All language subtitles for The Promise_The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town

All right. Let me think here.

First thing... Everybody, hey.

Stop.

And the bass, like...

You feel real good about
the way this one has come out?

Yeah, I like it. You know, I like it.

Which is always a hard thing to do.

There's a lot of things, you know,

that I would do differently,

and I hear differently now.

But in general...

I think it's an honest record,

and that's basically
what I was trying to make.

After Born To Run,

I wanted to write
about life in the close confines

of the small towns I grew up in.

In 1977, I was living on a farm
in Holmdel, New Jersey.

It was there that I wrote most of the songs
for Darkness On The Edge Of Town.

I was 27
and the product of Top 40 radio.

Songs like The Animals' It's My Life,

We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,

were infused with
an early-pop class consciousness.

That along with my own experience,

the stress and tension of
my father's and mother's life

that came with the difficulties
of trying to make ends meet,

influenced my writing.

I had a reaction to
my own good fortune,

and I asked myself new questions.

I felt a sense of accountability
to the people I had grown up alongside.

I began to wonder how
to address that feeling.

All of this led to the turn
my writing took on Darkness.

That was a sort of a big...

it's a reckoning
with the adult world,

with a life of limitations
and compromises.

But also...

a life of kind of resilience,
and commitment to life.

You know, to...

you know,

to the breath in your lungs.

How do I keep
faith with those things?

How do I honor those things?

Darkness was a record
where I set out to try to understand

how to do that.

We'd had Born To Run in 1975.

That was the biggest hit...

that any of us had
any connection to ever.

The success
we had with Born to Run

immediately made me ask,

"Well, what's that all about?"

"What is that..."

"You know, what's that mean for me?"

The success brought me an audience.

It also separated me
from all the things

I had been trying to make
my connections to my whole life.

And it frightened me because

I understood that what
I had of value was at my core,

and that core was rooted
into the place I had grown up,

the people I had known,

the experiences I'd had.

If I move away
from those things into a sphere of...

of just...

freedom as pure license,

to go about your life as you desire,
without connection,

that's where a lot
of the people I admire

drifted away from
the essential things

that made them great.

And more than rich,
and more than famous,

and more than happy,

I wanted to be great.

The success at that particular moment
was so dreamlike.

All of the rock-and-roll dreams
that I had held as a kid

had finally come true.

All of the sudden the band was noticed

and that's when we really
started building a following.

And everything was going good.

We were so excited about
that type of success.

We thought we made it.

We were finally
in the studio making records.

We got it made now,
this is going to happen.

Then all of a sudden
things stopped.

There were
two clouds that hung over

the writing and recording of
Darkness On The Edge Of Town,

and one was just the success that we had.

Let's face it -

you're one thing one day,

and then all of a sudden
you're post-Time and Newsweek,

post-Born To Run.

Everyone looks at you
different than what you were.

You were a struggling artist one day,
now you're a real success story.

I enjoyed it
plenty along the way,

tried to accept the things
that had happened to me

but not let them distort

my idea about who I was
or what I wanted to do.

I had to disregard
my own mutation.

That was the cloud of success.

The other was the lawsuit
that I ended up in with Mike.

January of 1976,
events had occurred

that had led to a fracture
in the relationship

between Bruce and
his former manager, Mike Appel.

We signed a publishing
and production contract, originally.

It was customary

in the business
when an artist gets a record deal

to give away half his publishing,

to EMI, Blackwood Music,
April-Blackwood Music,

whoever it might be.

He gave it to me
and it was a good thing he did

because he ended up
getting it all back.

That wouldn't
have happened elsewhere.

There was a bit something old-school
about what was going on.

The contract that these music moguls
would sign with these kids,

you know, Bruce had signed
that very contract.

When a law firm represents
a Bruce Springsteen,

the only way they can
get out of the contracts

is to claim that they're unconscionable.

The whole thing ends up
being a lot of stupidity,

there is no unconscionable anything,
and everything's just nonsense.

How could you be getting the best deal
for Bruce Springsteen

as his manager if you're already
his producer and his publisher?

Once you start along that path,
it's hard to extricate yourself

from that legal mess that you're now in.

You know, you're being pushed along,

and you may not like
where you're being pushed,

but nevertheless you're being pushed.
You have to take a stand.

How are you getting out of your contracts
if you want to get control?

With regard to the legal situation,
the actual initial court order

was that Bruce couldn't go in the studio

with a producer not approved by Mike Appel.

In the early stages of that lawsuit
when things didn't go well,

his only form of protest over this

was just not to go in at all.

The main problem we had initially
was we couldn't record

and the reason was I was signed
to Mike's production company,

and that gave Mike the power to decide

basically all the essentials about

how we recorded, who we recorded with.

I was kind of his property in that area
and that's all there was to it,

and I couldn't make those decisions
on my own,

so therefore we couldn't
go into the studio.

The initial contracts,
rather than evil, were naive.

You wouldn't put that kind of stress
and tension on a relationship.

It was bound to be destructive,
so the contracts were naive.

The litigation that was going on,

we weren't really a part of it,
but certainly were affected by it.

We were all broke, nobody had any money.

We were all going day to day.

It wasn't a lawsuit about money,

it was a lawsuit about control,

who was going to be in control of my work
and my work life.

Early on I decided that
that was going to be me.

The bottom line was
it would be my ass on the line,

and I was gonna control where it went
and how things went down.

That for me was what the lawsuit
was about.

If I don't go in the studio,
I don't go in the studio.

I don't go in under somebody else's rules.

If I can't go in the studio and make the
music I want to make, I won't make music.

We played live,
we survived playing the live shows

as best we could,
but things got very, very difficult.

What it came down to is you can lose the
rights to your music, the ability to record...

you can lose the ownership of your songs,

but you can't lose...

that thing, that thing that's in you.

Not being able to return to the studio
after the Born To Run record,

was just heartbreaking.

You hear a lot of talk about family,
bands being family, teams being family.

At that time, it really was that,

because what we had truly
were our relationships

and the music that Bruce was writing.

During that time, we rehearsed every day

at Bruce's house in New Jersey.

We could play until all hours of the night.

It was far enough and big enough
and away from other houses,

that we could make all the noise we wanted.

When he went through that lawsuit,

those things don't have to be...

They don't have to be horrible things
that happen to you,

there's things that happen to you

and then there are catalysts
for something else.

My sense of his reaction to this roadblock
in his career

was that determination, that will,

that desire to do it his way,

became even greater.

Maybe his way of working it all out
was to write songs.

While there was a lot of pain
because I was sorting out

what happened between Mike and I,

it was also a time of refinding myself
and freedom.

Freedom...

the freedom I found
back where I felt like I belonged.

Maybe horns here?

Bruce had been away for a year
since he made Born To Run,

a big record to live up to,

it's like the clock was ticking.

I believe the plan was to do Darkness
fairly quick.

These days two or three years
goes by between records,

and people don't think about it much,
but in those days

we had to make two records in the
first year that I had a contract,

and another record shortly after that.

Two or three years in between records then,
you disappeared.

And I read many, many articles
"Whatever happened to?"

You know, you're dead, flash in the pan,

and for all I knew, that
might have been true.

The stakes were even higher,
in certain respects.

What was this guy gonna do next?

The future was pretty cloudy.

You know, we had one success.

A lot of people, that's all they have.

If I'd had that one success,
I'd have went back to Asbury Park

millions of dollars in debt
rather than the other way round.

You didn't know...

that this may be the last record
you'll ever make.

Everything I'm about, and think about,
I gotta get it out now,

on this record,
because there's no tomorrow.

There's just this moment.

One, two, three, four!

In June of 1977,

Bruce's situation with his former manager
was decided conclusively.

He got control of his music
and ultimately his career,

and it was probably, in my view,

the defining moment of his young career,

because he had withstood
the rigors of someone

literally trying to take his future away.

These were the things that
I would have fought to the death for

because without them, at that time,
I felt I had no life.

So I knew I was gonna take...

whatever it was,
I was gonna take it the whole way.

And...

And that you're fighting a friend,
which is...

I wish it on nobody.

The loss of Mike's friendship
was a terrible loss.

I mean, I don't think our
working relationship

would have continued the way it had,
you know, but...

but the friendship
was tremendously enjoyable.

When we see each other now,

I still enjoy being with him very much.

I called Jon Landau and I said,
"I feel it's silly, this acrimony"

"that's still lingering in the air."

He said, "Mike, come on up."

I came up and I sat with him for an hour
or whatever it was,

chatting and...

He said, "I'll get a hold of Bruce, I'm
sure he'll want to get together with you."

And we did. We had a great dinner.

And that's commitment
you can't find anywhere.

Had I stayed right to this day,

that would not have been
the best thing for Mike Appel

because I have very strong artistic ideas

about songwriting and songs
and lyrics and riffs,

and they may have conflicted with Bruce.

And in the end you have to say,
"Mike, who's the artist?"

Finally, when we went back into the studio
to start recording

what would become the
Darkness On The Edge Of Town album,

it was a sense of...

we can finally start working on this thing

with the proper production team
of Bruce and Jon Landau.

When we sort of got together
and started talking about Darkness,

I had vaguely assumed that we would

in some way pick up from where we left off.

I think even us,
as well as the record companies,

after Born To Run...

felt the next record would sort of
follow in the same footsteps,

and propel us a little further along.

That would seem like formula to me.

He wasn't planning to write
the next Jungleland

or the next Backstreets.

I think that was one moment,
he was in another moment.

One, two, three,

four.

One, two, three,

four.

It was quite experimental

that we didn't go into that record

with an absolutely specific idea of...

what we wanted from it,

and how we were gonna get there.

I remember him telling me

he really wanted to downsize the scale,

that big sound of Born To Run.

Suddenly everything got very sparse.

Where the Born To Run album
had this sort of...

our take on the quote-unquote
"wall of sound",

now you had this vast cinematic landscape.

I love the wily lone wolf image

that I get when I hear that record.

The record maintains
that kind of ominous...

potentially hopeful feel throughout,
it doesn't break that focus.

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
feeling of loneliness,

a certain unglamorized,
to mix languages, sound.

There was no "sweetening",

you know, a lot of overdubs,
especially strings and horns.

We didn't want any sweetening, we wanted,
you know, coffee black.

That was pretty much what I was after,
a leaner sound,

an angrier sound,

I wanted to toughen up the songs.

When you're first making records,

you so think that you need this
big production, this big sound.

So I think Bruce was a little futuristic

in saying, you know, let's just be simple.

I wanted the record to have a very...

relentless...

feeling.

Nothing is forgotten or forgiven
when it's your last time around

I got stuff running 'round my head

that I just can't live down.

We're very preoccupied with parts.

On Born to Run
Bruce wrote all those parts,

the way to get it just the way he wanted,

was to focus on each individual part.

We had these very, very set arrangements
on Born To Run.

Darkness was a bit more freewheeling.

We just simply didn't rehearse anymore.

I would give the guys the chords,

count into the song,

and before they could come up with parts,
they'd have to play.

So the first two or three takes,

you didn't get people recording,
you got people playing.

Very often I didn't have the words.

I remember Badlands,
I think I had "Badlands".

Bruce was at that time
a tremendous rewriter,

alternate verses, alternate endings,

always created choices for himself.

All right.

I had that riff.

So I would count it off.

And then I would sort of imagine...

I'd imagine a verse in a...

you know, A and a B section,

I wouldn't have any lyrics yet.

I was just following
whatever worked musically,

whatever felt exciting musically.

Well, it was the first real
E Street Band record,

I think in many ways his first two albums

were solo records.

Stop, stop.

How do you capture that great live thing
in the studio...

was still a bit of a mystery.

In the '70s, somebody decided
that all ambient sound was bad.

Everything was carpeted,
everything was dead,

nothing was allowed to breathe,

we wanted to capture
the sound of the band live.

But studios created this
completely unnatural environment,

with not a hint of any reverberant sound
coming off of anything.

And if you listen to a lot of records
from the '70s,

the deadness on them,
I find it makes my skin crawl.

We didn't know how to get any sounds.

That was our main problem,
our problem all along.

This way it maintains...

Nothing seemed to be working.

We were just babes in the woods,

trying to figure out how to make a record

that sounded, you know, like live,
like we hear in our heads,

but not really knowing the technology
or having the wisdom

to figure it out.

The drum sound on Darkness,
that was quite a fiasco.

We literally spent weeks in the studio
just trying to get drum sounds.

An incredible amount of discussion
and intention

devoted to the subject
of Max's snare sound.

He would be sitting next to me.

Max would be out there
and he'd say, "Again."

And then Max would hit it
and all Bruce would say

over and over and over again, "Stick!"

That means he could hear the stick
on the drum.

It got to a place where we were
analyzing this so carefully

that everything sounded like...

"Stick!" That just sounds like
you're hitting it with a stick.

"Stick!" I mean hours.

We put the drums every place
you could put them in that building.

We put the drums in the elevator.

You would hear the whole reverb of
this whole big stairwell,

which made no sense at all.

I was waiting for a phone call

to come back to the studio
and start work again

while they're ten hours a day
hitting a drum

trying to make it sound like a drum.

It was pretty sad, really.

The problem was this,
I fantasized these huge sounds.

And so we went to pursue them,
but they were always bigger in my head.

And so we constantly were chasing

something that was
somewhat unattainable.

The thing that I didn't understand was
a fundamental equation at the time,

which was if you get big drums,

the guitars sound smaller.

If you get big guitars,
the drums are gonna have...

Something has to give,
there's only so much sonic range,

but we didn't know this at the time,

we just assumed
everything could sound huge.

Well, in those days, our process
was to rehearse a song in the studio,

lay it down - in other words, record it -

and once it became at all coherent,

go back into the control
room to listen to it

and to start honing it individually
and collectively.

And in those days it was about as much
the live performance of the take,

something special about it,

so when you sat down
it wasn't just by rote,

you were going out to create magic.

You just interpreted the songs more
in your own way

and the sound reflected that
because it was much more stark.

There was less saxophone.

The sax became a bit of an issue
on that record.

Take Born To Run and say
the basis of the record

was Brill Building and Phil Spector

and urban popular music.

When we went to
Darkness On The Edge Of Town,

it was a little more heartland, rural.

And so I then said how do I use the sax,

which is a very urban instrument?

How do I integrate what Clarence is doing
into this context?

He had definite ideas about certain solos
and certain songs.

He would direct me by telling me a story

and then he would hum it or sing it.

"Like this, big man."

I remember we had mastered the record

with no sax solo on Badlands,
it was just a guitar solo.

But at the end of the record
I didn't think we had enough saxophone,

took the guitar out
and Clarence played over that.

It would have been a terrible mistake
to leave that sax solo out.

Its presence is so strong in the places
where it appears

that it feels like the sax
is on much more of the record

than it actually turned out to be.

We recorded a lot of music.

Reels and reels and reels of tapes
and songs,

and it went on for days and days and days,
just recording songs.

He was very prolific, it
was like he exploded.

Born To Run, there were only nine songs.
Eight made the album.

On Darkness there were 70 songs.

That was a big difference.

If you think about that,
somebody sculpting eight songs,

and then all of a sudden,
the next album they're writing 70 songs.

Basically, the first good
ten songs you write,

you put them out, that's your record.

That process would end...

forever.

And never came back.

I would say Bruce would write five songs
to get one song.

There was a lot of multi-versions
of all kinds of things.

We were always pulling things apart.

I had like a big junkyard of stuff
as the year went by.

If something wasn't complete,

I just pulled out the parts I liked, like
pulling the parts you need from one car,

putting them in the other car
so that car runs.

Bruce to this day has notebooks,

and he's always diddling
and always writing,

and very aware of things around him.

Magical notebook, an endless stream
of songs coming out of it.

What are you looking in this book for?

The only thing that can come out of
this book is more work.

After the sessions, you know,

Bruce would say, "Let's go to the book,
I got more songs",

"let's go through them."

So we'd sit at the piano,

he'd open up a book of, you know, ideas.

You know? And he'd have...

25 ideas in there.

And you know that's the truth, baby.

You know, you'd go,
"Hey, what a great song,"

"we're gonna use that, right?"

And then he'd go, "No, I don't know
if that's gonna make it."

Ideas that I was interested in
concentrating on

would have been diluted
at that moment

if I had made more of a miscellaneous
grab bag of music,

no matter how entertaining it was
at the time.

You realized after a while that the albums
were made up of songs

that had an emotional thread,

not a collection of what
the artist would think

was gonna play well on the radio.

Those songs wound up being cut later

on The River album.

We went back to those
and pulled some of those out.

And some of them had to wait for
the Tracks album.

It's really hard to write
a really good song.

For him to write good songs,

possibly could have been hit songs,

and to not put them out, put 'em aside,

an enormous amount of discipline
and willpower to do that, you know?

It's a bit tragic...

in a way...

'cause he would have been one of
the great pop songwriters of all time.

Steve always had a great ear for,
and still does,

loves the...

the classic sort of pop,

a lot of the things that
ended up on Tracks.

Enormous amount of The River
and Darkness outtakes,

were probably some of his favorite things.

And he was a big aficionado...
The three-minute pop single for Steve.

I think part of what...

what pop promised
and rock promised

was the never-ending now, you know,

the always "No, no, no,
it's about living now."

"Right now you need to
be alive, right now."

Those three minutes, it was all on,

you know, it was all of a sudden
you were lifted up

into a higher place of living
and experiencing,

and there was this beautiful
ever-present now.

He just can do anything.

He can write anything for anybody.

And he just very much
took that for granted.

Which is how a lot of our poppier stuff

ended up not being released.

I mean, one great example which I think

would have fit on
Darkness On The Edge Of Town,

was a song called Because The Night.

I was recording Patti Smith at the time

as well as doing Bruce Springsteen
because I wanted to be a record producer.

So I started producing the record
in between Bruce's stuff.

And one day we were at the Nevada Hotel,
me and Bruce,

and he said...

"Hey, man, how are you doing with Patti?"

I said, "I don't have the song"

"that's gonna make everybody
listen to the album."

He said, "You mean
you don't have the single."

I said, "That's right, I
don't have the single."

He said, "Well, what are you gonna do?"

I knew that I wasn't gonna finish the song
because it was a love song,

and I really felt like I didn't know
how to write them at the time.

There was so many of them out there,
I figured I'd do something different.

And also a real love song
like Because The Night,

I was reticent to write.

I think I was too cowardly
to write it at the time.

But she was very brave,

she had the courage.

I was in my apartment and I was

having a long-distance romance
with Fred Sonic Smith,

who later became my husband.

He was supposed to call me
and I waited for him to call me for hours.

I thought,
"Well, I'll listen to that darn song."

It was so accessible,

it had such an anthemic tone,

it was in my key,

and I kept letting it loop and play.

And I still tried to resist it,
but I filled in the blanks,

and in the blanks it tells the story

of me waiting for Fred to call
and of my love for Fred.

Fred did call about three in the morning,

and I wasn't mad at him, though,

because by the time he called

I had written my share of the lyrics

of my one and only hit song.

You know, she took it, and she turned it
into this really beautiful love song.

I have to thank Jimmy for recognizing
what was in the song,

and then for her for the intensity
and the personalness,

and the deep love that she put in,
you know.

Her working on it has been
a tremendous gift to me.

I know that there were a lot of
brilliant songs that were written

that just didn't make the album.

They would have altered the picture.
When you look at Darkness,

the person's not really attached to
anybody else in that record.

There are no love songs on that record.

The two biggest songs that
were written for the Darkness album

and recorded by us,

Fire and Because The Night...

didn't make it onto the album.

One thing about Bruce,

is I think if he thought something
was going to be a hit,

and he didn't want to be represented
by that hit,

he'd just leave 'em off the record.

Bruce was going for something,

and like on Born To Run
he had something in his head.

And until he got that thing in his head

on tape,

he'd just keep going and going and going.

Everybody put in their two cents
about the music and the production,

and maybe where something
should be or shouldn't be.

And there would be a lot of times

where Jon and Bruce and maybe Steven
would huddle up.

But it's like...

There were a lot of people
in the control room.

You have a producer, Jon Landau,

you had the artist who's also a producer,

Steve Van Zandt...

so I held back.

I'm looking at the piano
fader on the console

and Steve was looking at the guitar fader,

everybody kind of wants
to lean over the engineer

and push themselves up
to hear a little more.

That made for, at times,

some pretty funny discussions.

Sometimes some pretty tense discussions.

Probably more tense discussions
than funny.

All right?

Steve is generally...

"It's my way or it sucks!"

It's like "Hey, man,
this is a major tragedy. Stop!"

It's like, "We're fucking this
whole thing up right now."

A transition was taking
place at that point.

And everybody would be finding
what role to play.

I was just doing what a friend does.

You know?

I'm just gonna give you my opinion,
you know.

And try and discover
what it is you wanna do.

The basis for our situation in the studio,

Jon is a formalist for the most part,

he's kind of a pop formalist,

and he is all roots and gospel and soul,

but they were also
well-performed, well-sung,

well-played records.

Steve likes things trashier and noisier,

he's the garage guy, you know.

And so I tend to like things
in the middle somewhere.

It was just two varying opinions.

I enjoyed them both.

I didn't want any one person
having too much control

over the direction the music was taking.

So...

I would Yin-Yang a little bit, you know.

It was just the way that
I played it, you know.

So I think Jon probably entered originally

thinking we were gonna work like we worked
Born To Run.

And that was already something.
I was into trying something else now.

Throughout our work life,

there's been a variety of moments
where he goes, "Oh."

He grasps that idea
and he shifts,

and he finds some very constructive
and helpful way

to help me move on, on what I am doing,
what I am trying to do, you know.

It's an amazing...
It's been one of his great talents.

And it's probably been an enormous reason
why we've been together

and so productive for so long.

I think that a lot of this album had to do,
ultimately,

with Bruce's own personal growth

and trying to come to terms with his idea
of what it meant

to be a man.

So I was trying to write music
that both felt angry

and rebellious,

yet that also felt adult.

That was a big thing
that shaped that record.

A couple of different things
came together at a certain time

to form my approach
towards a record.

The explosion of punk during '77,

which actually I felt quite a bit for,

I felt some similarity in spirit somewhere.

I started to listen to country music,
which I hadn't really done before.

For the first time I really connected with
Hank Williams.

What I liked about that
was country music tackled the...

adult concerns.

One of the elements that was so striking
between Born To Run and Darkness,

on Born To Run
you had the character saying,

"Baby, we were born to run,
we're gonna get out."

In the ensuing three years between
Born To Run and Darkness

it was made painfully clear
you can't just run away.

He was starting to have some conversations
with Jon Landau,

I think helped a great deal.

He kinda was drawn back to
a more solid sort of time,

that John Wayne character
in The Searchers sort of thing.

"I know who I am, I know right from wrong"

sort of clarity

that I think we all search for.

Darkness On The Edge Of Town,

it's a meditation on
where are you going to stand?

With who and where
are you going to stand?

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
In the darkness on the edge of town.

It builds to that one big moment...

That was the only answer I had at the time.

Not forsaking your own inner life force.

You know, how do you
hold on to those things?

How do you hold on to those things?

How do we keep those things?

How do we do justice and honor
to those things?

That was the question that that record
asked over and over and over again.

Adam Raised A Cain -
how do we honor our parents?

Promised Land -
how do we honor the community

and where we came from?

Factory - how do we honor the life,
you know,

of our brothers or sisters and parents?

For some reason that was something
that really mattered to me and...

it mattered to me a lot.

Life is no longer wide open.

Adult life is a life of
a lot of compromise.

And that's necessary, there's a lot of
things that you should be compromising on.

And there are essential things
where you don't want to compromise.

So, figuring those things out.

What's the part of life
where you need to compromise to...

whatever, to pay your bills, to get along,

to feed your kids,
to make your way through the world?

And what's the part of life

where there's a part of yourself
you can't compromise with,

or you lose yourself?

That's it.

Factory...

this was just the...

the paradox of earning your living and...

and getting life from a place
that also takes...

takes a lot out of you,

which is just something I saw as a kid
when my dad lost his hearing.

As a child,
I went in to bring him his lunch,

he was working in a plastics factory
at the time.

The machines were whirring and whirring,
huge machines,

and he was cutting
big, long pieces of plastic.

These days people
would be wearing those big headsets,

but in those days, people didn't.

And he didn't even see me for minutes
because the noise was so great.

His back was to me and I was saying,
"Dad, Dad."

But he couldn't hear me
because the machines were so loud.

He stopped for a moment
and I walked around the side.

Handed him the lunch bag.

He nodded his head and...

I walked out.

I go back to most of my writing
before Greetings

and it all appears simply terrible to me.

You know, you're still writing
a lot of bad words.

You know, you're writing
a lot of bad verses.

So, try and learn how to write well.

But your artistic instinct

is all you...
is what you're going on.

Your artistic intelligence
hasn't been developed yet.

Hopefully that increases and develops
over a long period of time,

which gives you an ace to play
down the road as you get older.

At the time I'm going on artistic instinct.

And that's a wide open game, you know,

so I'm following all kinds of paths,
and all kinds of roads,

and all I'm going is,
"That doesn't feel right.

"That doesn't feel right."
That's how I'm judging.

Lights out tonight.

And you're all alone.

Didn't save that one.

Baby's on the street,
you're getting pushed around.

That was my opener for that one.

Lights out tonight,
trouble in the heartland.

There it is, finally.
I don't know how many pages in.

Racing In The Street,
I'm sure there's a million verses on that.

There was one where there was no girl.

There was no girl in it.

The continuance of the story
of the two guys in the first verse.

I asked two people what they thought.
I asked Obie Dziedzic,

Obie is one of my earliest fans, and she
said, "I love the one with the girl."

Right.

And I asked Steve.

Steve says, "Oh, the one
with the girl in it."

I said, "Really?"

I thought he was gonna
go for the other one.

He said, "Yeah, that's
what happens in life."

"Two guys are pals,
then the girl comes along,"

"and that's it."

When I inserted the relationship
in the last verse,

it made sense of the journey
that the guy is taking.

A lot of the songs deal with
my obsession with the idea of sin.

What is it? What is it in a good life?

'Cause it plays an important place
in a good life also.

How do you deal with it?

You don't... you don't get rid of it.

How do you carry your sins?

That's what the people in
Racing In The Street are trying to do.

Well, the work ethic
that surfaced on Darkness

was actually even more intense

than anything that had gone on before.

This was our lives.

I mean, this was everything to us.

There was no wives, or families
or girlfriends that mattered that much.

So we were there all the time.

It was a mission. Better or worse we were
messianic in our approach, you know,

it was like, "This music
is going to save the world!"

This thing ain't nine to five.
This thing is 24/7.

Being that I didn't have a life,
that was easy for me.

You know, everybody else
had to suffer with me.

It was both self-indulgent

and the only way we knew how to do it.

I can't even tell you

how long we spent

on that record.

Because I don't really know,
it's kind of a blur.

But the obsessive-compulsive part
of my personality,

was such that I would be driving you crazy
just because I could.

I was a dangerous man to be around.

One of those, "You'll look back on this
one day and it will all seem funny."

It's starting to seem funny now.
At the time...

there was no humor there at all.

There was downtime in the studio.

You'd finish a take
and you gotta capture the moment.

Sometimes you gotta break the tension.

Well, the guys would, I suppose
in their attempt to ridicule me,

would bet on my whims of the day
and where they might go.

What songs are gonna get on,
what songs are gonna get thrown out today?

What songs are gonna get brought back in?

How long are the songs gonna be?

They had to find a lot of ways to get out

from underneath my oppressive hand.

Jimmy lovine, when it came time to mix,

he lost his mojo in the middle of Darkness
somewhere,

we just couldn't mix the record.

We had nothing but chaos going on.

At some point I got a call from Jon saying,

"Hey, Charlie,
we're having a bit of a problem"

"locating anything in between
dull and shrill."

I had never mixed anything before.

I wasn't actually a mixer,
I was a record producer.

Comes into the studio
and he starts listening.

And he has an idea about
what we're doing wrong.

He had all these different ideas of
how to make everything really... present.

It had a certain rawness to it
that I responded to

as a listener.

So Charlie sits down and he starts to mix.

I believe it was Prove It All Night.

Got the drums up, got the bass up.

Bruce listens.

"That's fantastic."

I took Jon aside, I said, "Look, I don't
hear any problems with the recordings."

"It doesn't sound to me like there ought
to be any problem with the mixes,"

"but get yourself a real mixer."

Jon sort of... He didn't...

Not much of a response.

He said, "What are you doing
tomorrow night?"

Now, when Chuck comes back,
Bruce is sort of ready for him,

and Bruce starts getting
more and more particular.

I came back the next night and he says,

"I'll tell you a little something
about this song.

"Here's what I want you to do.

"Imagine you're in a movie theater.

"On the screen is the two lovers
having a picnic.

"And then the camera...

"shock-cuts to a dead body.

"Every time this song
comes up on the album," he says,

"this song is that dead body."

That was an amazing experience
in and of itself,

to hear somebody talk about their music
in that way.

It was a brilliant set of cues.

He didn't tell me what
to do with the music,

he told me what he wanted the thing
to feel like.

One of Chuck's specialties
and what I always loved him for was...

Chuck was into just the feel.

Does it make you feel what the artist
wanted you to feel?

He understood how to build a sound picture.

It's not an ordinary-sounding record.

It captures the band in its leanest.

You hear in the aural environment

things struggling to make a place
for themselves.

It's not a grand, smooth open space.

It's a harder and darker space.

You hear the dynamic of the players

fighting for space inside the music.

If you get the voice too high,

it always feels like
much ado about nothing.

You can't get it way out in front,

you gotta get it just so that it's
some kind of intelligible.

So when all hell is breaking loose,

there's that strain...

as a mixer to keep the...

to keep the voice tucked in.

So that you feel like you could...

understand the words
if you wished to try hard enough.

Charlie, essential to the team,

came and saved our asses,

literally was the white
knight on that record.

Sometimes you wondered if the end
was ever going to actually happen

because you'd record 50 or 60 songs,

and I guess then
Bruce would collate all his thoughts,

and try to decide what the story was.

When I did my running order for that album,

I don't know if any of the songs
that wound up on the album

were the ones that I would have picked.

Nobody knew until the end, really,
how it was gonna turn out.

I don't think Bruce or Jon did.

There was only room for so many.

But there was a couple that
you kinda thought at least

that were definitely in there.

The Promise was an amazing song.

And we probably...

spent three months on that song.

Bruce cut that song every way possible.

It just was, you know...

unheard of not to put a song that great
on the record.

It's a song about fighting and not winning.

It's just about the disappointments
at the time.

It could have went on the record
if we'd have finished it,

because it actually fit
in the temper of the record

now that I look back on it.

But I felt too close to it, you know,

I felt I didn't have the distance,
I couldn't judge it myself at the time.

This was the beginning of.

Bruce being very meticulous about
the sequencing as well.

He would have sequences made up.

He would have four or five sequences

and he'd listen to them
all the way through.

We always were concerned
with our cornerstones,

first and last cut on both sides.

Everything happens between those spaces.

But that was our narrative device.

Gotta remember, Bruce and myself

shared a feeling that we were
always making an album.

To me...

There's not any one
element that's not a cut.

After the year of recording,
listening to all the stuff that we had,

I stripped the record down to its...

really its barest and
most austere elements.

And I decided I wanted something
that felt like a tone poem.

And I didn't want any distractions from

this is the narrative and the stories
that I was telling.

And also I wanted to have a sort of...

apocalyptic grandeur.

In the darkness on the edge of town.

Born To Run and Darkness,
they're the beginnings of the story.

I'm beginning to tell the story that I...

that I tell for most of
the rest of my work life.

He came down to my house, he said,
"What should I bring?"

I said, "Just bring some changes of clothes
so we can get several looks."

He came in with a crumpled-up
paper supermarket bag.

And it was some flannel shirts
and some jeans and some T-shirts,

and, you know, that was his wardrobe
for the shoot.

We'd just moved into this house,
an old house in Haddonfield, New Jersey,

with that flowered
wallpaper and everything,

you know, the cabbage roses.

"Let's just do some test shots."

That very first day,

some of the test shots that we did
up in the bedroom

with the cabbage-rose wallpaper

ended up being the cover for
Darkness On The Edge Of Town.

Incredibly revealing.

Very revealing.

Very stripped down,
kind of like what I thought the record was.

And...

they were also very blue-collar at the time

which is what the record was.

It was just like...

"Yeah, that's my story,
that's the character in my story."

When we finally got to perform on
the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour

after the record was finished,

it was almost like a wave of relief

that we had been able to withstand

the pressure of not recording,

of not being able to do what Bruce wanted,

it's amazing to me how he was able to
withstand it and never crack

and never really show at all

how disturbing the whole thing
must have been.

There's a moment where, like,

I guess I assessed my strengths
and my weaknesses, you know?

And I'm glad it happened, you know.

I don't got one regret about...

about one second of the past three years.

Because I learned a lot from it.

You can hear it on the record, I hope.

The Darkness album and tour
was such an important part of...

the Bruce Springsteen, E Street Band story,

because in my view it really seemed like
the first time that...

it is possible to do it your own way.

And there was a ferocity in the band...

when we finally went out
and started playing again,

that perhaps wasn't there earlier.

It was just an absolutely
take-no-prisoners approach.

The first time I saw Bruce was in 1978.

I'd never seen anything like that,
it was shocking.

I was surprised that you could be
in such a large venue

and still feel that you're having
a personal experience.

You come out there in that dark
and you make that magic,

you pull something that doesn't exist
out of the air,

doesn't exist until any given night

when you're standing in front of
your audience.

And nothing exists in that space

until you go, "One, two, three, four..."

Then you and the audience together
manifest an entire world,

an entire set of values,

an entire way of thinking about your life

and the world around you.

And an entire set of possibilities.

That can never be taken away.

Bruce is a man with a vision

and at the same time he's a person
in search of a vision.

And every one of these albums
is a search for that vision of now.

That's what ups the ante
and makes some of these records...

what made them so difficult

was they weren't done
until they had advanced his vision.

First thing... Everybody, hey.

Felt very weak in those days.

You know, couldn't do much of
what I wanted to do.

You had your friends
depending on you

and you couldn't really take care of them,

I always prided myself
as a good bandleader and...

But you were more than that in those days.

The guys were my soldiers,
you know, and...

You know, there was a time when I felt like
I'd failed them in some way.

So, deep despair...

and yet resilience, you know?

Trying to find something.
Deep despair and resilience.

And determination.

I think that's why the song
still reaches people, you know.

It's filled with deep despair,
resilience, determination,

assessment of limitations,

desire to transcend those limitations

in the way that you can.

And then the last verse is...

So, talking to myself there, obviously,
you know.

I had kind of a big fight and...

But...

you know, it was always more than
just my own circumstance

at the time of the lawsuit.

It was...

It's was just kind of the fight
you have with yourself your whole life.

It was always about the bigger conversation
for me.

And that was the important conversation.

And when you get to the end of the song...

You know...

So you had to lose your illusions,
you know, lose your illusions.

While at the same time holding on
to some sense of possibility.

But, more so, your illusions of adult life

and a life without limitations,

which I think everyone dreams of
and imagines at a certain point.

The song that needs to be sung
is the song about, well,

how do you deal with...
deal with those things

and move on to a creative life,

a spiritual life, a satisfying life,

and a life where you can just

make your way through the day
and sleep at night,

that's what most of those songs were about.