There’s the guy they already call Boss.
He’s young and somewhat scrawny with curly black hair and a propensity to write and rewrite. He has a specific sparse, cinematic sound in his head, with a lean, angry vibe to counter the “wall of sound” popular at the time.
He knows just how he wants everything, down to the drumbeat that’s bothering him. It’s giving off the hint of a stick hitting a drum and he’s intent on articulating something richer. The band members try everything, including putting the drum in an elevator to get a purer sound.
“Stick!” the 20-something Bruce Springsteen says after each take, rejecting the offending sound. “Stick!”
It’s a little moment in the new Springsteen documentary coming to HBO, but instructive.
“Drum sounds were always bigger in my head,” the now 61-year-old Springsteen says in the film, looking back on the days when he and the E Street Band worked intently on their fourth album. “We were chasing something unobtainable.”
The chase is on in “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town,’ ” the remarkably intimate story about the creation of that fourth album.
The specifics of his artistic intent, the shaping of sounds and editing of words, puts the album in new perspective, offering a new appreciation. It’s also a very entertaining look at a modern master.
“The Promise,” first screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, debuts Thursday, 7-8:30 p.m. on HBO.
Springsteen’s followers at the time didn’t know that, after his breakthrough “Born to Run,” the “Darkness” album would represent an artistic turning point. Devotees, those who even today swear by “E Street Radio” via satellite, knew they liked the less commercial sound of the new LP, but couldn’t articulate what was changing.
“A meditation”
Springsteen wouldn’t have been able to at the time, either. Now, he’s a big deconstructionist, getting philosophical about how he and the guys argued the virtues of a certain formalist style versus a garage sound; how “adult concerns” overtook the old ideas of “born to run,” and how “Darkness” became “a meditation on where are you going to stand.”
Filmmaker Thom Zimny collaborated with Springsteen on the film, using rehearsal footage shot in the studio with the band from 1976 to 1978, and overlaying the archival bits with current commentary from Springsteen. Lyrics are spelled out on screen. An array of pictures, then and now, tracks the man and his times, focusing on the hard work in production rather than in the concert hall.
A six-disc box-set reissue is planned for next month, including previously unreleased outtakes and a DVD of the Zimny documentary.
“I wanted to be great”
To see Springsteen as a young man, focused on creating “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” is to appreciate him in his role of a blue-collar American finding himself. “More than rich, more than famous, more than happy, I wanted to be great,” Springsteen says.
The film is self-actualization therapy with a beat.
To hear him talk about his art in critical, analytical terms is to understand his craving to be taken seriously. The music ultimately tends to excuse the pretension.
What rock music promised, he says, is “the never-ending now.” The three minutes spent inside a pop song represent a heightened state of living. He sounds like he’s in pursuit of some Greek form, the ideal of his art.
After a forced hiatus and legal problems with his former manager (detailed in the film), the fourth album represented a shift, Springsteen says. He was “developing an artistic intelligence instead of instinct.”
His prolific output at the time amazed and frustrated his bandmates. “Bruce would write five songs to get one,” Clarence Clemons notes. Rough drafts and notebooks full of lyrics are displayed as proof.
Apparently we are in a time of rock-artist naval-gazing.
Springsteen calls his album “a tone poem.” The 2006 film on Bob Dylan by Martin Scorsese, “No Direction Home,” which aired on PBS, similarly studied the poet at work with pen and paper as much as with guitar and harmonica. Next month, John Lennon gets the same treatment on PBS, posthumously recounting his New York City period.
Our rock legends are being studied as serious thinkers. The archives are opening on these singer-songwriters and the heady results can be quite different than the visceral, gut-grabbing music.
The films may not win them new fans, but they could earn them new respect.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
