The band Bruce Springsteen said shook the earth: “So frightening”
Disgruntled kids are a necessary part of music creation. Even in the experimental days of the 1970s, when some of the very best music was made, a fresh generation of youngsters came surging through the cracks, announcing the much-needed death of classic rock.
This community, which would live under the umbrella of punk were keen to usher in the death of what came before. All of the ‘60s idealism and studio musicianship that existed under The Beatles’ umbrella was to be booted out for something more raw and primal, befitting of the societal angst that existed across the world.
Of course, these movements took place in the cultural epicentres of the Atlantic, New York and London. Across both sides of the pond, rebellious bands emerged in a bid to put the sunny disposition of the ‘60s on its arse and topple its realism, driven by caustic guitar parts, pounding drums and screeching vocals.
Bruce Springsteen never really fit fully into either of those communities. The blue-collar songbird had every right to feel as angry as his punk counterparts, but he approached it with a more earnest approach, befitting of his native New Jersey.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t pull influence, particularly on his record Darkness on the Edge of Town, which came out at the peak of the punk movement in ‘78.
He explained, “Darkness was also informed by the punk explosion at the time. I went out, and I got all the records, all the early punk records, and I bought ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and ‘God Save the Queen’, and The Sex Pistols were so frightening. They literally, they shook the earth, which is different from shocking. A lot of groups managed shocking, but frightening, frightening was something else”.
There were very, very few rock groups that managed frightening.”
Springsteen was never in the business of frightening so much as uniting. Darkness certainly didn’t capture that same sense of terror, but it guided him nevertheless. He noticed the shifting tides of the cultural attitude and realised the reality of life couldn’t be captured in hopeful anthems anymore; it had to have fury laced into its sentiment.
Because Springsteen explained, at that time, “That was a great quality, it was part of their great beauty. They were brave, and they challenged you, and they made you brave. And a lot of that energy seeped its way into the subtext of Darkness. Darkness was written in 1977, and all of that music was out there. And if you had ears, you could not ignore it. And I had peers that did, and they were mistaken. You could not ignore that challenge.”
Come the ‘80s, the trend fizzled out, and the earth began to recalibrate. The punk movement would be left behind for a short while, and Springsteen would leave also, perfecting his ballad writing style of rock music that made him a stadium rock legend in the following decade. But his ability to unite people with his music might not have been as powerful, were it not for the punk beginnings.
