Bruce Springsteen's fourth studio album, Darkness on the Edge of Townwas released on June 2, 1978. (Re)discover how punk, country and other musical genres sprinkle this cult record.
“ There is something scary about seeing our dreams come true, because they may or may not exceed what we expected.,” confided Bruce Springsteen to WECB in 1987 about the genesis of his iconic Darkness on the Edge of Town, reissued since. “ I believe that when people dream, they dream of a life without complications. And it doesn't exist. »
Bruce Springsteen's rock and roll dreams came true in 1975 with the release of his third album, Born to Run. Critically acclaimed, it rose to third place in the Billboard 200, his eponymous single climbed to 21st place in the charts, which allowed Springsteen to simultaneously appear on the cover of the Time and of Newsweekand establish his reputation as the new rock hero of the seventies.
But with the success of Born to Run came a deluge of headaches and pitfalls, which significantly colored the tone of Bruce Springsteen's next album, and delayed its recording. “ Born to Run allowed me to afford a Steinway piano and a 1960 Chevrolet Corvette, » he wrote in his autobiography in 2016. “ The rest was just bills that Mike (Appel, Springsteen's manager) hid to keep us afloat. »
In addition to the aforementioned complications and pressure to do better, Springsteen and the E Street Band could not legally enter a recording studio without approval from their manager… whom Springsteen was suing to void the contract he signed with his company in 1972. While Bruce Springsteen and the E Streeters had attempted to plan to begin recording the follow-up to Born to Run in June 1976, they began to record the pieces which would subsequently become Darkness on the Edge of Town only a year later, after Appel and Springsteen had finally settled their differences outside of court.
- Photos of Bruce Springsteen on the covers of Darkness on the Edge of Town And The River come from the same session with photographer Frank Stefanko.
“ I knew Patti Smith a little through our work on 'Because The Night', » recalls Springsteen in Born To Run. “ When I visited her during one of her performances at the Bottom Line, she gave me the name of a photographer in South Jersey and said I should let him photograph me. » His name was Frank Stefanko, and his raw visual sensibility was a perfect match for the rawness of Darkness on the Edge of Town. Springsteen loved the results of their four-day photo session so much that he used the images for the cover of Darknessbut also The River.
“ Bruce went to California to work on The River,” Stefanki confided to WECB in 2017. « »He called me. He had all the photos from the Darkness session in his possession. He leafed through them. For two weeks, we had numerous discussions. He would call me from California at two in the morning and just say, 'Take out picture 28. Look at negative number four. Can we make the right side a little darker?' I would spend the night in my dark room and send it to him via FedEx. We did this until he chose a close-up portrait for which he wore the same plaid shirt as in 'Corvette Winter' (Stefanko's photograph used on the cover of the book Born to Run). »
