DARKNESS: "A MAP OF THE FUTURE"
On June 2, 1978, after 11 prolific months in the recording studio, Bruce Springsteen released Darkness on the Edge of Town. During the sessions, he had struggled with the paradoxes of rock 'n' roll – the joy and happiness that clashes with an inescapable sense of hardness and loneliness, until finally abandoning any attempt at reconciliation. As eventually released, Darkness portrays, in Springsteen’s words, a "community under siege" and a battered people holding on to the faith of a promised land.

Released two-and-a-half years after Born to Run salvaged his career, Darkness gave Springsteen both his adult voice and his political voice. In "A Map of the Future: Darkness on the Edge of Town at 30," critic and two-time Pulitizer Prize finalist Joyce Millman explores the many facets of the album, including Springsteen's "affirmations of democratic ideals," which are, she says, as "relevant today as commentaries on the darkness of cynicism and the dragons of endless war" as they were 30 years ago. Read Millman’s essay, written for the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection.

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SPRINGSTEEN SPECIAL COLLECTION EXPANDS
Already an enormous Bruce archive, the collection at the Asbury Park Library moves on to fishwrap
If you'd like to be part of the largest expansion ever at the Springsteen Special Collection, here's your ticket. Devoted to preserving written Springsteen history, the Special Collection celebrates its sixth anniversary this year by adding newspaper articles to the huge number of magazines, fanzines, tourbooks, songbooks, and printouts of internet articles already available to the public at the Asbury Park Public Library. Considering how newsprint colors and degrades with age, this is a critical period for collecting, photocoping and archiving articles that help tell the Springsteen story. 

Working with an international group of fans, managers of the Collection have compiled a starter list of donated articles on an unpublished page which you can review here. If you have album and concert reviews, interviews, personality profiles, and editorials along with other commentaries from newspapers sitting around in boxes or scrapbooks, and can share, please send a description of your materials to pbjcrane@erols.com. 

And while you're at it, check out the group which manages the Collection at www.friendsofthespringsteencollection.org.

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