The heartbreaking song Bruce Springsteen called “emotionally autobiographical”
Bruce Springsteen sits proudly among the rock and roll royalty of the 20th century as both a dynamic performer and an ingenious wordsmith. With the Boss strutting his way through interminable sell-out tours with his E Street Band over the past 45 years, it’s difficult to picture his stoic snail crawl to international acclaim over the late 1960s and early-’70s.
Springsteen’s first rock ‘n’ roll romance came in his childhood after seeing Elvis Presley perform on television, but his clear-cut ambition took shape after seeing four famous faces from Liverpool. “I saw Elvis on TV, and when I first saw Elvis, I was nine, but I was a little young, tried to play the guitar, but it didn’t work out, I put it away,” Springsteen once told Rolling Stone. “The keeper was in 1964, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ on South Street with my mother driving.”
“I immediately demanded that she let me out; I ran to the bowling alley, ran down a long neon-lit aisle, down the alley into the bowling alley,” he added. “Ran to the phone booth, got in the phone booth and immediately called my girl and asked, ‘Have you heard this band called The Beatles?’ After that, it was nothing but rock ‘n’ roll and guitars.”
After the relative success of his formative trio, Earth, in the late ’60s, Springsteen set his sights skyward. Through the early ’70s, Springsteen built an early incarnation of his E Street Band and took the show as far out as California while working on material for his first studio exploits.
With a Columbia Record deal signed in ’72, things were looking up, but tough times were in store for the following year. After the surprising commercial disappointment of his debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., in 1973, Springsteen had already begun pouring long-laboured material into his second shot, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. Sadly, despite a positive reaction from critics, Springsteen’s second studio album also flopped on the charts.
Encouraged by the critical reception of the first two studio attempts, Columbia gave Springsteen a generous make-or-break recording budget for his third album, which was understood to be a last-ditch effort at commercial reception. “So, I was going to have to give it everything I had,” Springsteen recalled of the tense moment in an interview with BBC News in 2018. Thankfully, the third album Springsteen conjured up was Born To Run, a golden ticket to fame and fortune.
With the momentum of Born To Run, Springsteen pulled his masterpiece, Darkness on the Edge of Town, out of the bag in 1978. The album perfectly encapsulated his unique ability for anthemic yet deeply poetic songwriting. The LP served a mouth-watering selection of soaring crowd-pleasers and introspective, brooding ballads.
‘Adam Raised a Cain’, the second track on Darkness On the Edge of Town, brought a hearty mix of Springsteen’s insightful, dour lyricism and rock ‘n’ roll effervescence. Using biblical imagery, Springsteen depicted the complex relationship between father and son.
In the Old Testament’s ‘Genesis’, Adam and Eve’s son Cain murders his brother Abel out of jealousy and ultimately suffers the wrath of God. Springsteen examined Adam’s role in raising such an ill-disciplined and wayward son. The Boss once described ‘Adam Raised Cain’ as “emotionally autobiographical,” as it reflects on the strained relationship he had with his own father, Douglas.
“Our actual relationship was probably more complicated than how I presented it,” Springsteen added. “Those songs were ways that I spoke to my father at the time, because he didn’t speak, and we didn’t talk very much.”
Listen to the classic song from Darkness On the Edge of Town below.
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