Bruce Springsteen Raises Cain

Last night, as we were getting into the car after the KMET interview, Bruce began to talk about the reviews Darkness on the Edge of Town has been getting. It is a subject on which he qualifies as something of an expert: more has been written about him — and about what has been written on him — than any other rock performer of recent years, with the possible exception of Mick Jagger. The miracle is, I guess, that the scars barely show — instead Springsteen looks at the press with avid interest.

"It's a weird thing about those reviews," Bruce says. "You can find any conceivable opinion in them: one guy says the record's exactly like Born to Run and it's great, the next one says it's not like Born to Run and it's great, the next one says, it's not like Born to Run and it's awful." This amuses him. The nearly unanimous opinion that the album is grim and depressing doesn't.

It's the title, I suggest. "I know, I know," he says impatiently. "But I put in the first few seconds of 'Badlands,' the first song on the album, those lines about 'I believe in the love and the hope and the faith.' It's there on all four corners of the album" By which he means the first and last songs on each side: "Badlands" and "Racing in the Street," "The Promised Land" and the title song. He is clearly distressed: he meant Darkness to be "relentless," not grim.

Later, I ask him why the album lacks the humor that buoys his shows. "In the show, it's a compilation of all the recorded stuff," he says in the halting way he uses when he's taking something seriously. "If you go back to The Wild and Innocent, 'Rosalita' is there, and all that stuff. But when I was making this particular album, I just had a specific thing in mind. And one of the important things was that it had to be just a relentless... just a barrage of the particular thing.

"I got an album's worth of pop songs, like 'Rendezvous' and early English-style stuff. I got an album's worth right now, and I'm gonna get it out somehow. I wanna do an album that's got ten or eleven things like that on it. But I didn't feel it was the right time to do that, and I didn't want to sacrifice any of the intensity of the album by throwing in 'Rendezvous,' even though I knew it was popular from the show."

The other criticism that is easily made of Darkness concerns the repetition of certain images: cars, street life, abandonment by or of women, family and friends. Those who like this call it style; those who don't say Springsteen is drilling a dry hole. But perhaps Springsteen's greatest and most repeated image is the lie.

"It's hard to explain without getting too heavy. What it is, it's the characters' commitment. In the face of all the betrayals, in the face of all the imperfections that surround you in whatever kind of life you lead, it's the characters' refusal to let go of their own humanity, to let go of their own belief in the other side. It's a certain loss of innocence — more so than in the other albums."

I drove out to the Forum this afternoon with Obie. Obie is twenty-five, and she has been Bruce Springsteen's biggest fan for more than a decade. When he was still just a local star, she waited overnight for tickets to his shows to make certain she'd have perfect seats. She is now secretary to Miami Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen's guitarist and manager/producer of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. This means what while Springsteen is on tour, Obie is the de facto manager of the Asbury Jukes. But she's also something more. She makes some of the jackets and suits Bruce wears onstage. She is also a historian; there are a thousand Asbury Park legends behind her twinkling eyes. More than anything, she is a fan who counts the days between Springsteen shows. Her loyalty is rewarded. Whenever she comes to a show, in any town, the front-row center is reserved for her.

It is partly this that makes Bruce Springsteen so attractive: he is surrounded by real-life characters that form the kind of utopian community most of us lost when we graduated high school; one of the reasons Springsteen is such a singular performer is that he has never lost touch with this decidedly noncosmopolitan gang.

Part of the legend is the E Street Band. "Ya know, you can tell by looking at 'em," Bruce explains to me, "that this isn't a bunch of guys with a whole lot in common. But somehow the music cuts right through all that."

There's a lot to cut. Bassist Garry Tallent is a consummate rockabilly addict who looks the part. He's been known to use Brylcreem. Organist Danny Federici has an angel face that could pass for the kind of tough guy Harvey Keitel plays in Fingers. Pianist Roy Bittan and drummer Max Weinberg are seasoned pros, veterans of recording studios and Broadway pit bands. Miami Steve Van Zandt is a perpetual motion machine, a comic version of Keith Richards' Barbary pirate act, with a slice of small-town-boy-made-good on the side. And Clarence Clemons, last of all, dwells in a land all his own, not quite like the universe the rest of us inhabit, though it is seemingly available to all comers. Clemons transforms any room he enters, as a six-foot plus black man with the bulk of a former football player often can do, but even in his own digs at the Marquis, there's something special happening — his hospitality is perfect, and it is in Clarence's room that the all-night part is most likely to run.

Bruce stands distinctly outside this group. "It's weird," he says, "'cause it's not really a touring band or just a recording band. And it's definitely me, I'm a solo act, y'know." But there is also a sense in which Bruce Springsteen does not mesh in any society, and it has a great deal to do with what makes him so obsessive about his music.

Before he landed a record contract, all of the Asbury Park musicians held day jobs — Garry Tallent worked in a music store, Clemons was a social worker, Van Zandt was in the construction union. The exception, always, was Bruce, who never held any other job, apparently because he could not conceive of doing anything else. At age eight, when he first heard Presley, lightning struck, and when he picked up the guitar at thirteen, another bolt hit him. "When I got the guitar," he told me Wednesday night, "I wasn't getting out of myself. I was already out of myself. I knew myself, and I did not dig me. I was getting into myself."

By fourteen, he was in his first band; by sixteen, he was so good that when he practiced in his manager's garage, neighborhood kids would stand on milk crates at the windows with their noses pressed to the glass, just to hear. The only other things besides music that ever meant much to him, Springsteen says, were surfing and cars. But nothing — even girls — ever got in the way of his obsession with his music; there is a certain awe in the way that people who have known him for many years speak of his single-minded devotion to playing. It's as if he always knew his destiny, and while this hasn't made him cold — he is one of the friendliest people I know — it has given him considerable distance from everyday relationships. One does not ever think of Bruce Springsteen married and settled down, raising a family, having kids; that would be too much monkey business.

What keeps the band so tight is the two-to-three hour sound check before each gig. Today's began at 3:30 p.m. — it's a 7:30 show on the ticket — and didn't end until nearly seven. In part, these are informal band rehearsals, with Bruce working up new material: as we enter the hall at five, he is singing Buddy Holly's "Rave On," a number he has never done live. But there's more to it than that.