In their place were tight, guitar-driven intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus songs. By Darkness on the Edge of Town, gone were the West Side Story-esque jazz suites of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Bruce’s musical vocabulary accordingly shrank. The White Album and Hendrix and the Velvet Underground had robbed rock of its power, which lay buried in the pre-Beatles era with Del Shannon and the Ronettes. Rock music was transcendent, Landau believed, because it was primitive, not because it could be avant-garde. At the same time that he intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him.
He filled his new protégé’s head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, N.J., Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honors degree in history from Brandeis. Over the next couple of years, Landau insinuated himself into Bruce’s artistic life and consciousness (while remaining on the Rolling Stone masthead) until he became Springsteen’s producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Well, Bruce Springsteen was Jon Landau’s future. For all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce’s every move, we can thank Jon Landau, the ex- Rolling Stone critic who, after catching a typically seismic Springsteen set in 1974, famously wrote, “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Springsteen has been augmenting and refining that persona for so long now that it’s hard to recall its status, not only as an invention, but an invention whose origin wasn’t even Bruce Springsteen. In its place was a majestic American simpleton with a generic heartland twang, obsessed with cars, Mary, the Man, and the bitterness between fathers and sons. Bruce was one of their own, after all, a scrawny little dirtbag from the shore, a minor celebrity of what the great George Trow once called “the disappearing middle distance.” By 1978, and the release of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the endearing Jersey wharf rat in Springsteen had been refined away. Not bras and panties, mind you, but gifts-something thoughtful, not too expensive. As a matter of routine, a Springsteen show would kick off with audience members throwing gifts onto the stage. Back then, in the early 1970s, Bruce was still a regional act, touring the dive bars and dive colleges of the Atlantic coast, playing any venue that would have him. This he punctuated with a shy, wheezing laugh that let you know he didn’t for a second buy into his own bullshit. In his early live shows, Bruce Springsteen had a habit of rattling off, while the band vamped softly in the background, some thoroughly implausible story from his youth.