The Freedom of Music: Dancing In The Dark
One likes to believe in the freedom of music.Rush – Spirit of Radio.
Dec 31, 2010 6:25 PM
This shall be one long lonely night.
The above was written on the Facebook wall of somebody I’m close enough to be bothered by it. It wasn’t serious, not a cry for help or a desolate person in desperate need of company. But left alone on new years, she felt a little saddened by it.
I didn’t have a wild and crazy new years eve myself, although I was out among friends. A few drinks, some nice finger food to nibble on and the conversation of a couple of good friends. Did I drink? Why yes you honour. Much? No, not very much at all. Which perhaps explains how, at around noon on New Years Day, I was working out.
I put Bruce Springsteen’s Live at Hyde Park, a Christmas present, in the DVD player to work out with. As it was playing, Dancing in the Dark came on:
Message keeps getting clearer,
Radio’s on and I’m moving around the place.
I check my look in the mirror,
I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.
Man I ain’t getting’ nowhere, just sittin’ in a dump like this
There’s something happenin’ somewhere, baby I just know there is.Stay on the streets of this town, they’ll be carvin’ you up all night.
They say you gotta stay hungry, hey baby! I’m just about starving’ tonight.
I’m dying for some action, I’m sick of sittin’ round here trying to write this book,
I need a love reaction, c’mon baby give me just one look.
Springsteen has always had that one line, that phrase that could express so much. The intensity and passion of Born to Run, summed up in:
I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight,
In an everlasting kiss.
The sadness of The River:
And for my nineteenth birthday,
I got a union card and a wedding coat.
We went down to the courthouse,
And the judge put it all to rest.
No wedding day smile, no walk down the aisle,
No flowers no wedding dress.
You kind of know that’s not going to be a happy song.
But Dancing in the Dark was always different. It was the pop song, the song Courtney Cox danced to. It meant, well, nothing much.
In fact, it may have meant something very much more. During recording of Born in the USA, Springsteen’s manager and producer Jon Landau sent him home one night with a simple instruction: the album is good to great but it needs a hit. It needs a radio song. Go home and write it.
He did. Interesting then that he references writing so prominently in Dancing in the Dark:
I’m dying for some action,
I’m sick of sittin’ round here trying to write this book,
I need a Love reaction…
Suppose you change the word book for song, and it’s not hard to imagine you are looking into Bruce Springsteen’s very heart at that moment. It seems light enough, until…
“This shall be one long lonely night.”
It’s the knowledge that someone you love is lonely that changes the song. It becomes not a dance song, but a sad song with a happy face.
When the Born in the USA album came out, there was a fair bit of remark about Springsteen’s appearance. A once gaunt, skinny, weak looking kid (well, young man), he was now muscular, built up on weights. Meanwhile his foil, The Big Man, Clarence Clemons, had also hit the weights, adding bulk, losing fat. Springsteen gained weight, it was reported, Clemons lost. It seems unremarkable, except:
I check my look in the mirror,
I wanna change my clothes my hair my face.
Again you ask yourself, was Springsteen giving us a peek into his very darkest place, at 120 beats per minute of happy synthesizer pop?
And again you remember the words of Jon Landau: “go home and write a hit song.” Not a carefully crafted examination of your psyche. Not a scream for help. A pop song. So Springsteen did, all the while leaving a song that 25 years and hundreds of listens later, there was still something there to be discovered.
“That’s why,” as Clemons said in his recent autobiography, Big Man , “he’s the boss.”
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