Bruce

I just bought a CD that cost about $100. I already have the record, I’ve owned it since before 1980. I’ve bought it on vinyl (though the first was given to me - I have two) and on CD (ok, three. Four in a day or two). (Ok I give up, I have no idea how many I have. It's less than a dozen.) The new one isn’t rare or a collector’s item. Why would I do this? Am I not grown up now? I’m not a collector or a fan of that maniac sort, never have been.  (No, really. Really!)

The answer is that this record doesn’t represent part of my youth. It is part of my youth. Part of my life happened in that record instead of within the day to day life where I walked and talked. Dozens of records have been important in my life, but none as important as this one. This is the one.

Having been a Springsteen fan will never make me cool. I can live with that.  It wasn’t being cool that made me one when I was 12 and it wasn’t being cool that kept me coming back for more.

Back side cover.
CD version, I dare say.

- You're born with nothing

 and better off that way

Darkness on the edge of town has been if not my Favorite Record, then at least one of my top 5, since the same week I got it. In an amusing twist of fate, it was my rock-o-phobic father who gave me the record – I’m sure he regretted it many times. He’d asked for advice from a colleague who was more down with the kids as to what music he should give his oldest son. The answer was Born to run, on my 11^th birthday. It wasn’t an instant success or instant love but it stuck. The lyrics were on the gatefold sleeve and they were… enough. Yeah, I’ve known the lyrics to Jungleland by heart, straight through, since I was 12. Dad noticed I played the record, and a short while later, he came home with the next Springsteen record. I think it was the day school was out for summer and me and my brother each got a record to congratulate us and encourage us to keep being nice boys. I hadn’t even figured out that there might be more records from the same dude that made Born to run. I was completely unaware of the drama in Springsteen’s life and career. I think this was before The river had come out, probably spring 1979. I put the record on straight away. I noticed the lyrics were there, I saw the sparser and grittier tone on the sleeve. And then I heard the drums opening Badlands for the first time. When the last song died down I knew I had a new favorite song and a new favorite record.

I don’t know how many times I played the record that first day. I know I played it a lot those next weeks, that whole summer. It was something I did on my own, nobody else I knew was listening to these things.

The past months I’ve seen a lot of essays, articles, reviews and interviews that all talk about the dark tone of Darkness, usually compared to the predecessor. It’s not rocket science, the analytic skill needed to see the difference isn’t vast. I saw it, felt it, when I was 12.

I understand this is what the new one looks like.

Darkness was to set the bar for me for what constituted good music. Its balance between musical and lyrical expression. The amount of jaggedness in the music, the balance between melody and rhythm. The relative adrenaline content of expression. Almost every one of my later favorites follow just this pattern. You know how some say Like a rolling stone transformed music? That's what Darkness was to me.

- Some guys they just give up living,

and start dying, 

little by little, piece by piece.

I was 12 and this was what I heard. I think it scarred me a little, made me older than I was. Then again maybe that’s just how I am. I took to that anger and despair and made it my own, instantly. I actually added it to my own experience. It was as though I had lived the lives of those guys in those stories.

In the years afterwards, I often briefly mistook misbehaving for that jagged edge I wanted, that level of honesty in pain that makes a lyric just so and that slight disharmony and off-beat rhythm that keeps the bland melody from getting boring. The human touch that makes music come alive. Like most teenagers I thought that revolt meant hurting others. It was lucky that I had already done my share or revolt – I had screamed there in the darkness on the edge.

- And I hope that you're happy now

I have one other record that competes in my mind for the top #1 spot on my list of the best records in my life, just one. It’s not similar, except for being too rough for soft radio stations and not quite loud enough for wild teenagers making statements. It’s Elvis Costello’s Blood & Chocolate, and overall they share almost every quality. The big difference is that Darkness is done seriously, Blood & Chocolate is this weird mix between agony and laughter, drunken libation and agonizing.  Blood & Chocolate isn’t serious though. It isn’t serious, the way drunken misery isn’t serious. Darkness is sober, and it wouldn’t be cured by getting stiff drunk. Everything would still be there in the morning.

- Till someday they just cut it loose, cut it loose or let it drag 'em down.

Bruce become Bruce with me during those months when I played that record over and over. Eventually The river came out and though I wasn’t old enough to see the shows in Stockholm that was when I stepped over into fandom. I stayed with Bruce from then on, and though I didn’t always pay attention I never really left.

The original.

As I think back on all those years and think about what made me faithful, I’m as certain as ever that what made me stay, what made it possible to stay friendly and loyal to Bruce was that he was always faithful and honest to his listeners.  Not only not doing ass-hat stuff, but always fair and sensible, upstanding and often willing to help, not greedy and on top of it all managing to pull it off without being holier than thou or preachy. Being that, to me, is truly something worth admiring.

I don't know what I've heard before of new material on The Promise. I know I used to have the title song in both live and studio versions. When the Tracks box came out, it didn’t have much that I hadn’t heard before, even the studio tapes had been leaked decades earlier except some very early stuff. Getting decently high quality live recordings from the era that was always my favorite in the bootleg archives would have had me drooling back then and I look forward to listening to it. A good remaster of the main record is the main draw to me though.

So when I bought a CD that cost about ten times what a normal CD should be worth, I did it out of loyalty, I did it because I recognize in myself that this part of my life is something that I can be totally honest about and live with.  I will never wish that this part of my life had not taken place, that something better had gone instead.

There's something magic about that. 

You can buy The Promise box directly from the artist/company. There are a couple versions to choose from. Bruce's official home page is at brucespringsteen.net (I think the lyrics for every single published song is there), and he's also on twitter (@brucespringsteen.net), though I wouldn't go so far as to say he's active on the net in person. The canonical fan site is backstreets.com.

Buying the box directly halfway across the world gets prohibitively expensive (in my case, around SEK 1300 instead of SEK 850); it's available on most online shops. Check out all the alternatives - there's even a free essay download for kindle users. Just so there's no confusion, the expensive CD I bought is "The Promise:  The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story".

Things not to name your blog

Don't name it /dev/random. Don't name it /dev/null either. Both have a tiny fraction of the coolness you ascribe to them and neither have even a tiny fraction of the originality you ascribe to them. No, coolness and originality are not the same thing.

For the nerdliness-challenged, don't name your blog anything that has "PC" in it. It's not cool and if you need help understanding that you either need to not be blogging or you're so cool you don't need any advice anyway. 100% in the first category will believe they belong in the latter one.

Everything really is a bitch.