Darkness on the Edge of the Tunnel of Love
Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel of Love turns 35
In 1987, Bruce Springsteen took a career-turn that many saw as radically conservative, an understandable reaction. Tunnel of Love was, on the surface, a major departure from the artistic road Springsteen had been traveling. For nearly 15 years Springsteen and his E. Street Band had been perfecting the art of a hard-working, lyrical rock band specializing in songs that captured the desperation of a gritty, working class life, but always with an eye toward the possibility of joyous, even euphoric liberation. 1982’s brilliant Nebraska was a dark and elemental detour in this career path, but Springsteen and the band had perfected the formula with 1984’s massive breakthrough album Born in the U.S.A., which catapulted The Boss into mainstream superstardom. Springsteen was the working class hero.
However, with Tunnel of Love, it seemed as though Superman had stepped into a phone booth and re-emerged as Clark Kent.
The bombastic and audacious E. Street Band was gone (for now) and guitar-driven stadium anthems about escaping to freedom were replaced, in part, by synthesizer-led ballads about coming to grips with the responsibilities of being an adult. Critics and audiences still received the album with enthusiasm and it produced some of Springsteen’s most enduring work, including the title track and “Brilliant Disguise,” but the album seemed like an entirely new Springsteen.
However, as I revisit the album on its thirty-fifth anniversary, the album doesn’t sound like much of a departure at all, in neither theme nor style. Even the smooth synth sounds of Tunnel of Love are, in truth, a natural evolutionary step from several songs on Born in the U.S.A. like “My Hometown,” “I’m on Fire,” and “Dancing in the Dark,” for example.
But the album’s driving themes are what makes it, for me, perfectly matched with Springsteen’s early-career oeuvre. Yes the themes are more “grown-up.” But rather than standing as a radical break from the past, I see Tunnel of Love as re-tilling the old soil.
In the end, I think of the album as a spiritual sequel to (my personal favorite Springsteen album) 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. The 1978 album is a document of a self-waging war against his world; by 1987, the conflict has shifted and now the singer’s battle is internal. His foe in Tunnel of Love is the man from the past, who persists after all these years.
The Album Covers - “Two Faces Have I”
I truly miss the days when one leafed through stacks of vinyl to find music. Algorithmic music searches and consumption are nice (and open up so many more opportunities for discovery), but there was a mystery and a euphoria about running your thumbs across the thin cardboard tops of LPs. And there is something about being drawn to a record by the cover image of an album that evoked the magic of ESP. (I realize that vinyl is back, but I have not made room in my life for that journey yet. Someday, perhaps).
One of the reasons Darkness on the Edge of Town is my favorite record is undoubtedly its cover. Bruce, shaggy and looking exhausted, leans against the wall of what can only be a working class house. Wearing a black leather jacket over a plain white undershirt, v-necked, he could be from any decade from the 1950s onward. He is the image of a confused but ambitious punk kid (this was 1978, after all). Like the characters that float from the grooves scratched into the vinyl inside this cover, he is resolute. Determined to find his art in the liminal spaces of the world (the darkness on the edge of town, as it were).
The back cover — there is no digital equivalent for this — finds Bruce with the same pose, wearing only the undershirt, his jacket removed. A man ready to get down to business (or perhaps having already finished it).
Flash forward nine years and look at Tunnel of Love now.
We see the same man, older and wiser. The confused look is replaced by that of knowing one. In fact, Springsteen seems to know all too well in this image. It is a world-weary wisdom he wears on his face now. Still, the images mirror one another, front and back. Black jacket atop white shirt. And like the back cover of Darkness, on the reverse side of Tunnel, the jacket is removed.
The differences are still there though. Gone are the images of working class striving, replaced instead by those of confidence and accomplishment. Here Bruce wears a tie; a spectacular, heart-shaped bolo tie. And an elegant dress jacket replaces the rough and rowdy leather one of his youth. Most notably different is the setting. The faded wallpaper and closed blinds of the working class home has evaporated, deep into the past. Now Springsteen stands in a wide-open desert, leaning against a white, classic convertible. This is a man who has escaped the prison of his youth and has achieved the dreams of that younger man. Yet despite all this, he still doesn’t look quite happy.
These two album covers tell a story with a real arc. They are of two men perhaps, but these two men are part of the same tale. (Incidentally, I am surely not the first person to notice this comparison. Annie Leibovitz once merged the two images into a single photo of Springsteen where he combines the bolo with the leather jacket, for instance).
Taken together, the album covers establish a sense of duality, a theme that is deeply explored in the songs of Tunnel of Love. What I want to suggest here is that this duality, this psychic fracture that characterizes the 1987 album is rooted in 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town.
Tunnel offers a new perspective on Darkness, one benefiting from the passage of time. The younger man’s yearning for an escape to freedom and self-actualization is the driving force behind Darkness. Tunnel, on the other hand questions the degree to which one can leave the past behind. The man of Tunnel of Love is not exactly a new creation that replaced the old self. He carries the tortured, desiring younger man around with him like a ghost. The old self haunts the new.
The Songs
Tunnel of Love is filled with terrific songs, many of which still celebrate rebirth and re-invention, as classic Springsteen does. “All That Heaven Will Allow” is one such song, a sweet celebration of building a new life with one’s true love. This was the song my wife and I danced to at our own wedding, a sign of its significance to me. The Mavericks covered the song beautifully as well, incidentally.
“Spare Parts” is another song that basks in the glory of breaking with the past, its central figure, Janie, is a woman done wrong by her man and is left to raise a baby alone. The song’s climax is one of intoxicating joy as Janie breaks with the past, starting anew with only the “spare parts” left over from her old, disappointing life.
So yes, there is the old Springsteen optimism in this record. But it rides with doubt and disillusionment in that white convertible.
The meat of the record is a series of songs in which the singer faces down the lingering past and the consequences that past has for the present and future. “Cautious Man” is one such song that explores the dark duality still living in a supposedly liberated man. Springsteen sings in a wailing voice:
“On his right hand, Billy tattooed the word ‘love’ and on his left hand the word ‘fear.’ And in which hand he held his fate, was never clear.”
The nihilistic tattoos of Billy’s youth still hold sway over the present, mature and well-adjusted self.
One obvious song that explores the co-habitation of Hyde and Jekyll is “Two Faces.” The song is an extended lament about the inability to shake a darker, selfish past self.
“I met a girl and we ran away. I swore I’d make her happy every day. But now I’ve made her cry. Two faces have I.”
The attempt to run away with his girl and begin anew echoes the Springsteen classic, “Racing in the Street” from Darkness. In that song, the singer imagines:
“tonight my baby and me are gonna ride to the sea and wash these sins off our hands.”
The Springsteen of Tunnel has escaped from a stifling old life as planned, but there are no clean hands at the end of the journey.
The title track of Tunnel of Love is probably the most emotionally mature perspective on the life of self-invention the album delivers. It matches the weary wisdom of the man on album cover. The song makes full use of the carnival metaphor, and the singer walks us through the thrilling ups and harrowing downs of a mature life in love with another flawed human being — the “crazy mirror showing us both in 5-D.”
The song’s final stanza is not bleak, but still it’s coldly honest about the difficulties of growing up.
“It ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough. Man meets woman and they fall in love. But this house is haunted and the ride gets rough. You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above. If you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love.”
The stark clarity of this knowledge is aimed backwards, at the wild, angry optimism of the younger Springsteen’s Utopian dreams of freedom and a life of passion.
To me the finest song on Tunnel of Love, and one of the best in Springsteen’s career, is “Brilliant Disguise.” The song elaborates on the album’s driving theme: the past isn’t dead, it’s not even passed — to paraphrase William Faulkner. But it also provides direct, obvious connective tissue between Tunnel and Darkness. Opening in the middle of the singer’s doubts about his partner, Springsteen smoothly sings:
“I saw you last night, out on the edge of town. I want to read your mind and know just what I’ve got in this new thing I’ve found.”
The simple fact that his uncertainty occurs “on the edge of town” is a profound repudiation of the philosophical foundations of “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”
In the song “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and throughout the whole album in fact, truth and spirit can only be found in such liminal spaces. The Springsteen of Darkness concludes the album with his self-defining creation myth:
“Tonight I’ll be on that hill ‘cause I can’t stop. I’ll be on that hill with everything I’ve got. Where life’s on the line, where dreams are found and lost. I’ll be there on time, and I’ll pay the cost. For wanting things that can only be found, in the darkness on the edge of town.”
In that song, the younger man, desperate to leave the old ruins behind him dives into the dark and uncertain spaces outside the mainstream. The older, wiser man of Tunnel, is still in that space “on the edge of town” in “Brilliant Disguise.” He has found no clarity, however. He has found what he had been looking for, but doubts the trustworthiness of his prize.
“So tell me what I see, when I look in your eyes. Is that you baby, or just a brilliant disguise?”
I refuse to believe that the song is nihilistic, however. Like “Tunnel of Love,” it demonstrates a healthy maturity and an open-eyed honesty about the complexities of life. The singer of “Brilliant Disguise” recognizes that his doubts about what he’s found are rooted in a suspicion of himself — he knows his own past and owns it.
“I wanna know if it’s you I don’t trust, ‘cause I damn sure don’t trust myself.”
The maturity we see on the bolo-wearing Springsteen’s face comes through in the lyrics here (and in the production, but this essay is too long already).
Perhaps this is a side note, but I simply adore what I can only take as references to the 1942 Universal classic, The Wolf Man, in the final stanza. “Now you play the loving woman, I’ll play the faithful man. But just don’t look too close into the palm of my hand.” He then goes on to reference the Gypsy who brought them together and all I can see is Maria Ouspenskaya’s face and the image of a pentagram in the hands of the Wolf Man’s victims. Drawing on Lon Chaney’s curse is a metaphorical triumph for Tunnel of Love.
Nonetheless, the lack of self-trust indicates two things: first, the singer understands that the man he was still exists inside the man that is. Second, the older version of the singer has not only achieved dreams, he has also achieved wisdom and a clear-eyed knowledge of the truth about himself. And it’s more difficult to be honest with oneself than with anyone else. This wisdom and honesty make Tunnel of Love a landmark album, but also a worth spiritual sequel to Darkness on the Edge of Town.
The older Springsteen has lived out the ambitions of his younger self, and has discovered their limitations.