Cruising Through the Darkness

By JAY COCKS

The dust hasn't settled yet, and now likely never will. After almost three years of legal entanglements, a creative time-out and a lingering celebrity hangover, Bruce Springsteen has come storming back, raising a fine ruckus, not just reaffirming his promise as the pre-eminent rock figure of the late '70s, but redeeming, even enhancing it.

A volley of legal actions between Bruce and his former manager kept Springsteen effectively off course for more than a year after the release of his galvanic 1975 album Born to Run. Once he and Producer Jon Landau began recording again in the spring of 1977, it took him ten months, and upwards of 30 songs, to come up with Darkness on the Edge of Town, which headed straight for the Top Ten after its release in June. It has been there ever since, setting up a long-term residence and lending a little class to that generally tacky neighborhood.

All this time, too, Springsteen had to do battle with the crosscurrents of high hopes and deep cynicism that eddied around him; there were those who thought his career was a classic case study in media hype. Although most of these critics never listened to his records or saw him in concert, the charge still stung. Celebrity had hit Springsteen with unexpected force. One of his crew members recalls that the afternoon of his first London concert Springsteen found every seat in the house covered with enthusiastic, often evangelic, reviews and "started tearing them all up. He just wasn't ready." Later, he handled the fuss in the same way he deals with all the reflections of his past and refractions of his fantasy: through his music.

In Rosalita, his classic rocker about a street dude come acourting, the suitor presses his advantage by announcing that "the record company just gave me a big advance." Springsteen often sings it that way. But sometimes, he will throw his head back into the full glare of an overhead spot, grin with pride on one side of his wide smile and irony on the other, and shout out: "Your Papa says he knows that I don't have any money/ This is his last chance/ Tell him, Rosie, I ain't no freak/ 'Cause I got my picture/ On the cover of TIME and Newsweek." The audience roars, and the Boss, as friends call him, moves along to more pressing matters.

"When all that attention started," Springsteen, now 28, reflects, "I was out in L.A. and Jack Nicholson came to a show. I asked him how he handled the attention. He said, for him, it was a long time coming and he was mostly glad to have it. I didn't see it quite that way. I bundled it all together into one general experience and labeled it 'bad.' I felt control over my life and career was slipping away and that all the attention was . . . like . . . an obstacle. But that was a mistake. After a while I realized, well, time was on my side. What ever happens. I wasn't gonna go away. I got no place to go."

This is some small part of what he means in his beautiful ballad The Promise, when he sings about making "my peace with the past." He dropped The Promise from his new album, fearing that it could be narrowly interpreted as a comment on his legal hassles, which he believes have been credited with "too much affect on my writing." He performs the song in concert, though, and its dour, defiant spirit haunts the album nonetheless.

Darkness passes the romantic delirium of Born to Run, cuts deeper, lingers longer. The proud prisoners of shore towns, the rod riders and front-porch madonnas, turn up again, but no longer bursting with the same heady spirit. Here the "shutdown strangers and hot rod angels" suffer a sudden, splintering sense of their own settled fates. They crash right up against that darkness in the album's title. There are a lot of victims, like the girl in Racing in the Street, one of Springsteen's best songs, who "stares off alone into the night/ With the eyes of one who hates for just being born." Intimations of guilt and the dim promise of salvation shade and deepen the darkness, but for every casualty it claims, there are others who strain against it. "Badlands, you gotta live it every day," Springsteen sings in the opening number:

Let the broken hearts stand As the price you 've gotta pay, We'll keep pushin' till it's understood, And these badlands start treating us good.

By the end of the record, the price of the darkness and its promise are held in firm perspective, accepted only if they can always be challenged:

Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop, I'll be on that hill with everything I got, Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost, 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.

The album is full of gruff courage and sadness, but never despair. "Darkness is about dealing with despair," Springsteen says, "about people trying to hold on to their dignity in the middle of a hurricane. You look around, you see people on the street dug in. You know they're already six feet under, people with nothin' to lose and full of poison. I try to write about the other choice they've got."

In Badlands, when Springsteen sings, "I believe in the love that you gave me/ I believe in the faith that can save me," it is not only the spirits of his Catholic childhood showing themselves, raising memories of the kid who was asked to draw a picture of Jesus and presented the nun with a rendering of Christ crucified on a guitar. What also comes through is his unshakable belief in the power of music. "When I was growing up," he says, "the only thing that never let me down was rock 'n' roll." Upon this rock, Springsteen has built his church, which glows not with heavenly light but with the carny fluorescence of a Wurlitzer.

"You've got to always remember," he says, "rock 'n' roll's never about giving up. For me--for a lot of kids--it was a totally positive force . . . not optimistic all the time, but positive. It was never--never --about surrender." Like the people in his songs, Springsteen reaches high, always making the big grab but never loosing aim. When a visiting English journalist suggested to him a couple of weeks ago that he was trying to write "the great American novel on albums," Springsteen just grinned and replied, "The great American drive-in movie's more like it."

In fact, all those night riders across the neon terrain not only summon familiar memories, but have misled some reviewers into thinking that Springsteen has driven himself right off Thunder Road and into a rut. "But," he says, "everything has its limitations and its ultimate possibilities, and you got to test them to find out what they are. It's like those Italian westerns at the drive-in. I always loved it that they showed 'em all at once. That's the way I make these albums--so they get played all at once."

The albums are getting played plenty. FM radio seems inundated, Darkness has just gone platinum, and Springsteen, en route to three sold-out concerts at Madison Square Garden later this month, is currently storming the heartland, dishing out 2 1/2 hours of red-hot rock. His E Street Band helps keep things always at the boiling point. They are powerhouse musicians who have raised roadhouse rock to Olympian heights. The driving delicacy of Roy Bittan's piano, Danny Federici's flights of rough-and-tumble fantasy on the organ, and the hang-tough beat of Max Weinberg's drums, Garry Tallent's sinuous, serpentine bass lines and the roistering guitar of Miami Steve Van Zandt form the firm foundation. The wailing, extravagant sax solos by Clarence Clemens cut jolting, joking arabesques around the Boss's lead guitar and vocals, which are the main attraction, and the most seismic in the business.

No artificial stimulation of any kind required, either. Using drugs to get up for a concert is for Springsteen "like coming onstage on crutches." He will, however, listen to some good music before a show (Buddy Holly is a current favorite). "It's like an actor watching Brando in Waterfront before he does a scene," Springsteen says. "It just gives you a sense of what the possibilities are, where you can take them, and a sense there's a lot to live up to."

As Springsteen leaps into an audience, playing with them, strutting and joking, he cuts up like a star. Yet he also cracks self-deprecating jokes during performances and just recently defaced his own billboard above Sunset Strip with a can of spray paint. His myths are in his music, not in his life. The Jersey shore he sings about is becoming universal territory, and his mentions of Asbury Park are greeted with home-town cheers everywhere. But he remains wary of celebrity, recalling, "When I was a kid, what mattered to me more than the performers was the power of the music. People emphasize the personal too much. Being a rock star, that's like the booby prize. Me, I set out to be a rock 'n' roller."

At the end of each show, Springsteen will drop to one knee in front of the mike and yell with the sort of mock melodrama that cloaks an almost literal truth, "I'm just a prisoner . . . of rock 'n' roll!" In the audience, his fellow lifers laugh and cheer, delirious inmates in the same cell. Of all those prisoners, though, only the Boss holds the key.

-- Jay Cocks

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