Free The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper

tracks here reappear in slightly different forms on Darkness and later albums (“Candy’s Boy,” “Racing in the Street (’78),” the opening refrain of “Spanish Eyes” would later appear in “I’m On Fire”). It’s easy to hear that some of these could have been hits for Springsteen—and wonder why they’re absent from Darkness . As an album, Darkness is lean and ready, marks of the influence of Springsteen’s recent conversion to both punk rock and Hank Williams; many of these tracks are ballads and polished anthems with large debts to the formalist sensibilities of Spector, Lieber and Stoller, King and Goff. More than their sound, what kept these cuts off Darkness is that the story that Springsteen wanted to tell was a moral one.
    Darkness was an attempt to ask impossibly big questions about life and liberty in America, what it meant to be a man, the meaning of work in a capitalist system, and, as Springsteen explained later, how to deal with sin in a good life. He spent five months in the studio with the E Street Band working out the hungry ghosts of his Catholic boyhood, until he found a way contain them in Darkness ’ anxious blaze. He refused the gleaming pop tracks and lovelorn balladry that make up The Promise —turning “Because the Night” over to Patti Smith because he knew it was a hit, a song that would define him, and he wasn’t interested in that.
    Whether Springsteen was seeking to become rock’s beleaguered blue-collar conscience or he just wanted to be more than a standard-issue rock star is debatable, but it’s safe to assume that one doesn’t endeavor to spend years laboring over the allegorical language with which to best illuminate the spiritual longing of the American underclass if you aren’t fully convinced of your own powers. Whether Springsteen was interested in being rock’s great moralist is beside the point— Darkness is what earned him the job.
    Listening to The Promise it’s easy to understand that if any of these tracks would have made it onto Darkness it would changed the record’s entire character. These are songs about kisses (“Fire,” “The Little Things”), 14 of them are about his feelings for a girl. All this lovin’ and radio-listenin’ and car-buildin’ on The Promise doesn’t emotionally square with a Darkness track like “Adam Raised a Cain”—a song about shouldering the legacy you inherit from your parents—or the album’s reckoning, “The Promised Land.” Even as desperate as “Because the Night” is—with Springsteen sounding so plaintive and vulnerable—it would have worked against the macho confidence he exudes on “Candy’s Room.” “The Promise” chronicles disenfranchisement from the American Dream and could have fit, but its bathos would have undercut the hope that is Darkness ’ covenant with the listener.
    While The Promise comes as a standalone double disc, it’s perhaps better to take it in its other form, sandwiched within the context of the Darkness on the Edge of Town box set; a reproduction of Springsteen’s notebook from the sessions, three CDs ( The Promise and Darkness ) and three DVDs, including a making-of Darkness DVD that is culled from archival footage from rehearsals and sessions and a phenomenal vintage concert performance. Seeing the scope of Springsteen’s bright-eyed intent and his commitment, to Darkness ’ message, to his music, to his talent and his fans—believing in the power of music to communicate something so complex—makes the man seem heroic. By aiming to make such moral music, he made a new mimetic mold. Here we have the complete package, of all that you’d really want your rock stars to be—the longing loverman, the prove-it-all-night rock star, and the regular guy staking his guts to the stage, the craftsman capable of putting all your too-familiar restlessness into a song you’d wanna hear a thousand times.
    The album’s emotional truth mirrors its political one. The