“Where are you going to stand?  This is the question the album asked over and over again.  With who and where are you going to stand?” -Bruce Springsteen

As a huge fan of Darkness on the Edge of Town I was extremely excited to delve deeper into how the album was made and get a peek into Springsteen’s creative process.  This is my favorite Springsteen album hands down – every one of the 8 tracks tells a story and has it’s own unique point of view.  This was Springsteen at his best and when you watch the documentary, his intensity during the making of this album is front and center.  Armed with more songs, lyrics and ideas than ever before Springsteen almost went insane crafting every note on the album until as a whole it became something bigger than itself.

The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town was directed by Thom Zimny and shot in grainy intimate style footage that allows the audience to peek into Springsteen’s process during the recording of this landmark album in the late 1970s.  Springsteen’s album Born to Run was a massive hit and like so many artists he began to struggle with who he was going to become and where he was going to take his music.  It would have been easy to build on his commercial success with an album full of pop songs but Springsteen has always been a man who wanted to stay true to who he was.  Whether it be his music, working class background or humble New Jersey upbringing it was important to him to stay grounded.

At the start of the film we find Springsteen battling for creative control with Mike Appel, his manager at the time.  A lawsuit between the two would drag on for over a year in court and in the end greatly influence the writing on Darkness.  The entire album focuses on a man standing alone in search of self discovery and purpose, so if you’re looking for love songs you came to the wrong place(there’s not a single one on the whole album).  Eventually Springsteen gained control over his music but as the E street band quickly found out that didn’t mean recording their next album would be easy.

In the film Springsteen appears crazed at times, almost like he was possessed by the music he was trying to create.  At one point he spends days yelling “STICK” over and over at Max Weinberg because when he hits his drum it sounds too much like a stick hitting a drum(I thought that was the point?)  Springsteen wrote about 10 songs for Born to Run but brought 70 to the table for Darkness, which meant everyday great songs would be thrown out never to be heard again. The band would bet on how many songs would be left on the cutting room floor at the end of the day, songs like “Because the Night,” which became a huge hit for Patti Smith and ended up being more successful than any song on Darkness.  There was a sound Springsteen could hear in his head and he nearly drove his band insane trying to find it.  In fact Jimmy Iovine burned out halfway through mixing the recordings because the experience was so intense.  When they brought in Charles Plotkin to finish the sessions, Springsteen sat down with him and described the songs as a feeling not as how they should sound.  For one song Bruce described a couple sitting in a dark movie theater, they are comfortable and quiet, then BAM a dead body shows up on screen and wakes the entire room up – “Adam Raised a Cane” is that dead body.

The best parts of the documentary come when you feel like you are peeking into the band’s most intimate moments.  Whether it’s an early version of “Sherry Darling” played by Bruce on the piano while Stevie Van Zandt bangs out a beat on a blanket, or a shirtless and wild haired Bruce working through “Something in the Night” in his Holmdel NJ home, or just peering over Bruce’s shoulder as he flips through a notebook of scribbled lyrics.  Like all good documentaries The Promise makes you feel like you were right there in the room with the band watching all the drama unfold.

Although the film does a great job of transporting you back to when Darkness was recorded and providing you with a gritty account of the making of the album, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars because there were still questions left unanswered.  One of my favorite songs of all time “Streets of Fire” didn’t get mentioned, the specifics of the lawsuit with his manager are fuzzy and why exactly “The Promise” never made it to the album doesn’t get addressed.  Despite my nitpicking this really was a film well worth watching, you get the sense of where Bruce was coming from when he wrote the music and the specific vision he had in mind when crafting the album during this tumultuous time in his life.  When watching the present day footage The Boss seems confident and unapologetic in his choices and why not?  He was a man who knew exactly what he wanted at the time and was fighting to make sure he could attain it then and in years to come.  He felt Darkness would define him as a musician and thankfully he didn’t compromise because the final result is an album that is still as relevant, ground breaking and brilliant today as it ever was.

Bruce Springsteen – “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’” Sneak Peek from Columbia Records on Vimeo.