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All right. Let me think here.

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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.