I'm getting repetitive. However this Friday I am heading out of the city to The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey for a concert that I hope will be one for the ages. The cover band "Tramps Like Us" is performing the entire set list from Springsteen's legendary 1978 Darkness on the Edge of Town tour, specifically September 19th 1978 performed at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic New Jersey.
If you don't know about the Stone Pony it was one of the venues where Bruce got his start and has been known to drop in and play some songs with the house band "Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes" who never gained widespread success but started the Jersey Shore sound at the time of the Boss' beginning.
There has been books written about the background to the album "Darkness on the Edge of Town" the biblical scope of the album and legends and mysteries spoken of about the subsequent tour. In short he was personally struggling and on the cusp of losing his career which was just taking off. He was looking for a more toned down sound, more real and sharp. His writing also took on a different form from visualizations of grandeur and hope to a realization that those hopes are usually crushed. Basically the characters in "Born to Run" grew up and realized it wasn't as easy as pulling out of here to win.
However instead of it being an album whining about what could have been it became a cry of self reliance and steadfastness in perfect Thoreauian and Emerson defiance. To me it encapsulates every personal belief I have held my entire life and hence when I listen to it or watch him perform my emotions run the range until at the very end I am left crying. But not in defeat, rather in bliss and total contentment, with security in my faith and a renewed vow to maintain it. In the album "Darkness" Bruce says more than most all classical philosophers and writers in history. Combined.
Songs such as "Promised Land" and the refrain Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man, "Factory" ...and you just better believe boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight, "Something in the Night" ...you're born with nothing and better off that way, "Prove it All Night" where in the pre verse jamming he walks up to the mike and says I remember when I was a kid, I used to think, as long as I went to bed and said my prayers everything was gonna be alright but you find out you gotta prove it all night every night. This is Sisyphus relinquishing the rock and telling the gods to fuck off, it is the acceptance of what you've been given and defying all in the face of it.
How could it not tear you up inside to hear verses such as:
from Darkness:
Some folks are born into a good life
Other folks get it anyway anyhow
I lost my money and I lost my wife
Them things don't seem to matter much to me now
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
from Candy's Room:
She says baby if you wanna be wild
you got a lot to learn, close your eyes
Let them melt, let them fire, let them burn
Cause in the darkness there'll be hidden worlds that shine
When I hold Candy close she makes these hidden worlds mine
from Street of Fire:
When the night's quiet and you don't care anymore,
And your eyes are tired and there's
someone at your door
And you realize you wanna let go
And the weak lies and the cold walls you embrace
Eat at your insides and leave you face to face with
Streets of fire
These songs and verses are not only part of the American Canon but part of the American himself. The ideals of freedom and refusal to bow down, to surrender. Simple, terse songs titles with simple, terse, tight lyrics combined with razor sharp guitar chords that don't beg but demand to be heard. In concert, his ramblings, contorted facial expressions and nuclear energy...Combined, they have to be witnessed to be believed.
In every show there was my Daddy and millions of others walking through the factory gates in the rain at four in the morning, the widower shaking off the theft of a loved one, the man pining for someone deemed inaccessible. They bleed out through every chord of the tele, every note of the big man's brass, Max's rim shots and the epic glockenspiel that became a hallmark of his early sound stretching the artistic narrative into the spiritual.
Of course I'm not going to see Bruce and the band themselves. Clarence is dead as is Dan Federici, though even if they were alive...I'm still going to see a cover band. Having said that they are attempting to replicate one of the greatest shows in rock and roll history and I'll stand in front of that hall in Cleveland and shit on anyone who thinks different, starts talking about Kiss, or any of those other bullshit Broadway show bands. If I had a son he'd be going with me, I don't now but when I do the bootleg from the original will be his life long syllabus for all anyone needs to know how to succeed in this world can be found in this three and a half hour show.
