“Everybody’s got a secret, sonny,
Something that they just can’t face,
Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it,
They carry it with them every step that they take.
Till someday they just cut it loose,
Cut it loose or let it drag ’em down,
Where no one asks any questions,
Or looks too long in your face.”
After Bruce Springsteen lifted his Jersey following even higher with Born to Run, and garnered a nation a new ones, touring BTR and patience from Columbia Records provided The Boss nearly three years to write and record Darkness on the Edge of Town. The time was well spent, as Darkness proved not only that Springsteen could maintain the quality of music that broke him into platinum sales status, but also that he could push the emotional intensity even further with a personal darkness that would reach fruition later in The River and Tunnel of Love.
Bruce Springsteen has always had the ability to create a place, make it real, and put you in it. Mean streets, love against the odds and youthful desperation were his stock and trade, and Darkness covers this ground well with songs like “Candy’s Room,” “Streets of Fire” and “Prove it All Night.” But Bruce began to add deeper tones and more mature textures of alienation in his newest work. “Adam Raised a Cain” juxtaposes the anguish of the same old faults between father and son, brother and brother, self and self. “Factory” searches for the meaning of a lifetime of hard work, work that at once tears down and sustains.
It’s the title song, though, where Springsteen plows new musical ground, and introduces a theme that he will creatively revisit for the next decade – that of the man in a crumbled relationship, wondering where he went wrong, who is at fault, and if redemption is possible. The setting is familiar, a blue-collar town of train trestles and Abram’s Bridge, but there is no roar of engines here, no flash of juvenile violence. Here there are festering secrets, lost dreams, lost jobs, lost wives. Bruce’s protagonists are growing up, and the vivid themes of lovers running away, gangland knife fights and Main Street midnight drag races are giving way to darker, more formless ones where frenetic action becomes late-night wandering, youthful certainty becomes confused, and loving relationships become ephemeral.
Defeatist? By no means, and the clues are also in the song. Though his wife has left him and moved to fashionable Fairview, and he remains in the town raw with pain and longing, the protagonist clings to his desperate, yet hopeful plan.
“Well if she wants to see me,
You can tell her that I’m easily found…
…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.”
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