets?
These questions cannot be answered in a sentence or two. Directors
like Ford and Scorsese choose narrow areas of experience and
then demonstrate how much drama and mystery those strictly
limited spaces can contain. Springsteen began to experiment
with that method of storytelling in the 1970s and has continued
to use it throughout his career. How would you describe the
relationship between the character in “Brilliant Disguise”
and his wife? Is it dominated by love? Suspicion? Confusion?
Shame? What does the character in “The Rising”
have to say about his violent death? Is he wounded by his
separation from his family? Proud that he did his job under
extraordinary pressure with courage and skill? Shaken by the
moments of crisis that made him a victim and a hero at the
same time? Any effort to sum up a “message” conveyed
by these songs would be futile. Like Darkness on the Edge
of Town, they demonstrate that Springsteen’s aim
is to represent experience in convincing ways, not to sing
his characters’ praises.
January 2006
From guest contributor Alexander Pitofsky, Assistant Professor
of English at Appalachian State University
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