Back in the ‘70s, any recording artist worth his or her salt was
expected to release an album per year, every two years tops. If there were a
lapse in this rote pattern, the record company would put out a “greatest hits,”
or some type of “best of” compilation to appease hungry fans. Everybody thought
Dylan was finished (or dead, due to a serious motorcycle accident) when there
was no follow-up to Blonde on Blonde within twelve months of
its mid-1966 release, and after an unheard of three-year lull in Van Morrison's
recording career, Van the Man released an LP with the apparently explanatory
title A Period of Transition in
1977.
I
remember the seemingly endless barren stretch that followed Born to Run (was
Springsteen not really “Rock and Roll Future” after all? my friends and I
wondered aloud). It would be years before I found out Bruce had actually
written and recorded several songs in the limbo between his 1975 epic and
1978's Darkness On the Edge of Town. Now, three decades later, this
material is finally, officially, seeing the light of day.
The
Promise is
best appreciated not as a fully realized whole like Born to Run or Darkness,
but as a transitional journey between the two, from the wide-eyed optimism of
the former, when Bruce believed (and we did right along with him) that rock and
roll was bigger than life, to the harder-edged latter, forged by the trials and
stresses of an increasingly imposing real world. It makes for an engrossing,
sometimes downright intoxicating mix, and serves as a welcome, long lost bridge
between two masterpieces seemingly half a world apart. It’s also, to me, an
invigorating reminder of why I became a Springsteen fan all those years
ago.
And
it's a tribute to the Boss that he could produce such a vast storehouse of
great songs--some of which (“Because the Night,” “Fire,” “Talk to Me,” et al.)
provided success for other artists--and withhold them from release simply
because they didn't fit the overall concept, the Big Picture, of the LP he was
determined to make. Or, in some cases, as he recently mentioned on Late
Night With Jimmy Fallon, he didn't want to be perceived as a “revivalist” or
to put out an album that “wore its influences on its sleeve.” This strict
adherence to his forward-looking vision was our loss for several decades (save
for the resulting Darkness album, of course), and has now,
thankfully, been remedied.
There
are some shimmeringly beautiful tracks here that hearken back to Born
to Run, of which Sprinsteen has said he wanted to make “the greatest rock
and roll record ever.” A number of these lush mini epics bring to mind a line
from a review of Neil Young's Live Rust, written by Tom Carson some
30 years ago: “It's so massively stately that you get the feeling of huge
mountains on the move.” And we get a feeling of just how important
Springsteen's then-recent influences were to him, as well.
As
for wearing them “on its sleeve,” well, perhaps there was the fear at the time
that those influences were too recent and recognizable. Whatever the case, they
have since aged gracefully, and to anyone born after, say, 1970, these songs’
inspirations are likely to be all but invisible.
Nevertheless,
the giants on whose shoulders Bruce stood were among the tallest of the 1950s
and ‘60s. There's the euphoric, Spectorian wall of sound of “The Little Things
(My Baby Does)” and the glorious “Gotta Get That Feeling.” Mighty Max channels
Jerry Allison in the Buddy Holly inspired “Outside Looking In.” “Someday (We'll
Be Together)” conjures up the Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll.” “Breakaway” is steeped
in Orbison-like majesty. The rhythmic rawness of Gary “U.S.” Bonds permeates “Ain't
Good Enough For You.” The horn arrangements on “It's a Shame” hearken back to the
Stax/Volt Memphis Horns. “One Way Street” brings to mind Percy Sledge's
soul classic “True Love Travels On a Gravel Road,” which was covered by Elvis,
for whom Bruce wrote “Fire.” Come to think of it, this is the music that made
me fall in love with rock and roll in the first place, before Bruce even came
on the scene.
On
the more somber Darkness side of the coin is “Wrong Side
of the Street,” a full band version of “The Promise,” an alternate
take of “Racing In the Street,” “Come On (Let's Go Tonight),” which was the
forerunner of both “Factory” and “Johnny Bye Bye,” and “Candy’s Boy,” which
obviously morphed into “Candy's Room.”
It's
all good, but two songs, to my ears, stand above the rest. “Rendezvous”
actually gave me goose bumps upon hearing it for the first time--something
that, at my age, hasn’t happened in quite awhile. It simply blows the
live Tracks version out of the water. “Save My Love,” written
in 1977 and recorded in 2010 according to the liner notes, brings it all back
home. It's what rock and roll is all about.
Which
brings up the issue of Bruce's tinkering with some of the original material for
this package. “Where needed, I worked on them to bring them to fruition,” he
says in the liner notes. I thought this would bother me, but it ended up not
being the case. The end result is what counts, and these songs, some of which
were in an unfinished, unreleasable state prior to Bruce's intervention,
ultimately deliver.
© Jon Oye, 2010
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