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Flash of Light: Lawrence Kirsch's Latest
on The Boss
by Sadi Ranson
Back cover, A Light in the Darkness - collected photographs and essays
It was the year the Bee Gees Saturday Night Fever album was number one for
twenty-four weeks and the year a killer snowstorm hit the eastern seaboard putting
us out of work and school for about a week. The year that saw us watching the

2. beautiful Barbara Bach let down her hair for Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved
Me and had us listening to disco and driving at night to the Eagle’s Hotel California
and falling in love to Fleetwood Mac and Wings. It was the year the Sex Pistols
went dark and and told us to never mind the bollocks for the last time at Winterland
in San Francisco, where Bruce would give one of the most memorable concerts of
his career in that December.
1978 has been exposed and laid bare for Springsteen fans. Lawrence Kirsch has
collected a healthy volume of blog entries, magazine and newspaper articles, and
reminiscences of Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 tour and bound them with the best tour
photographs in his book The Light in Darkness. These are not concert reviews or
album reviews as much as they are personal stories about the person who has
written each piece. Anecdotes and reminiscences about songs of youth and joy and
love and sex and hardship and identity. The songs on Darkness reach us because
they seem to not only understand but to embrace the working-class struggle, family
relationships, and hard-won romance. They are small town stories– not quite urban
and not quite not; urban un-urban – that are visually engaging and nerve-touching;
whole lyric narratives that tell us what it is to be down and out but to want to live
anyway.
Springsteen is a sort of high priest of Passaic who tells us it’s okay to not
understand what it’s all about but to keep on trying anyway and to refuse all bullshit.
That “it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” and to want control and want it now. After
what he had just been through with former manager Appel, it isn’t surprising to hear
Bruce sing with such guttural, throaty vehemence. He is glad to be back. He is glad
he’s alive and he shows it. The photos reveal a buff Springsteen with his mop of
chocolate waves, buff in his sleeveless t-shirts and motorcycle boots all hipness
and attitude like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.
One contributor tells us, “Music had become my savior that summer…” It was the
summer her mother died from a second failed kidney transplant and the summer
she went to a concert despite everything. “There are other things I remember about
that night, an evening when music – particularly Bruce Springsteen and the E Street
Band – saved my life and made me realize that I could go on…” As Springsteen
tells us on “Badlands”, “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” And that is the point.
Whatever happened to him during his enforced hiatus when he was falling out with
Mike Appel. Appel was Bruce Springsteen's first manager and producer, and is
probably most remembered for his part in a contract dispute that kept Springsteen
from recording for quite a while after Born to Run in 1975.
Eager and loyal fans of the early Springsteen had nothing to listen to. It was, as one
fan writes, a “primitive media era”. There was no Internet, there was no news, no
new Springsteen recordings. “Waiting during that time was an eternity…
But when Brue did come back, he gave the performance of his lifetime. The ’78
Tour (some have called it “The Lawsuit Tour”) is compared to Dylan’s live ’66
performance at the Royal Albert Hall. One writer says that it was this tour, the ’78
tour, that gave “the feeling that someone out there has understood and shares my

3. pain (and that) has kept me going many times…”
Springsteen, like Dylan, is one of few artists who inspire a real closeness between
performer and fan – an intimacy that is inherent in the work, the music, and how it is
performed with such gut wrenching sincerity that a large number of fans don’t
simply relate – they take it personally. It is this very fact – the blurred boundary –
that makes the artist so successful and that gives the music such staying power.
Phillippe Rezzanico says, “You cannot escape what was written for you, for your
kind, for what you value in life…”
This is performance-based writing and photography and so highly personal and it is
this that gives the work its strength: it is everything that you too have felt at a
Springsteen concert – that palpable connection that you did not expect but is there
nonetheless. Here we see Springsteen falling backwards into the crowd, venturing
out into the crowd with his long-lead microphone halfway up the aisle and
welcoming girls onto stage to dance. This is how Springsteen shares the show.
Kirsch has collected the best images from this tour: a rose-colored light soaked
Springsteen jumping with his guitar held at sharp angle, falling back at the feet of
Clarence Clemons and wailing out a tune. He is sweat drenched and loving it. This
book, for all intents and purposes, is the best souvenir booklet of the tour. It is a
program adapted after the fact by the fans and for the fans. And that’s what it’s all
about and should be about. Springsteen was the shaman – the one we chose and
who travelled down the witness tree during those three-hour concerts - expressing
what we feel and how we feel it with such abandon, our own personal soundtrack
Springsteen. The Light in Darkness is only available by clicking on the following link
for direct purchase: http://www.theLightinDarkness.com
Last updated on November 18, 2014