Bruce Springsteen – The Promise (Columbia)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
The lavish reissue of Born To Run set a pretty high standard, but the dusting off given to Bruce Springsteen’s downtrodden 1978 masterpiece Darkness on the Edge of Town resides in another league completely. Not only has the album in question been treated to a lovingly handled remastering job and found itself packaged with all manner of behind the scenes documentaries and classic concert footage (it’s a six disc set in all), but the outtakes... well, there are so many of them, and they’re of such consistently high quality, that they warrant an entire 2CD set to themselves. And thus, The Promise – basically, it’s like having a couple of new LPs from Springsteen at the peak of his powers, rather than having to sift through a dozen duff tracks just to find there were only two good songs on 2009’s Working on a Dream after all.
Darkness on the Edge of Town was Bruce Springsteen’s fourth album, his first after Born To Run catapulted him toward superstardom. But in the period before its release, the man we know as The Boss certainly wasn’t calling all the shots. Its eventual unveiling in the Spring of ’78 marked the end of three years of legal disputes with his former manager Mike Appel, a marathon contractual scuffle that meant Springsteen and his band were forbidden from releasing any new material. Personally, Bruce reacted with anger and disillusion at the way the law and money were suddenly impacting on his ability to make rock and roll (“when the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my dreams”, he divulges on this collection’s epic title track). The topics for the songs that became Darkness... reflected this, bravely eschewing the hopes and dreams of the characters in the record that made him a rock ‘n roll star and instead focusing on a the worries of a far more despondent crowd, one who didn’t seem to be looking forward to the future much at all.
Yet as a band leader and performer rather than a lyricist, or indeed regular guy, Bruce made sure that his backing troupe, The E Street Band, were never short of work. Their touring effort became herculean, and though they weren’t allowed to release any of what they were working on in the studio, they certainly laid down a lot of it. The septet became tighter and tighter both as friends and musicians, and The Promise shows us exactly how that process sounded. Springsteen fanatics (here’s a surprise, I am one!) will adore all of this fascinating twenty one track collection, one I rate as highly as anything he’s released since at least Tunnel of Love. But for those who take only a passing interest, as mean as I can be is to say that there is at the very least one lengthy disc’s worth of material here that, if sequenced correctly, would stand as one of Springsteen’s strongest albums.
Whilst they shouldn’t be viewed as concept records, the best Bruce Springsteen albums (up until he mistakenly abandoned the idea completely with the 1992 double release of Human Touch and Lucky Town) are bound around a certain theme, be it the wide eyed expectations of youth, the harsh realities of growing up or, later, divorce. They’re often also very character driven. For example, whereas the fellas in Born To Run would crack open a few beers under the stars whilst lying on the bonnet of Daddy’s Chevrolet, the guys and dolls in Darkness would scramble for change in a dive bar, crying in to their brews until chucking out time. But The Promise is not devoid of hope in the way that Darkness so eloquently explored – and that’s exactly the reason that these tracks, excellent though many of them are, were not destined to make the cut. His albums were not simply collections of the ten songs he had written since the last one - there was a story to be told, and the chapters The Promise brings to light simply didn’t fit the narrative.
Or at least, not in this form. The Promise’s opener ‘Racing In The Street (’78)’ is a rollicking full band version of the forlorn Darkness standout – certainly more bombastic, it does prove that contrary to prevailing opinion, Bruce does know when to tone it down when it works best, this being a take that would have stood completely at odds with the one you’ll be more familiar with from Darkness. Similarly, ‘Candy’s Boy’ would eventually become the excellent LP highlight ‘Candy’s Room’, and whilst it does stand out admirably in this incarnation, it’s more interesting as a curio to Springsteen enthusiasts, and isn’t destined to become anyone’s favourite Boss tune.
There are many things here that could indeed perform that function, however. In need of cash (believe it or not) and seemingly burping out hits, Bruce spent much of this enforced hiatus from releasing music by writing it for other people, two notable instances of which are included here. His version of ‘Because The Night’, written for and taken to the higher reaches of the charts by Patti Smith, is featured in pretty much the version that the E Street Band have since been playing out on the road for decades, and as such is a thorough delight. The best thing here however is the excellent ‘Fire’ - a bubblegum pop song taken to number one by The Pointer Sisters, it shows an absolute mastery of pop music, Bruce delivering a tale of trying to convince a woman to give him a kiss that could come across as creepy, but thanks to his best Elvis Presley impression, actually settles instead on genuinely endearing.
That one’s on CD2 - certainly the much more accessible of the pair of discs here, it opens with ‘Save My Love’, a track written in 1977 but not recorded until 2010 (for the very purpose of this compilation). As well as being as melodically winning as anything in his back catalogue, it shows that Bruce Springsteen, now 61, is still capable of putting in a performance befitting a man in his mid twenties with nothing but fire in his belly. It’s just a wonder he chooses to channel such force so rarely in his new material these days. Hearing him and the E Street Band have this much fun is the biggest treat – party tunes like ‘Ain’t Good Enough’ with its call and response hooks and honky tonk piano deliver relentlessly upbeat thrills, and numbers such as the joyous ‘Talk To Me’ prove that even though Bruce might have been in a pretty dark place at the time, there’s nothing like playing rock music with your friends to exorcise some demons. Far from the much talked about sour mood of its creators at the time, much of The Promise sounds like a real hoot.
Throughout it, the band shimmer in a Phil Spector-like manner that does sound gorgeous, but also lends itself a little too readily to overly sentimental numbers like ‘Someday We’ll Be Together’. Sounding like a hammed up version of The River’s ‘Independence Day’, complete with full choir, the people who dislike Springsteen do so because of songs like this. Sure, the point of The Promise isn’t to convert such fellows, and there is a lot here (most of it on CD1, oddly) that will interest fans and few beyond that strongly devoted bunch. Things like ‘Outside Looking In’ or the slightly maudlin but not without charm ‘One Way Street’ are of the quality of great B-Sides, and on the likes of ‘Rendezvous’, E Street Band fanatics will delight in hearing that on the studio version of a track the band continue to dust off live now and again, they sound as virulent as they continue to do in concert. Remember, this was a band who out of necessity were playing gigs a lot at the time, and they sound great precisely because of that fact.
Even though he was only three albums in to his career at the time many of these songs were being recorded, Bruce Springsteen the person was very aware of having already become Bruce ‘The Boss’ Springsteen, superstar. Though he would later choose to embrace it, and in doing so became arguably one of the four most famous people of the 1980s (Jacko, Madonna and Prince being the others – right?), in 1975 he was seemingly rather afraid of self parody. The people mentioned in ‘The Promise’ do things like work in diners, play in rock and roll bands, follow dreams that won’t come true – he even brings up one of his previous hits in it, ominously crooning “Thunder Road? Baby, you were so right – there’s something dying down on the highway tonight...”. Whilst it’s hugely affecting with the benefit of hindsight, too much of this kind of thing would have made Darkness a very different record – arguably a worse one.
As I hope comes through, I like Bruce Springsteen a lot. The few criticisms I can chuck at The Promise – its odd sequencing, its all-too schmaltzy numbers, the fact that we had to wait 32 years to hear his version of ‘Fire’ – I do so precisely because I think being able to notice such things is part of being a true fan of the guy. I love his music like it's a family member, and am able to spot its flaws without having that diminished - I feel somewhat parental towards it, despite it being many decades my senior. Yet flawed and fan-centric though it certainly is, it’s largely brilliant, and certainly the record released this year that I’ll be listening to most throughout my life.
Artists in this article: Bruce Springsteen
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