When the ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ tour kicked off at Shea Hall in Buffalo, N.Y. on May 23, 1978, Bruce Springsteen was looking to restart his career after nearly three years on the sidelines. By the time it ended seven months later, he had cemented his reputation as one of the most electrifying performers in the entirety of rock music.

The story of the problems Springsteen encountered in making ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ is well-known. The success of ‘Born to Run’ in 1975 made him a star, but he soon learned that the contract he signed with manager Mike Appel put his lucrative publishing rights in Appel’s hands. Springsteen sued to break the contract, and Appel counter-sued, getting an injunction barring Springsteen from entering a recording studio.

Unable to make the follow-up to ‘Born to Run,’ Springsteen spent most of 1976 and 1977 on the road. The concerts furthered the E Street Band’s reputation as one of the best live acts in the country, as well as further integrating drummer Max Weinberg, pianist Roy Bittan and guitarist Steven Van Zandt – all of whom joined in 1975 – into the band.

In May 1977, two months after the ‘Lawsuit Tour’ ended, both parties finally came to an agreement, and Springsteen and the E Street Band began the marathon sessions recording ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town.’ A year later — ten days before the album was released — Springsteen returned to the stage.

At the time, three years between releases was practically unheard of. Springsteen has often said that he was worried that the general public had forgotten about him in the interim. With punk and disco capturing the public’s imagination during his layoff, he had no idea how the new material would be received, and channeled that into his performance when he took the stage that night in Buffalo.

“What I remember most was the raw emotion that Bruce presented on stage,” Lawrence Kirsch said about that opening night in ‘The Light in Darkness,’ his 2009 collection of essays about the tour. “I would even say he was a bit tentative and nervous. But by the time he launched into ‘Something in the Night’ and screamed so his body shook, we knew that he was going to take no prisoners that night, even if it killed him, and us.”

Concerts on the ‘Darkness’ tour, which ran between 2 hours and 45 minutes and three hours, were broken into two sets. The first often opened with a cover of an early rock song, such as Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’ or Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues.’ Springsteen then moved into ‘Badlands’ and most of the other songs on ‘Darkness,’ including an extended version of ‘Prove it All Night’ (revived on his current tour) that featured a searing introductory guitar solo. The set closed with ‘Jungleland,’ after which the band took a 15-20 minute break.

Springsteen usually began the second half with a few songs he hadn’t yet released, like ‘Fire,’ ‘Sherry Darling’ or ‘Paradise by the ‘C’,’ a spotlight for saxophonist Clarence Clemons. From there, however, he took fans on a roller-coaster ride through his then-small catalog. ‘She’s the One’ often began with a few verses of ‘Not Fade Away’ or Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona.’ Then it was ‘Growin’ Up,’ which featured Springsteen making up a story dealing with his own frustrations as a teenager with rock and roll dreams before launching into the final verse.

Then it was on to ‘Backstreets,’ which, as it had during the ‘Lawsuit Tour,’ included a stream-of-consciousness break down before the coda that became known as ‘Sad Eyes.’ The section involved Springsteen describing a betrayal by a lover that could easily be interpreted as his anger towards Appel, which took the already-emotional song to new heights. The second set closed, as always, with ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight).’ ‘Born to Run,’ ‘Because the Night’ and a cover of Eddie Floyd’s ‘Raise Your Hand’ formed the bulk of the encores on most nights.

A handful of the dates on the ‘Darkness’ tour — most notably Los Angeles (July 7), Cleveland (Aug. 9), Passaic, N.J. (Sept. 19), and San Francisco (Dec. 15) — were broadcast over radio, and the tapes from those shows remain among the most beloved Springsteen bootlegs. In addition, the performance of ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)’ from the July 8 concert in Phoenix was filmed and broadcast the next year on an ABC television special called ‘Heroes of Rock and Roll.’

By the time the tour ended in Cleveland after more than 110 shows on Jan. 1, 1979, Springsteen had graduated from theaters and ballrooms to arenas in his biggest markets. He would soon be filling stadiums worldwide on the heels of the success of ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ but the ‘Darkness’ tour remains the favorite of many of his most devout fans.

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GIVING
The generosity of donors, volunteers and auxiliaries has made the MUHC what it is today…these precious funds are used for the benefit of current and future patients at the MGH. We are collecting funds to benefit two MGH departments, the Emergency/Trauma, and the Colorectal Department.

To help raise funds we are raffling off a brand new signed copy (by the publisher) of For You: Original Stories and Photographs by Bruce Springsteen’s LegendaryFans.

If you missed your chance to purchase a copy of this limited-edition book, or even if you just want a second copy to keep as a collector’s item, now is your opportunity. First edition copies of “For You” often sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, when you can find a copy.

Participants can enter the contest as many times as they wish and all proceeds go to the Montreal General Hospital. The book, autographed by the publisher, will be shipped to the winner free of charge anywhere in the world, so everyone is encouraged to enter.

You can help the fund raising efforts for the 2013 campaign by participating in the raffle for a copy of For You. All monies collected will be donated to the Montreal General Hospital.

The Montreal General Hospital, founded in 1821, enjoys a distinguished world reputation, as well as an impressive history of community service. The Montreal General Hospital, a pioneer hospital in North America, introduced teaching at the bedside and founded the first medical school in Canada — the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University.

The hospital has remained allied as a teaching hospital for the century and a half of the Faculty’s existence. The Montreal General Hospital is dedicated to patient care through diagnosis, treatment, research and teaching.

All proceeds go the Montreal General Hospital.

Last three days to enter, raffle ends April 7.

Good Luck!!

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Seemingly the most notable piece of information gleaned from David Remnick’s celebrated 19,000-word profile of Bruce Springsteen (We Are Alive, Bruce Springsteen at 62) was that the band-leading singer-songwriter has been in psychotherapy for 30 years, in treatment for depression. That this detail warranted special press attention beyond the existence of the piece itself, tells us everything about a culture that still perceives a weakness or taboo in mental illness.

That the Boss—a giant of a man who has shouldered such burdens in song as the aspirations of the working class, the twin notions of freedom and democracy, not to mention love in its many guises from the destructive to the transcendent (so, just the basics!)—could be felled by the black dog as easily and mercilessly as the rest of us was perhaps a truth too foreign to grasp, despite the fact that in Springsteen’s lyrics it has always been in plain sight. Depression, a life half spent covering up, is what Born In The USA (pop’s most egregiously misappropriated song) is explicitly about.
The Born in The USA album itself is littered with some impressively brutalizing misery, anchored by a narrator ‘just tired and bored’ with himself, who yearns to be another person altogether (‘Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.’) I’m On Fire is about anxiety-ridden fever dreams brought on by an unfulfilled carnal fixation, a dull knife rending ‘a six inch valley through the middle of my skull,’; I’m Going Down, is about a man unable to leave a woman who no longer loves him; Downbound Train sees its protagonist in the grip of another dream, this one where his lover has not yet left him, gone with ‘a ticket for that central line.’ Glory Days’ narrator is trapped in a bar patroned exclusively by young adults whose lives peaked in high school; Cover Me is about literally barricading yourself against the world with the one person in it who maybe understands you, (‘Whole world is rough and it’s just getting rougher. Bolt the door and cover me.’) The men of all these stories display a vulnerability at odds with Springsteen’s public persona of the Herculean alpha who is at once an everyman, though they appear on almost every album he has ever released.

The E Street Band borrowed a nifty trick from The Cure on Born in the USA: by dressing up even the most anguished lyrics in irresistible pop hooks, their intent was made more explicit, not less; their strike to the heart smoothed by way of stealth delivery. Springsteen’s intention for the album was to reach as many people as possible with it. It came to deliver success well beyond that already ambitious desire.

However, the misery was only compounded for Springsteen personally when the album propelled him to the stratospheric, rarified heights of global rock superstardom. With its Annie Leibovitz cover image, seven Top Ten singles, 20 million copies sold and Rolling Stone branding him ‘Voice of the Decade’, the album encapsulated the bygone era of the blockbuster record as cultural juggernaut that peaked in the 1980s. The irony was not lost on the singer that his writing and singing about the raw socioeconomic deals dealt to an entire generation post-Vietnam—which had eroded not only basic fairness but hope, essentially, for a life lived on one’s own terms—had brought him untold personal wealth. At the time Springsteen said of this sudden access to money, ‘There were moments where it was very confusing.’

Nearly thirty years later he would describe this to Remnick in much starker terms, explaining that his live shows in the ‘80s were driven by ‘pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred.’ And that even before the super-heated success of Born in the USA he had entered therapy to try and curb what he viewed as an hereditary depression handed down by his father. The hours-long shows were a way to blot out the darker urges of his psyche, at least for as long as they lasted.

Though we can’t be certain as to which denomination of psychotherapy’s broad church Springsteen personally adheres, we might agree that the chief aim of its project for those who engage with it is the psychic unification of the self. The sense-making of one’s life and past through the imposition of a cohesive, ongoing narrative upon the oftentimes chaotic and fragmentary nature of existence, in order to better understand our motives and actions and to actively cast a future of our choosing. The dialogue of psychotherapy is at core one of transformation; in creativity it can specifically focus on the transformation of lack—of say, a cogent sense of self, of good-enough parents, of material safety—into meaning. This sense of lack, of a perceived sense of not being whole, can fuel great fires of creativity, the writing of a great number of songs.

The dialogue between client and therapist can last for years, or in Springsteen’s case, decades. It is a relationship where one looks to the other for signposts and guidance thereby fulfilling the lack of in-family role models. There is a kind of devotion, a deep commitment to this relationship that can craft so much meaning where previously there was none. It can be a life-long palimpsest, constantly written over. Perhaps somewhat like the bond between a band and its audience, following and fuelling each other for almost forty years. This is what people mean when they say that a band scored the soundtrack of their life.

I am not a religious person but I was from a young age attracted to stadium rock shows. The sense of being lost to and sensorially overwhelmed by something much bigger than myself, to be lost in self-erasure, appealed to me greatly. This experience is described by many at a Springsteen show, as akin to ‘going to church.’ That this great, heaving throng of people are being held in sway by one person, essentially, and their band is something that must never sit quite right in those performer’s minds, I imagine. To be the object of tens of thousands of people’s simultaneously projected aspiration must, by the nature of power transference, dement you in at least some way. Probably enough to land any right-thinking person in therapy.

I’m too young to have grown to adulthood with Bruce Springsteen as my contemporary, though I will when pressed admit to a profound envy of anyone who did. Instead I found him some decades later when tracing back through the vast swathe of artists he influenced and who couldn’t exist without him. So this night at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne is the first time I have ever seen him play live, and he is 63. This is a temporal fact not borne out by Springsteen’s apparent physicality of a much younger man.

Original members of the E Street band have since moved off this mortal coil, and guitarist Steven Van Zandt, who for many years was better known to me as Tony Soprano’s consigliore Silvio, is not on this tour, instead replaced by Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine. His band soundtracked my adolescence far more than Springsteen did, and though ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,’ might lack the lyrical subtlety of Born to Run, essentially their message is the same. Their pairing on stage is apt and Morello ably rises to the challenge of playing in his wildly contrasting, singular style alongside someone who so clearly influenced his own politics.

The seventeen-piece band now includes Clarence Clemons’ nephew Jake on lead saxophone, with percussion, keys, a trio of back-up singers, four guitar players, bass, violin and accordion, all held down by Max Weinberg’s load-bearing drums, beat out with an almost immobile, merciless precision like a carving in Mount Rushmore come to life with arms.

Springsteen the performer is more mythmaker than man, and he does little to dispel the crypto-religious overtones of the show by assuming the role of revivalist preacher in a soul revue, imploring the crowd throughout the night in a series of increasingly fervent calls and response, ‘Can you feel the spirit?!’ He runs around the floor of the arena, wheat fields of arms reaching out in his wake. On the stage, he leans out over the first few rows of fans offering up his guitar to be played. Near the end of the more than three-hour set, he submerges his head in a bucket of cold water sitting on the drum riser, and sponges almost as much over his neck and down the back of his shirt, which will be dry again in minutes. He stands over the crowd at the lip of the stage and twists the sponge over their heads, leaving them baptized and likely, grateful for a few seconds of cool relief from the heat of the lights and each other and from the frenzy they have been gleefully whipped into.

Legs are exhausted from standing and dancing—during these hours there hasn’t been even the shortest break. It seemed impossible that the field of energy conjured by the first chord, the physically tangible crackle of expectation that greeted Springsteen’s first appearance on the stage could be sustained for that whole time. But it was. It came to somehow pass through itself and into another realm of ecstatic receptivity when the encore ran through without pause: Born In The USA, Born To Run, and Dancing In The Dark, with each ratcheting up the excitement on the last. When the show then topped out with Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, I would not have been surprised if the houselights revealed the entire arena’s worth of people falling upon each other in almost post-coital exhaustion, elated.

‘For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself,’ Springsteen said to Remnick when explaining his relationship with his audience. ‘Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that […] People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.’

And it’s true. I still feel dazed a day later, scratching around feebly to get it into words. The force of this show will stay with me much longer than that, for however long we have to wait for the particular alchemy of this man and his band to come around again. That might not be for another ten years, though we hope not, by which point, will Springsteen still be touring the world at the age of 73, casting out and recasting demons as life-affirming spectacle?

It seems impossible for it to be any other way. No retreat, baby. No surrender.

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When I was 19, I thought Paddy McAloon had been so clever. He had watched Bruce Springsteen’s kingdom become an empire through the mid-80s and responded with with an acerbic little song critiquing Springsteen’s lyrical preoccupations. “Look at us now, quit driving,” he sang on what became a hit single for Prefab Sprout, “some things hurt more, much more than cars and girls.” Yeah! You showed him! That big, bloated American with his will to rock power and his trite tunes about good ol’ boys in Cadillacs.