Darkness on the Edge of Town

Even though it's disappointing in not living up to how much actual in the studio footage it contains (albeit still more than most of these kind of documentaries), I've been watching The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town on a loop since it's on HBO Demand lately.

Most uber-Bruce fans I know consider Darkness to be their favorite Bruce album, but while there's some great things on it, I've never been able to get over the fact that so much of it is just, for lack of a worse word when it comes to rock 'n roll, dullsville.

Badlands is an all-time Top 10 Bruce song (although it contains a line that might be seen as one that belies the theme of the album, "it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive"), and the title song of the album, I love.

Candy's Room is incredible in the beginning, and the "baby if you wanna be wild" bit is one of my all-time favorite moments in rock, much less Bruce, history.  But then it seems to fizzle out into nowhere; the song feels incomplete to me.

Racing in the Street could be a great song, but it's marred by having a much, much weaker facsimile of itself a mere two songs before it, Something in the Night, which ruins it for me.

The Promised Land is for some reason a Bruce fan favorite, but I can't imagine a more boring, mid-tempo, blech song.  Same goes for Prove It All Night, although that gets a bump because live it's so monstrous (but, again, on the album it's fucking maddeningly mid-tempo/dullsville.)

Factory I like.  Lyrically it's kind of "Bruce 101," but it at least sounds different.  I like that one.

Adam Raised a Cain and Streets of Fire have always rung to me as cheap, by the numbers "Bruce potboilers!"  We get it: you didn't get along with your dad, and you're angry.  Great.  Got it.

Anyhoo.  I'm not saying there's no value to the album, when it's great it's phenomenal, but the dullness of so much of it is baffling to me. 

Another gripe of mine is not including Don't Look Back on the album.  Which only adds to the album's curiosity for me, since if it was on the album it'd prolly be my second favorite song on it behind Badlands, and yet it might not even be my favorite song titled Don't Look Back!

Anyway.  Hey, I'm just saying.

And it turns out The Boss is an asshole anyway  ;)

We met at the Paramount Theater in Asbury Park, where he was tirelessly rehearsing his band, continually promising breaks that never came. Instead, he was giving them detailed instructions on performing 2005's "Devils & Dust."

The band looked exhausted. They'd been going for five hours straight. They were not so much standing as they were sagging.

"It's lunchtime," Patti Scialfa suggested.

"Let's just see what we got,” Springsteen pressed.

"Maybe we should do lunch first,” she hinted again.

"One more time, then we'll all take a break."

Wearily, horns were put to lips, violin bows to strings, fingers to accordion buttons. When it comes to energy level and focus, Springsteen, even in rehearsal, remained super-human.

Interestingly, my junior year of high school we got a new football coach, who, having only coached college before, was such a hardass that by the times the games began that season we went from over 40 kids on the team to 16 (I tried to fucking quit, but couldn't!), and months later some of us were in the gym waiting for the basketball bus to pick us up for an away game, and he was playing basketball with his two kids, who were like 5 and 7. The 5 year-old asked for a break so he could get some water, and Coach said "No breaks. Suck it up."  Interesting, because while being such a slavedriver during practice, Bruce talks about his kids during the ensuing interview.

Not many people in your position can talk about their childrens' homework assignments like that.
I'm enjoying their person-ness, you know. I enjoy having their ideas in the house, and the give and take of that. The other stuff of being a parent is all the same: You're doing a lot of chauffeuring, you’re doing a lot of driving around, you're looking a little closer to make sure everybody’s okay with this, that, and the other thing. And it's wonderful having them at that place where they have their ideas about all that. It really just graces the house.