“For me, the primary questions I’d be writing about for the rest of my work life first took form in the songs on Born To Run.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
“I was never a visionary like Dylan. I wasn’t a revolutionary, but I had the idea of a long arc: where you could take the job that I did and create this long, emotional arc that found its own kind of richness.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Pivotal moments don’t come much more pivotal than Born To Run. Bruce Springsteen’s third album was the one that broke him big and remains, for many his magnum opus. Miles of words have been committed to print in homage to what was an audacious attempt by Springsteen to replicate the layered density of Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ (an audacious attempt that he pulled off memorably), without my adding to them here. But I can’t resist it, so here goes.
Born To Run not only sounds great, it reads great. Lyrically, this is a leaner Springsteen, the exuberant imagery that made both Greetings… and The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle occasionally clumsy, has been toned down. This is a writer serious about improving his craft. The songs, particularly ‘Thunder Road’, display astute editorial judgement; they are narratively arresting in their synthesis of romantic poetry, dirty realist fiction and cinematic imagery.
George Pelecanos, the American crime fiction author, has cited ‘Meeting Across The River’, the penultimate track, as a watershed for him. “As artful in its economy as a Raymond Carver short story. There are many books and movies that made me want to become a fiction writer, but very few songs. This is one that did.”
Thematically, although the argot of Born To Run is contemporary, the songs embody the American folk tradition’s preoccupation with the lives of the common people, those men and women who “get up every morning at the sound of the bell”, who “sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream”. But where Woody Guthrie would have infused them with a sense of hope, and early Dylan would have protested on their behalf, Springsteen lays it out as he sees it, and what he sees is mostly drudgery and despondency punctuated by the respite of music and the kinship of gangs. It’s a soulless reality from which its characters want to flee.
There is a recognition here that everything is not as it should be, that for a whole swathe of society, choice is limited to the slender possibility of things being better someplace else. That someplace else is not just found on the map – it can be inside yourself, it can be inside another, it can be in the sounds coming out of the radio or in the bands that pump it out on stage, or, in the most extreme cases, it can be in the black economy, in those shady deals done under cover of night.
The music at times is almost symphonic in its scope, especially the title track and ‘Jungleland’, whose emotionally draining sax solo was arguably Clarence Clemons’ finest moment as an E Streeter. And the words mark Springsteen out as more than a smart arse with access to a rhyming dictionary. On ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘Backstreets’ he displays the instinct of a dramatist with the heart of a poet – every image in the former is vividly conceived.
That Springsteen could sustain such artistic focus while the suits at Columbia were making noises about dropping him from the label unless he began shifting more units – a lot more units – was impressive. “If I fuck up now, it’s over,” he confided to one journalist before descending into the hell of recording an album that “ate up everyone’s life”.
Springsteen and the E Street Band cocooned themselves in New York’s 914 Sound studio for months, grafting twelve hours a day, painstakingly building each song. Most famously, Clarence Clemons spent sixteen hours perfecting the elegiac saxophone solo on ‘Jungleland’. The whole experience was pounding Springsteen into the ground. When he wasn’t in the studio, he was holed up in a seedy Times Square hotel crawling with prostitutes, pimps and junkies. He became obsessed with the mirror in his room.
“The mirror was crooked. That sucker was as crooked as crooked could be; it just hung crooked. Couldn’t get it to hang right. It just blew my mind after a certain amount of time. It was the album that mirror became – it was crooked, it just wouldn’t hang right.”
Springsteen was ready to abort the project, even told Columbia he would refuse to release it. Then along came Jon Landau.
Historically, rock managers are tough bastards. Think Allen Klein, Albert Grossman, Peter Grant and Colonel Tom Parker who, despite the jolly uncle appearance, lined his own very deep pockets with loot off the back of Elvis’ naivety. But then I suppose they have to be tough to get the best for their charges; they function, after all, in a medium infested with oily characters for whom idealism is only useful as a commodity. In horseracing parlance, they have the mathematical genius of a bookie, the cunning of a trainer and a neck like a jockey’s bollocks. They are charming and obnoxious, just as they are diplomatic and autocratic, complicated and simple, and they are probably among the most paranoid, neurotic creatures you will ever have the misfortune to encounter.
Now to avoid any kind of lawsuit, I’m not going to say which of the above applies to Jon Landau. Instead, I’m going to tell you a little yarn, something that came to pass while writing this book. It provided a salutary glimpse at the kind of empire Landau oversees, and indeed perhaps the kind of empire Bruce Springsteen has conceived. The latter, of course, is conjecture, for if it isn’t, then ‘The Boss’ really is the boss and part of, rather than in opposition to, the establishment. This would be a travesty given that I and others regard him as being among that special band of brothers who channel the spirit of Woody Guthrie. The brief anecdote that follows is not designed to impugn Springsteen’s reputation as a blue-collar bard, but to reveal a little of Landau’s management style.
Any book of this nature involves piles of correspondence (mostly these days through the auspices of email) regarding approaches to publicists and the like. The rules governing such correspondence dictate that the writer couches their request – either for information or interview time, usually the latter – in obsequious language and prepare themselves to be flexible with their ethics.
Toby Scott was one of the engineers on Nebraska. That makes him a pretty important guy. Springsteen may have the production credit on the sleeve, but it was Scott who, with his colleagues, helped to finesse the rough edges on the cassette tape Springsteen had been carrying around in his back pocket. He was among the team who enabled what was essentially a domestic recording to become fit for public release. Like I said, a pretty important guy.
Scott was easy to track down on the internet. I contacted his manager Joe D’Ambrosio, outlined a synopsis of the book, told him what I was after. His reply was positive and gave me a chuckle into the bargain. The sort of wry chuckle reserved for religious disciples of a fundamentalist bent. My email address, you see, suggests a cheerless disposition, though in more profane terms. It always elicits a laugh. But not from Scott, it seems.
“You’re in business. Toby will do it,” D’Ambrosio informed me.
There was, however, a proviso.
“He doesn’t like your email moniker. Is there a way to have him correspond with you via a different email address?”
Fair enough, I thought. I can rustle up another email address, an alternative he won’t find offensive. And so I did. Same routine in the email to Scott.
“I will talk about the Nebraska record,” he replied in a tone that bore the dramatic whiff of conspiracy, as though agreeing to impart secret knowledge. It was all a bit ‘Deep Throat’.
“I will have to get permission from Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau, and he will require final approval of any text or draft before publication. This will not be an issue if we stick to the subject and do not get into the intimate details of Bruce’s life.”
Permission? Final approval of any text or draft? From Nixon’s America we were now in the old Eastern Bloc. What punitive measures was Landau going to impose on Scott if he went ahead and talked to me without consent?
This is where my principles were subjected to contortion. Sure, I can wait for Mr Landau’s blessing – and as for a transcript of our chat, no problem. That was on a Friday. By Monday, Scott still hadn’t heard back from Landau but set a provisional day and time for the interview and furnished me with his phone number.
Then, the day before the interview was due to take place, this: “David, I have received word that I cannot do the interview with you regarding the Nebraska album. Any further contact or discussion on this should be through Jon Landau Management.”
And that was it. Communication ended. I fired off an email to Scott expressing my disappointment, as well as my genuine bewilderment. I fired another off to a representative at Jon Landau Management expressing considerably more. Their response? “It is customary that our office be contacted about a book being written about Bruce Springsteen and/or his music. However, since we were never notified and know nothing about it, we are forwarding your email to our attorneys.”
I pointed out that Springsteen’s New York-based publicist Marilyn Lafferty of Shorefire Productions had been informed months ago of my intention to write this book. On that occasion, she graciously passed on my request for an interview with Springsteen to Jon Landau Management. Inevitably it was refused, but she nonetheless wished me good luck with the project. I also composed a letter to Jon Landau himself and had it sent to him through a third party. So the claim that his management company “were never notified and knew nothing about it” was complete bollocks. And they knew it, as their next email indicated.
“David, we’re contacting our attorneys simply to inform them you are writing a book. If you would like to start over and inform us of the book, who your publisher is, what the focus of the book is and what your specific requests are, we would be happy to take a look at it.”
Take a look at it they did, apparently. The outcome? Well, two months later, I was tersely informed, “Bruce is not available to do an interview with you.” I could have bet my liver on that one.
Now I understood why all those emails to members of the E Street Band went unanswered; why Springsteen’s UK press people were giving me the electronic equivalent of the deaf ear. What did any of them hope to achieve (or what were they seeking to avoid) by not talking to me? My objective was explicitly conveyed: I wanted to laud Nebraska in print, celebrate a great album. There was no hidden agenda. I knew my chances of securing an interview with Springsteen were about as likely as being granted an audience with the Almighty, but talking to some of his collaborators would have been the next best thing.
What is this really about? Is it about Jon Landau letting the rest of us know he is the power behind the throne? Is it about absolute control of the Springsteen image in the public domain – a dictatorship by any other name? Or is it about ensuring that nobody but the inner circle feeds off the sacred cow? Is Jon Landau a Svengali or sentinel?
Here’s a more disturbing question: is Springsteen that determined to preserve the favourable persona he has cultivated among we, the folk, that he is willing to relinquish the responsibility for doing so to Landau, regardless of the tactics he employs? Whatever your perspective, it’s hard to imagine Woody or Dylan being that bothered.
For Springsteen, the clincher when it came to Landau was he that he could trust him. In 2002, he said, “There were a lot of things I hated doing, business things, which I had proven terrible at before I met Jon. I wasn’t even terrible at it. I just couldn’t have cared less. I just wanted to be able to do what I wanted to do. Particularly when I was younger, I was really alienated by that part of it and I felt that any involvement in it was somehow not being true to my original ideas.
“So when Jon came along, that whole thing was taken care of. I had a long period of time when I was pretty estranged from it, probably until well into my thirties, and he kept the boat afloat. He was a writer himself, and he managed because I needed a manager.
“We had a lot of discussions over the years about these issues, where people were right and where people went wrong, and it’s always based around, ‘How do we do the best job this time out with the record?’ It was so simple. He would say, ‘Well, you can do this and play a hall this size and it can still be great.’ He was constantly pushing the boundaries out for me a little bit, which I needed to do because I was fearful, I was self-protective, and not unwisely so because you need to be. You need to protect your work, your music and the identity that you’ve worked hard to present.”
Now the need to protect your work and your music, that bit I understand; the need to protect an identity, that’s where the confusion sets in. An identity should reveal itself; an identity is a composite of the individual characteristics that make a person or thing recognisable. And if it’s not, then it’s a construct – it’s not real.
There’s an excellent article by Stephen Metcalf on the Slate magazine website in which he attributes “all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce’s every move” to Landau. Metcalf puts forward the argument that pre-Landau, Springsteen was an “endearing wharf rat”, but that by the time Landau had worked a number on him, Springsteen “had been refined away”.
Landau, he claims, “insinuated himself into Bruce’s artistic life and consciousness”, while simultaneously staying on the Rolling Stone masthead, “until he became Springsteen’s producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, NJ, Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honours degree in history from Brandeis. He filled his new protégé’s head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck and Flannery O’Connor. At the same time that he intellectualised Bruce, he anti-intellectualised him… Bruce’s musical vocabulary accordingly shrank.”
More than three decades later, Springsteen, according to Metcalf, has ceased to be a musician and become a belief system. “And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You’re either in or you’re out.”
It’s a bit of a heartbreaker to learn that someone who purports to be one of us, who writes so eloquently of our hopes, dreams, doubts and fears, may not be all that he seems; may, in fact, be an actor playing a role. And, like a consummate actor, one who does his job so well that perhaps the line between flesh and fantasy has become blurred.
But the bald fact of the piece is that, without Jon Landau’s intervention, Born To Run probably would not have turned out as it did. Landau had famously written in Rolling Stone that he had seen the future of rock’n’roll, and the future was Bruce Springsteen. Just the kind of pronouncement to seduce any self-respecting rock’n’roll ego, whether by default or design. The two men became friends. And so it was that, over Mike Appel’s vehement objection, Springsteen invited Landau to join the Born To Run production team early in 1975. It wasn’t as though Landau had no previous form, having manned the controls on albums by MC5 and Livingston Taylor.
The recording had stalled prior to Landau’s involvement. Keyboardist David Sancious and drummer Ernest Carter lost faith and moved on to form a jazz-fusion outfit. Auditions were held for replacements, Springsteen finally deciding on Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg.
Landau’s first act was to move the operation from 914 Sound in Blauvelt on the outskirts of New York, to the higher-tech Record Plant in Manhattan. He then hired Jimmy Iovine, fresh from working with Phil Spector on John Lennon’s Rock’n’Roll, as engineer.
Another breakthrough came when Steve Van Zandt, a New Jersey compadré of Springsteen’s, wandered into the studio as the band were grinding their way through a turgid ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out’. “I didn’t know enough to be diplomatic or respectful,” said Van Zandt. “I’m sitting on the floor listening, and the horns were just wrong. I said, ‘Fuckin’ awful. How about I go in and fix it?’ So I sang the riffs to them, and that’s the arrangement on the record.”
‘Miami’ Steve became Springsteen’s interpreter in the studio, translating the sounds in his head to the band. “Bruce did have a very distinct vision in his mind, but it was difficult. For those of us who lived in the live rock’n’roll world, the Record Plant sounded dead and dull and flat. And Bruce was relentlessly pursuing this live sound from the past. In our frame of reference, the whole live sound was weird and dull. So we bashed and bashed and bashed away at it to make it sound live.”
Things gathered pace in the first half of 1975, and the album was officially completed in mid July. Columbia liked what they heard and allocated a $250,000 budget for promotion, with publicity and marketing departments given pep talks months in advance of Born To Run’s release.
And then the biggest coup of all – Springsteen appeared on the cover of both Time and Newsweek simultaneously on 27 October, the first non-politician to achieve such a feat. From virtual obscurity to national figure in months. Time called him “rock’s new sensation” and his music “primal, directly in touch with all the impulses of wild humour and glancing melancholy, street tragedy and punk anarchy that have made rock the distinctive voice of a generation”. Newsweek was more ambivalent: “Bruce Springsteen has been so heavily praised in the press and so tirelessly promoted by his record company, that the publicity about his publicity is now a dominant issue in his career. And some people are asking whether Bruce Springsteen will be the biggest superstar or the biggest hype of the Seventies.”
The only thing that mattered to Columbia was recouping their investment, which they did big time. Yet despite Born To Run’s success, Springsteen found himself strapped for cash. Time to take a closer look at the contracts he’d signed with Appel. What the large print had given, in Springsteen’s case, the small print had most certainly taken away. Appel, it turned out, had awarded himself an inflated management commission, and controlled the publishing rights to Springsteen’s songs. The lawyers were duly summoned and legal battle commenced.
Appel told Springsteen he wouldn’t let Landau produce his fourth album. Springsteen sued Appel for fraud and breach of trust. Appel took it further, filing a suit asking the court to prevent Springsteen and Landau from recording together. The court complied.
The dispute rumbled on into 1977, with a settlement concluded in May of that year. Precise details of the settlement remain sketchy to this day, although the upshot of it was that Appel won some money, as well as a portion of the profits from Springsteen’s first three albums and a production deal with CBS, while Springsteen regained control of his catalogue.
“You stare at the legal papers served upon you and you feel completely at a loss; the energy just drains out of your body and you don’t quite know what to do or make of it,” Appel remembers the spat thirty three years on.
“When you put all your eggs in one barrel and that barrel gets split and all the goods run out, you realise that you’ve got nothing and you’ve got to start from scratch again. You are, in a very real sense, destitute. You have no more income from something that you put years into. Your celebrity shrivels right up because the press and everybody at the label must necessarily desert you. Have you ever heard of the press or record label beating an artist over the head in favour of the manager? I was the manager and, by definition, the manager is the bad guy. There are certain stereotypes you can’t get away from.
“On top of everything, you look at the legal papers and you know it’s all nonsense to boot. Lawyers trying to pretend that Mike Appel is a scoundrel, his contracts are unconscionable and, of course, he must have stolen money from Bruce. It’s extremely frustrating to say the least. It was all a gas, but it was all over, baby blue.”
With the futile benefit of hindsight, Appel would never have become Springsteen’s manager. “It kept me away from him so that our personal relationship suffered. I was always a songwriter/producer, not a manager. Bruce hated all the managers he’d met, and that’s why he insisted that I manage him. I managed him as a convenience because we couldn’t even afford a real outside manager.”
While Appel, in the kind of self-denial typical of the classic lovable rogue, would rather reinvent history, the more plausible truth is that he saw Springsteen as an opportunity for him to advance his financial cause, however passionately he believed in his artistry. And he was found out. The resultant legal feud prevented Springsteen from capitalising on Born To Run with the immediacy he would have liked.
The recording ban imposed on him while the lawyers bickered and the hard lessons learned from the saga forced him deeper into the kind of dark creative terrain he had begun to explore on Born To Run. “In a funny way,” Springsteen said in 2010, “the lawsuit was not such a bad thing. Everything stopped and we had to build it up again in a different place.”
During the enforced absence from the studio that was a legacy of the legal proceedings, Springsteen returned to New Jersey. It was a homecoming that provided the template for the songs on Darkness On The Edge Of Town. He felt a sense of accountability to the people with whom he grew up, many of whom were struggling to survive in an America that, despite having ditched the unctuous Richard Nixon, was stung by the realisation that things weren’t a whole lot better under the new White House incumbent, Jimmy Carter. Meanwhile, Springsteen himself was engaged in a different kind of struggle – a moral struggle, if you like – to reconcile his relative wealth with the poverty, financial and spiritual, of his New Jersey homies. These factors coalesced to generate a reservoir of material that “veered away from great bar band music or great singles music and veered towards music that I felt would speak of people’s life experiences”. The proposed title of the album (Landau’s suggestion) was American Madness.
Another inspirational dynamic on Darkness On The Edge Of Town was cinema, Springsteen having become a recent (and fervent) convert to the medium, especially the work of John Ford, the four-time Academy Award-winning director whose forte was the Western in which fundamentally decent men are beset by external forces. It was Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s depression-era novel The Grapes Of Wrath that made an enduring impression on Springsteen who, incredibly, used to baulk at such black and white pictures whenever they were screened on television.
“I always remember turning it off and turning on something that was in colour. Then I realised it was a stupid thing to do, because one night Jon and I watched it and it opened up a whole particular world to me. It was very interesting, just a way to watch movies – just a way to observe things, period.”
Ford’s re-telling of the story of the migrant Joad family was Springsteen’s ‘in’ to Steinbeck, an author who, like Woody Guthrie in his songs, animated the ordinary American, raising him from the realm of stereotype and caricature and giving him individual identity and dignity. He made him real – too real for some. In 1939, The Grapes Of Wrath was banned from public schools and libraries by the Kern County Board of Supervisors, a school board in Mississippi also removed it from school reading lists on the grounds of profanity. In Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, California, there were ritual burnings of the book on two separate occasions.
Yet Steinbeck refused to be cowed by the reactionaries. Throughout a career in which he produced sixteen novels, six works of non-fiction and five short-story collections, he remained true to what he believed was the role of the writer, synopsised in his acceptance speech following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
“The writer is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures for the purpose of involvement… Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit, for gallantry in defeat and for courage, compassion and love.”
Wasn’t this was Woody Guthrie was about? And Pete Seeger? And the Sixties folk movement spearheaded by their poster boy, Bob Dylan? And aren’t there echoes of Steinbeck’s mission statement in Springsteen’s best writing?
If Darkness On The Edge Of Town resonated with the spirit of Ford and Steinbeck – a spirit that would become more manifest later on – it positively pulsated with the stylistic traits of film noir. “I always liked the flash and outlaws of B pictures – Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road and Arthur Ripley’s Gun Crazy,” said Springsteen.
He sought out Forties and Fifties film noir such as Jacques Tourneur’s Out Of The Past, drawn by a feeling of men and women “struggling against a world closing in”. Even the album title, by Springsteen’s own admission, owed much to American noir.
With its roots in German expressionist cinematography, film noir was the term applied to Hollywood crime dramas in which, to offer a crude explanation, cynicism and sexual motivation prevailed in a world that is inherently corrupt and where fate conspired to doom its denizens. Born To Run was about, well, running and never looking back, about taking chances, last chances even; the characters on Darkness On The Edge Of Town – maybe the same characters on its predecessor, those who either couldn’t get away or were determined to stay – were in it for the long haul, as Springsteen “steered away from any hint of escapism” and set them “down in the middle of a community under siege”.
The tension in the lives of these characters is palpable in the music. It’s a tension generated by a latent menace, a suggestion of violence in the switchblade guitars of ‘Badlands’ and ‘Adam Raised A Cain’, rumblings of a slave revolt in ‘Factory’. There’s anarchy in the air, Springsteen acknowledging the influence of Britain’s punk explosion. Where Born To Run offers the chance to get out of town, Darkness… wants to burn the town down.
“The record was of its time,” Springsteen told The Guardian more than twenty years later. “We had the late-Seventies recession, punk music had just come out, times were tough for a lot of the people I knew.”
If Springsteen took counsel from anyone but Landau, Darkness On The Edge Of Town would have been a completely different album. Van Zandt, who has always fallen under the spell of the three-minute record, wanted his friend to go with his pop impulse rather than the tone poem Darkness… became. Springsteen had amassed a mini-library of spiral notebooks containing lyrics to songs that totalled several multiples of ten. Springsteen himself reckons it was around forty, a couple of band members put it at seventy. Either way, there was a wealth of material to play around with, much of it animatedly opposite to the intense selection finally plumped for.
You can hear it on 2010 release The Promise, a collection of so-called outtakes from the Darkness… sessions, released as a stand-alone double album and as part of a deluxe box set (The Promise: The Darkness On The Edge Of Town Story) helmed by director Thom Zimny’s documentary, The Making Of Darkness, and two live gigs from 1978 and 2009.
Among the tracks that didn’t make it onto Darkness… but make it onto The Promise are ‘Because The Night’ and ‘Fire’, recorded by Patti Smith and the Pointer Sisters respectively. Those that didn’t make it onto either included Born In The USA’s ‘Darlington County’, and The River’s ‘Ramrod’, ‘Sherry Darling’, ‘Independence Day’ and ‘Drive All Night’. The man was prolific back then and, as The Promise testifies, there was quality in abundance to be found among the quantity. Big tearjerking ballads like ‘Someday (We’ll Be Together)’, ‘One Way Street’ and ‘The Brokenhearted’ (close your eyes and imagine Roy Orbison singing this one), finger-snappers like ‘Gotta Get That Feeling’ and the hilarious ‘Ain’t Good Enough for You’, and alternative versions of ‘Candy’s Room’ (renamed ‘Candy’s Boy’ here), ‘Factory’ (‘Come On (Let’s Go Tonight)’) and ‘Racing In The Street’. Only Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series has unearthed such a bounty of buried treasures.
Bud Scoppa, writing in Uncut, called it “big, bold, vibrantly coloured and laced with sweeping chorus hooks and towering middle eights. In a word: spectacular.” Quoting Springsteen from the Zimny documentary, when he said The Promise would have been a perfect fit between Born To Run and Darkness…, Scoppa added, “Seeing the light of day at long last, thirty two years hence, this music seems to have arrived from some parallel universe, enriching the history of a supreme artist at his very peak, during a vital era in rock history.”
Keith Cameron in Mojo was more measured in his appraisal. The Promise, he soberly stated, “depicts a crossroads moment in Springsteen’s development as a songwriter”.
Dave Marsh, a friend of Jon Landau’s and Springsteen’s chief lobbyist in print (he has written four books, including a brace of hagiographies), completely missed the point of Darkness On The Edge Of Town in his Rolling Stone review. Where Crawdaddy’s Peter Knobler, like those of us listening hard, found “enough raw emotion to make you shake”, and one interviewer expressed surprise that “there weren’t any razor blades attached to the LP”, Marsh heard optimism. “It poses once more the question that rock’n’roll’s epiphanic moments always raise: do you believe in magic? And once again the answer is yes. Absolutely.”
Cultural commentator Joyce Millman, in an appreciation of the album some twenty years later, called it just about right when she described Darkness… as “urban folk music that quotes rock’n’roll in the way that Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams quoted black and Appalachian spirituals”.
Springsteen was about to get folkier and darker yet next time out.