Bruce Springsteen's new boxed set ($119.98; Columbia) is manna for hardcore fans like myself. You get a newly remastered edition of Darkness On The Edge Of Town, the album that established Springsteen as a serious artist and a grown-up. Then there's the two CD set The Promise, the "outtakes" from the sessions for Darkness that provided enough great music for two more albums. This is the road not taken, powerful catchy stuff that would have cemented his commercial appeal. But until Born In The USA Springsteen ran in the opposite direction whenever success reared its head. That's why Patti Smith got "Because The Night" and the Pointer Sisters (!) got "Fire" and Springsteen kept "Adam Raised A Cain." It all comes in a boxed set that is oversized (which I hate) but for a purpose: the case holding the discs is also a reproduction of one of the many notebooks Springsteen filled to overflowing with song lyrics, sometimes including endless variations on a particular song until he got it just right. It's a blast to pore over.
Almost every review talks about his classic album and the bonus CDs with a brief mention at the end of the three DVDs in this boxed set. I'm going to focus on the DVDs. DVD one contains The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town, directed by Thom Zimny. It's a delight, filled with classic archival footage. I'm intrigued by the idea that Springsteen was wary of fame but also let a film crew into his rehearsals for days and weeks on end. The movie features in-depth interviews with all the band members as well as Springsteen's once estranged manager Mike Appel. Locked in a court battle over control of his career, Bruce was kept out of the studio for literally years after the titanic success of Born To Run, which landed him on the cover of Time and Newsweek. The film captures well the tension of the times, how two or three years between albums was an eternity back then.
This happened, ironically, when the music was pouring out of him. As Steven Van Zandt says, before this album they just came up with the next 10 or 12 good songs and then recorded them. But instead of coming up with about ten songs, like he did for Born To Run (ultimately including only eight), this time he was writing more than 70 songs, an explosion of ideas. Every artist has to believe they're going to change the world and rewrite the rules to achieve greatness. In one of the quotes that jumps out at you, Springsteen says that at the time, more than fame and wealth, more than happiness, he wanted to be great. They describe tossing out great songs that just didn't fit the album, crafting a coherent idea from beginning to end, ignoring commerce for the sake of art as if they were the very first people in the history of the world to do so. Toss aside a great song just because it didn't fit? Crazy. Of course, anyone who has heard the Bob Dylan bootlegs or seen how the Beatles came up with their albums know Bruce wasn't inventing the wheel. But it's fascinating to see how they had to believe they were to stay passionate and committed.
You really feel like you're in the studio with them, thanks to a lot of footage that shows them bickering and discussing songs, Springsteen spending hours and hours trying to get the right drum sound, the band teasing him by placing bets on what song he was going to take off the album that day or the length of the tracks. (4:45 sounded like a winner.) As Springsteen sits alone discussing those days, he is thoughtful as always. It seems like the more sincere and earnest he gets, the more likely he is to look down and away, not making eye contact with the interviewer or the camera, as if he's almost afraid to speak that loftily about what he was trying to accomplish. It's a fascinating film, though not one to draw in a lot of new fans. It should be enjoyable to anyone but will surely resonate most with those already baptized into the faith.
The second DVD is my favorite. it contains Thrill Hill Vault Houston '78 Bootleg: House Cut. It's a raucous three hour show -- the band had finally been released from purgatory and was out on the road doing what they do best. It's not in any way a remarkable or stand-out show. It's what you probably would have seen anywhere along the way: three hours of hellaciously entertaining rock and roll by the best live band in the world. From the opener "Badlands" to the don't-you-dare-sit encore featuring a Detroit medley, "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" and more, it's a delight.
Strangely, Springsteen is a legendary live act but has rarely been caught well on film. It began with the faux live video for "Dancing In the Dark," directed by Brian De Palma, not the most musical of film directors to begin with. Springsteen seemed stiff and fake, the utter opposite of him in real life on stage. The boxed set Live 1971-1985 was great, but that was audio only. Every time he's done a concert film, like the one in New York or the one in Dublin (or Barcelona or London), it's been a relentlessly tiresome barrage of cut-cut-cuts to create excitement in the editing when the last thing a Springsteen show needs is help to generate power. Give any director today 15 cameras and by god, he's going to use them. It's the curse of most concert films, though exceptions like Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads prove it still can be done with artistry. But not for Springsteen, who is whipsawed from camera to camera.
Happily, this relatively primitive recording in 1978 only had a few cameras. And though the director cuts between them far more than say the artistry on display in The Last Waltz or Jazz On A Summer's Day, they're a lot more likely to stay with a song and not feel the need to exploit eight different angles on every single tune. So this is much, much closer to the experience of sitting in the audience and seeing his show in person. The image stays still long enough to let the performers create the moment, not the camera. It's a treat and easily the best Springsteen concert film I've seen to date.
The final DVD has a grab-bag of stuff, some of it also sensational for hardcore fans. The first batch is called Thrill Hill Vault 1976-1978. It begins with two rehearsals in someone's house in Holmdel, New Jersey in 1976. Springsteen is shirtless and swaggering, having fun as they work through the songs "Save My Love" and "Candy's Boy" (an early version of "Candy's Room") and then another tune -- "Something In The Night" at Red Bank. You literally feel like you're hanging out with the guys, watching them work their way towards greatness. Whoever is shooting the footage just has one camera, thank God, so they stay focused on one person at a time, maybe panning from Steven Van Zandt back to Bruce is as fancy as it gets. Fly on the wall stuff.
Then comes four songs recorded live in the studio in New York City in 1978. I've no idea what happened on the first number, "Don't Look Back." It's utterly different than the rest, filled with all sorts of cuts and edits, like any mishmash number recorded today. Maybe they just cut together a bunch of footage from the session and kept the audio track to make it all seem to be happening at the same moment. It's of course far less satisfying emotionally and artistically than the rest. The heart-stopping moment here is getting to watch Springsteen sit at the piano and play "Candy's Room" as he works through the lyrics and gives the others a sense of what it is. It's like getting to watch Lennon and McCartney sit down with an acoustic guitar and audition their latest tunes for George Martin. (If only such footage existed.) Otherwise, it's just one camera, which in one song moves from musician to musician just as if you were in the room looking around. Artless, simple and again, much more fun than any concert he's recorded in the past 20 years.
Then we get five songs from a Phoenix show in 1978 that produced the footage (I believe) for the music video MTV ran over and over for "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)." It's a well-light, raucous show and while the editing is getting a little more fast-paced it's not out of control quite yet
Finally, we get a 2009 performance of the entire Darkness On The Edge Of Town album in order at the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Like the documentary film, it's directed by Thom Zimny, but here he squanders a golden opportunity. This is a rehearsal of sorts -- just the band performing the album without an audience. They're focused and tight and ready to prove the album and the band are both as relevant and fiery as ever -- Springsteen wanted music that was rebellious but ready to own up to its responsibilities, which is one reason it carries such conviction. It was meant to be played by adults and it shows.
But of course, this being today, instead of a few well-placed cameras or cinematographers encouraged to find a great angle and stick with it, all we get is cut-cut-cut throughout the set. The edits are so absurd both musically and emotionally it'll drive you nuts. They cut in the middle of lines, sometimes even in the middle of a word or phrase and for no apparent purpose. Since there's no audience, Zimny was presumably even freer to place cameras anywhere he wanted without fear of blocking the sight line of a fan. They could have been as close and intimate as they wanted. But you'd be hard-pressed to see any visual difference between this and any other concert film done with an audience. The band sounds great of course. But oh, what might have been.
Any time I think of Springsteen on film, I think of the No Nukes concert. Springsteen is on stage and right behind him is this red spotlight that bleeds out all around him. There's one camera and it's focused tight on him as he begins to tell the story of "The River" and then sing that brilliant song. Springsteen is rooted to the spot but when he moves just a little to the left or the right, that red light fills up the screen so you can barely see him at times. But the camera stays right there and the director doesn't cut away for the longest time and it's one of the most magnetic things you'll ever see.
It's out of character for Springsteen to not have released the remastered Darkness CD on its own already. It's not even scheduled for release that I can see, when at most there should have been maybe a week or two when only the people who could shell out for the entire box got the album as well. Right now you can buy the two CD set of The Promise, which is like a great lost Springsteen album. And presumably at some point soon you'll be able to get the Darkness CD. But for hardcore fans, the three DVDs contain a wealth of material they'll soak up. And anyone wondering how to capture a great artist on film can learn a lot by seeing how much more gripping and involving it is to simply let the artist perform. Constant cutting is like refusing to use a wideshot when Fred Astaire is dancing. It's a lot more exciting to see him do his stuff than it is to cut cut cut and ruin the beauty of his skill. The same is true for rock and roll. Happily, you'll find enough accidental and intentional examples of that here, along with the best live concert film of Springsteen to date. It puts to shame all the more elaborate efforts that have come out in recent years. No fan will want to miss it.
*****
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews.
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