There’s A Darkness On The Edge Of Town
40 Years On
The summer of 1978 found me at an important crossroads; I’d graduated from college the previous spring and through a series of serendipities, ended up in Providence, Rhode Island rooming with my high school friend Dayle. I was a terrible roommate; I’ll just throw that out there apropos of nothing. We lived together for over a year and then later lived together in New York City, and parted ways so dramatically and egregiously that we didn’t talk for years.
Of course, that has nothing to do with Bruce Springsteen’s third album, Darkness On The Edge Of Town. My relationship with Bruce Springsteen up until 1978 had been absolutely nada. I knew well who he was, because I hailed from Philadelphia, where he was played on the radio as often as if he were Frampton or Aerosmith or Judas Priest or Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Bruce Springsteen was a household name in Philly and had been since his first album in 1973; his new records were lauded and praised with all the feverishness and loyalty of hometown boy makes good. Meanwhile, with the exception of a few obscure pockets (Cleveland for instance), the rest of the country had not a clue.
My friend Michael had been urging me to see Springsteen play live since 1974, when he was going to college shows in the Philadelphia area as well as at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr. I loved the Main Point (a tiny room full of high school desks where they served you hot cocoa before and during the concerts) but had never gone to see Springsteen there. It just didn’t interest me.
I had the tired ennui of a 23 year old; Oh, him. Yeah. Isn’t he like a garage mechanic or something? (This fallacy came from the cartoon cover of a famous bootleg at the time which pictured him as a car mechanic ready to check your oil called You Can Trust Your Car to the Man Who Wears the Star).
Hell no, he’s not a garage mechanic! Michael scoffed. This is the same Michael who happened to drive over to my mother’s apartment in Drexelbrook in 1975 with Born to Run blaring over his car stereo. I came out to the car and he was in a state of beatific bliss, smiling ear to ear. Hol! The new album is out! It’s called Born to Run!
That’s nice, Mike, I said, like a second grade teacher or a kindly grandmother. I just purely didn’t care and I thought I’d seen it all by 1978. What had I seen? Plenty of David Bromberg, John Hartford, Wings, George Harrison, and Rosalie Sorrels. Props to all of them, but I was pretty sure I had live music buttoned up and didn’t need any new artist input, thanks very much. I look back at that sanctimonious self and just shake my head with pity. Oh, the irony!
Then a couple of things happened. First, Because The Night was released by Patti Smith. This was a Springsteen song that she ended up inheriting by virtue of them being in the same recording studio at the same time. Talk about fortuitous. For her, for sure, but also for me: I worshipped her (still do). The fact that she recorded a Springsteen song made me think: okay, I may have been off-base with my assessment of him. Clearly he has to be the shit if Patti Smith is doing one of his songs. It was the Patti Smith Seal of Approval that first won me over.
That, and the fact that at some point that early spring of 1978 Michael sent me an oversized postcard on which he had written down the lyrics of one verse from It’s Hard To Be A (Saint In The City). It was the exuberant scribble of a young man in his twenties who adored this song and this music, and it grabbed me around the throat and shook me like a rag doll.
I had skin like leather and the diamond hard look of a cobra. I was born blue and weathered but I burst like a supernova. I could walk like Brando I kept everything cool. Danced just like a Casanova. In my black jack and jacket with my hair slicked sweet. Silver star studs on my duds like a Harley in heat. When I strut down the street I could feel its heart beat. Sisters fell back said don’t that man look pretty. Cripples on the corner cried out nickel for your pity. Those downtown girls they sure talk gritty. It’s so hard to be a saint in the city.
~ © Bruce Springsteen
When I tell you that sealed the deal, well, it did. Those lyrics punched me in the face with all the fury of my future life, screaming wake up already! Thus I was already deep in the pocket when the local rock station played a live bootleg of a Springsteen concert one night and I huddled around the radio like a moth to a flame. That giggle did me in. I was suddenly obsessed with seeing this band play live, seeing those songs performed live. I could tell this was everything I’d dreamed about, and then some. And I had wasted some very precious time. It was already the summer of 1978.
It was at this perspicacious moment that Darkness On The Edge Of Town dropped into the world. I bought it, savored it, played it several times a day, woke up with it, played it during my lunch break, played it when I got home after work (at the time, I was answering the phone and transcribing depositions about car accidents for an insurance company conveniently located a block from my house). With the exception of Men Without Women by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, I never played a record more than this before or since. Every song was carved into my heart.
Tickets went on sale three months before the August show at the Providence Civic Center. I grabbed one for me and for Dayle. They were $8.50 each. We had 19th row. I put my ticket in my dresser drawer and checked on it faithfully every day to make sure it was still there and that no Springsteen fan from the future (post Born in the USA) had time traveled into the past and stolen it.
August 26, 1978 is, I believe, the date that more than any other changed my life. It was like a huge igneous rock falling into a lake and the swirling eddies commenced to reverberate through the years, all the way to now, forty years later, and no doubt beyond. The fall out from the decision to see that concert, a plan conceived and cherished like a pearl inside an oyster due to the fact it was four years in the making, would not, and will not, ever end.
That show was forty years ago this August and I’ll write more about it later this summer, but suffice it to say that I experienced it with my jaw agape in wonder and my mind blown and my heart on fire. This man, this artist, touched every part of my soul and woke me up to the possibilities of everything.
Are you alive out there? he addressed the audience in a heady, raspy laugh.
I am not sure I had been up to that point, but after that moment I was.
Tonight I’ll be on that hill ’cause I can’t stop,
I’ll be on that hill with everything I got,
Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost,
I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost,
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town.
~ Bruce Springsteen
