Columbia
Produced by Bruce Springsteen, Jon Landau and Steven Van Zandt
Released: 2 June 1978

TRACKLISTING

01 Badlands

02 Adam Raised a Cain

03 Something in the Night

04 Candy’s Room

05 Racing in the Street

06 The Promised Land

07 Factory

08 Streets of Fire

09 Prove It All Night

10 Darkness on the Edge of Town

Born to Run was an album about kids getting out. Darkness on the Edge of Town is about the kids who didn’t. In the three years following Born to Run, the ’70s recession bit hard and Springsteen studied the Clash and Hank Williams; these forces and a law suit hang heavy on Springsteen’s fourth album.

‘The stakes were even higher in certain respects [than with Born to Run],’ said drummer Max Weinberg recalling the Darkness sessions. In 1975 Born to Run had catapulted Springsteen and the E Street Band from New Jersey heroes to somewhere near the top of the music industry. However, a legal dispute with former manager/producer Mike Appel kept Springsteen out of the studio for 18 months and, had Appel won, it could have ended Springsteen’s career. ‘The future was pretty cloudy,’ said Springsteen. ‘We’d had one success. A lot of people – that’s all they have. I’d had that one success and I was millions of dollars in debt. You didn’t know if this would be the last record you’d make.’

Springsteen was soaking up influences, particularly films such as John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, Terrence Malick’s Badlands and a huge number of film noir classics. He began to listen to country music, which he thought dealt with ‘adult’ issues, rather than the sounds of Spector and the ’60s R&B he associated with the romance of youth. On Darkness, Springsteen quotes from the classics – ‘Dancing in the Street’, Chuck Berry’s ‘The Promised Land’ – but he turns these teen fantasies into the darker reality of life. The opening riff of ‘Badlands’ is based on ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’: ‘That’s every song I’ve ever written,’ he recently said of the Animals’ hit. ‘That’s all of them. I’m not kidding, either. “Born to Run”, “Born in the USA”. Everything I’ve done for the past 40 years, including all the new ones.’

Where Born to Run had started with nine songs of which eight were used, some 70 songs were written for Darkness. He gave away ‘Fire’ and ‘Because the Night’ (hits for the Pointer Sisters and Patti Smith) because they didn’t fit with the themes of the album.

Where previous records had been led by elaborate keyboard and saxophone parts, on this album the band was very much an ensemble, led by Max Weinberg’s drumming. Even the vocals were submerged, intentionally placed lower in the mix.

‘I wanted the record to have a relentless feeling,’ he said. ‘I stripped it down to its barest and most austere elements and I decided that I wanted something that felt like a tone poem. I didn’t want any distractions from the narrative and the story, I wanted it to have a sort of apocalyptic grandeur.’

According to co-producer Jon Landau, ‘One phrase that we would use to discuss the sound of the record as it evolved was the sound picture – what kind of picture was the sound of the record suggesting? We did want a certain unglamorous sound. There were no sweetening strings. We wanted the coffee black.’

Darkness on the Edge of Town is Springsteen’s most personal record – the helplessness and the vulnerability of his characters reflect Springsteen’s own life at the time. But if it reeks of the bleakness its title speaks of, there’s still a resilience and defiance permeating the sepia; the characters moving forward, unbowed. ‘Darkness is a meditation on where are you going to stand and with who,’ Springsteen said. ‘Not forsaking your own inner life force … how do you hold on to those things? That was the question that record asked over and over again.’