The Promise

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No more pristine, layered recordings. He wanted the entire E Street Band playing at once -- often to melodies they were shaping as they went along. And in selecting the 10 songs that would make the final cut,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], he wrote, and rejected, seven times that many. Some were rehearsed and recorded for months, or given to other artists, while Springsteen honed the working-man theme that would permeate his landmark 1978 album.
For both legal and creative reasons, Bruce Springsteen took three years between his hit Born to Run LP and his darker follow-up, Darkness on the Edge of Town. In the 1970s, on the pop charts, three years was a lifetime or two -- but that's nothing. It took another 32 years for a documentary to be made and released about the making of that pivotal album. It premieres tonight (Thursday) at 9 ET on HBO...
Also captured are snippets of discarded, delayed or orphaned songs, the sort of stuff diehard fans of the Boss will find fascinating. Springsteen does, too. Now 61, he flips through his old ledgers and notebooks, poring over endless pages of lyrics before finally getting to a couplet that provided the inspiration for a song. All the surviving musicians and other figures are interviewed anew for this documentary -- all lending their own perspectives on Springsteen's stubborn, instinctive creative path.
He explains, in retrospect, the reason he felt so compelled to gamble everything, after Born to Run was such a hit, on making sure his next album contained everything he really,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], truly wanted to express, musically and lyrically.
Add some color home movies, and Promise director Thom Zimmy has a gold mine of vintage materials with which to work. Watch young Springsteen and guitarist Steven Van Zandt (decades before reinventing himself on The Sopranos) having a blast improvising verses of a new song: Springsteen playing piano, and Van Zandt playing, um, furniture, drumming on couch cushions. The joy of rock 'n' roll is right there, captured in video amber.
And make no mistake: The Promise (that part of the documentary's title, by the way, alludes to one of the songs recorded during these sessions -- one that was shelved for more than two decades) is a film about creativity. Few artists allow anyone to get this close to the creative process, to explore and explain the grueling work as well as the inspired bursts. But Springsteen, this study makes clear, was like few other artists, even at age 28.
"We had one success," the older Springsteen says of his younger self and band. "A lot of people, that's all they have."
It's called The Promise: The Making of 'Darkness on the Edge of Town,' and it's a 90-minute up close, very personal look at Springsteen's working methods, and how they changed once he made the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously, and was hailed as the "new" Bob Dylan. Making it work, with more raw power than these after-the-fact glimpses usually provide: unusually rich treasure troves of raw material, both then and now.
A courtroom-resolved dispute over creative control kept Springsteen out of the recording studio, but not off the road, after Born to Run exploded in 1975. He kept writing, and rewriting, verses for possible songs -- and by the time he finally won the right to go back into the studio, his way, he had new ideas about what that way would be.
A lot of that angst and process was captured by Barry Rebo, a fledgling filmmaker who shot many hours of grainy black-and-white footage of Springsteen and company during their time in and around the recording studio.
The Promise explains why, in the intervening decades,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], he's produced and enjoyed many, many more.