Album Review: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band The Promise

Bruce Springsteen's The Promise features 22 of his tracks from the mid-70s, many of which had been recorded by others. Photo / AP

Rating: 4/5
Verdict: Paying the cost of being the Boss - and it paid off

Bruce Springsteen's The Promise features 22 of his tracks from the mid-70s, many of which had been recorded by others.

After Born to Run in 1975 - which sold around 10 million copies and took him to the covers of Newsweek and Time in the same week - there was a gap of three years before Springsteen's next album Darkness on the Edge of Town.

These days that isn't such a long hiatus but, as he notes in the hour-long doco included in the 3CD/3DVD box set version of this double CD, he'd recorded two albums in the first year he'd had a contract and Born to Run shortly after. In the early 70s you kept the music coming.

"Two or three years between records then and you'd disappeared," he says. "I read all these articles saying 'Whatever happened to ...?', 'You're dead, flash in the pan'. And for all I knew that might have been true."

The reason for the hold-up was a lawsuit with manager Mike Appel which, ironically, gave Springsteen time to consider where he wanted to go as a writer. And it wasn't the full-throated adrenalin rush of "strap your hands across my engines".

Darkness was a much more adult album, not so much characters born to run but working people driving round in circles through the boredom of factory work, bad marriages and the grind of dead-end suburbia.

During that long wait Springsteen wrote constantly (around 70 songs) and many went to others like his old running mate from New Jersey, Southside Johnny (the soul ballad Hearts of Stone), the Knack (Don't Look Back) and the Pointer Sisters (Fire). Patti Smith finished off Because the Night which gave her a hit, "My only one" she laughs here.

Double disc The Promise features 22 of those songs, among them his versions of Rendezvous (which appeared on his 1998 Tracks box set), Fire and Because the Night. Here too is a version of Racing in the Streets more like the wall of sound on Born to Run than the spare Darkness treatment; Gotta Get That Feeling (a Spanish Harlem-styled slice of dramatic pop); Come On (rewritten to become the melancholy Factory on Darkness); and Candy's Boy (a different version of what became Candy's Room).

There are also the glorious ballads One Way Street and Brokenhearted (the latter an Orbison-styled piece); the hand-clap bar room rocker Ain't Good Enough For You; Talk to Me (which Southside Johnny covered) and finally Breakaway, The Promise, City of Night and The Way in which that darkness comes down.

More than just an insight into the creative process, The Promise shows how Springsteen drew on the Top 40 and Brill Building pop he grew up on, and how that was transformed by an awareness of the hollowness in people's lives where music was the passport to three minutes of freedom.

"Part of that pop and rock promise was the never-ending Now, it's about living Now, that need to be alive right now," he says. "Those three minutes it was all on, you were lifted up into a higher place of living and experiencing and there was this beautiful, ever-present Now."

Darkness didn't lift anyone up, but it allowed people to believe someone understood their life outside of that wonderful Now - a Now which is all over The Promise, a great lost Springsteen album from the mid-70s.

-TimeOut