FEATURE:
Groovelines
Bruce Springsteen – Dancing in the Dark
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I find it amazing that there are these songs…
that we still talk about and play today that were released when I was very young. In fact, Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark came out the day I turned one. That was 9th May, 1984. It was the first single from his classic album, Born in the U.S.A. Whether Bruce Springsteen feels the album deserves its acclaim and fame – he preferred the writing on 1982’s Nebraska -, one cannot deny the legacy and importance of Born in the U.S.A. It was a real turning point for Springsteen in terms of his popularity. Dancing in the Dark is one of the album’s standouts. It spent four weeks at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold over one million singles in the U.S. The recoding for Dancing in the Dark won Bruce Springsteen his first Grammy Award, as it won for Best Rock Vocal Performance in 1985. The classic has gone on to be listed one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. I am going to bring in a few features about Dancing in the Dark. American Songwriter told the story behind one of the most important singles in Bruce Springsteen’s career:
“When you learn that Bruce Springsteen had written 70 songs for his 1984 Born in the USA album, but none were deemed “standout first single” worthy, the lyrics of “Dancing in the Dark” become even more profound. Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, made that determination as they were finalizing the album’s track list, reports Billboard. Springsteen’s response to Landau, “I’ve written 70 songs,” according to Dave Marsh’s biography Glory Days: The Bruce Springsteen Story. “If you want another, you write it.”
His frustration was evident. Springsteen had worked on Born in the USA for two years and was nearing the finish line when Landau delivered the news that the album needed more, according to E Street Shuffle.
“Jon [Landau] had been bothering me to write a single, which is something he rarely does,” Springsteen told Bill Flanagan in April 1987. “But he did that day. And he wanted something direct. That seemed to be what he was hitting on me for at the time. I was angry. I had written a lot of songs and was kind of fed up with the whole thing. We’d been making the record for a long time, and I was bored with the whole situation.
“That particular night, I came home and sat on the edge of my bed, and the thing I remember thinking first was that we had a record, but it wasn’t necessarily finished; I could change the whole thing right now if I wanted to,” he added.
“That’s all I remember thinking: if I wanted to, I could do something right now that would change the whole thing,” recalled Springsteen.
One can almost picture Springsteen’s body, radiating exhaustion, as he sat down to write song No. 71 for Born in the USA. Some accounts say he wrote it in one night.
Little wonder Springsteen is quoted in Billboard as saying the song turned out to be “my own alienation, fatigue, and desire to get out from inside the studio, my room, my record, my head and … live.”
The song resonated with listeners, especially those in the US. The US economy was in a slump, jobs had dried up, and it seemed rural America was on the brink of disaster. On June 30, 1984, the song spent its first of four weeks at its No. 2 peak on the Billboard Hot 100. That was Springsteen’s highest showing on the chart as an artist.
The song was released during a US Presidential election year. President Ronald Reagan alluded to Born in the USA during a campaign stop in New Jersey. “America’s future,” Reagan announced, according to LouderSound, “rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire—New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.”
A few days later, Springsteen spoke to a Pittsburgh audience about the mention. “Well, the president was mentioning my name in a speech the other day, and I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know, Springsteen said, according to LouderSound. “ I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.”
The song he played was “Johnny 99” from the album Nebraska. The song is about a downtrodden person in despair over losing a job at a local auto plant.
At that time, Springsteen was resurfacing from some professional and personal struggles. But things had started to turn around for Springsteen, at least publicly, by 1984. Arguably, that reemergence is evident in the video for the song when a smiling Springsteen pulls a young Courtney Cox from the audience to dance with him as the E Street Band plays.
The actress, who went on to co-star in the TV show Friends, discussed her audition for the video on The Howard Stern Show.
“I thought I was in the wrong place,” Cox said of showing up to the audition and being surrounded by professional dancers, according to ET Online. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing, but I can’t even bend my leg. Like, this is it.’
“I went into [director] Brian De Palma’s office, he put on the music and said, ‘Will you dance?’ I thought, ‘Right now, here, in front of you, just the two of us?’” she remembered. “It was so embarrassing. I think that’s why I got it, because I was literally like [nervously saying], ‘OK.’ I think that’s what they wanted, a fan that just couldn’t believe it.”
Later in the conversation, she says: “I do feel like when I watch the video, when I see it, I mean, God, did you see my dance? It was pathetic,” she said. “I’m not a bad dancer, but that was horrible. I was so nervous.”
Springsteen’s live shows often culminate with “Dancing in the Dark,” which the Financial Times calls “a celebration,” although a dark one. Those listening to the up-tempo tune featuring a rising synth line might not realize just how dark it is.
When Springsteen performs the song on the opening night of the Born in the USA Tour in St. Paul, Minnesota, and pulls Cox onstage, he seems like a man whose personal background has shifted to bright multi-colors”.
I am going to move on to the Financial Times and their feature on Dancing in the Dark. It is great to learn more about a song that holds a very special place in so many people’s hearts. I have been listening back to it a lot when researching for this feature:
“Dancing in the Dark” is a celebration. It remains a key part of every Bruce Springsteen live show, usually in the encores, when he pulls someone from the crowd to dance with him, recreating the video, in which a young Courteney Cox cavorts with Springsteen. It’s a moment of ecstatic release. Even in his current Broadway theatre shows, with no E Street Band behind him, it still takes its place third from the end, a promise of joy after the soul-baring that has come before. It is a pop song; a pop song that took Springsteen, with deliberate calculation, to the upper reaches of pop stardom.
It’s a very black celebration indeed, though. When Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, explained that the Born in the USA album still lacked a killer single, he perhaps didn’t expect what Springsteen set to paper that evening early in 1984, what Springsteen described in his autobiography as “my song about my own alienation, fatigue and desire to get out from inside the studio, my room, my record, my head and … live.” In “Dancing in the Dark”, the singer wants to “change my clothes, my hair, my face”; he’s “just tired and bored with myself”. He knows there’s “something happening somewhere” — he just knows he is not part of it.
The despair is masked by the euphoria of the song — Roy Bittan’s swelling synth line is like riding a motorboat on calm waters – and the joy of the video. Quite how important the video is becomes apparent when one trawls YouTube and finds early drafts of it: Springsteen rehearsing with Clarence Clemons in his home; the original version, which was just Springsteen dancing against a black background. He looks desperately uncomfortable, like the man in the song. Evidently it took staging the video around a real gig — the opening night of the Born in the USA tour, in St Paul, Minnesota — to get Springsteen to relax just enough.
The song reached number two in the Billboard Hot 100, and entered the bloodstream of popular culture immediately. The following year, Tina Turner took to performing it live, in lieu of the song she said Springsteen had promised to write for her. Her version was clumpy and colourless, a party hit shorn of desperation. Also in 1985, Big Daddy had a hit single with a dreadful novelty cover, recast as 1950s easy listening country. In 1986, The Shadows tackled it instrumentally, which rather robbed the song of its whole point.
But “Dancing in the Dark” was too dark to be subsumed into light entertainment, and the best versions are those that emphasise both parts of the equation. Mary Chapin Carpenter perhaps took it too far towards misery in her live reading, introducing it as “a bummer song” and playing it as “a bummer song”. Ruth Moody of the folk band The Wailin’ Jennys began the song sombrely before allowing the sunshine in.
Best of all, though, was Hot Chip’s version from 2015. The London electronica group have always had a keen eye for the intersection of melancholy and joy, and “Dancing in the Dark” was made for them. It has the excited propulsion of the dancefloor, taken at a HiNRG tempo — it seems to be racing itself to its end — but Alexis Taylor’s fragile voice can’t carry bombast. And then they perform a brilliant trick — mashing in snatches of another great joy/despair anthem, LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”. Theirs is the only reading, bar Springsteen’s live performances, that leaves you unsure whether you should be dancing or crying.
It’s surely inconceivable, given his obsessional knowledge of pop music and his love of Frank Sinatra, that Springsteen didn’t know there had already been one very famous song called “Dancing in the Dark”. It’s worth comparing the two, because Springsteen’s reads like an answer to the former. Howard Dietz’s 1931 lyric was about two lovers so entwined in each other that they provide the light for each other to dance through the dark. Springsteen, by contrast, sees dancing in the dark as something to be resigned to. And as he comes to the end of the song, he alters the structure of the chorus (“Can’t start a fire / Can’t start a fire without a spark”) to make the song suddenly lurch over a precipice like a rollercoaster. “Can’t start a fire,” he sings, “worryin’ ’bout your little world falling apart,” and — because people remember choruses — the sting of the song becomes fully apparent”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Bruce Springsteen in action in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: Ebet Roberts
I am going to end with The Mix Review and their words about Dancing in the Dark. It is more analytics regarding the sound and instrumentation. Another angle that gives more depth and nuance to this iconic song. I don’t think that this is too strong a word. The introduction to one of Bruce Springsteen’s best-known and acclaimed albums, we are still playing Dancing in the Dark to this day:
“This song has so comprehensively wormed its way into the collective unconscious that it’s hard to hear it without preconceptions, but at face value that drum sound is pretty strange. For a start, the combination of super-dry kick, densely ambient snare, and diffusely distant hi-hat bear no relation to any kind of acoustic reality. In addition, the hyper-consistent kick and snare hits add a definite drum-machine character to the part. I suspect they’re both triggered samples, in fact, given the ‘AMS Kick’ and ‘AMS Sn’ track-sheet annotations for the same album’s ‘Born In The USA’, as shown in this Sound On Sound magazine article. (The AMS DMX 15-80s was one of the first devices widely used for drum-sample triggering.) The scarcity of cymbal hits is also strange for what is ostensibly a rock song, and the two we do get (at 1:50 and 2:42) are much louder and more forward-sounding than the hi-hat.
Looking at the studio setup from that Sound On Sound article, I find it fascinating how the received wisdom of the time was to isolate all the musicians from each other acoustically, thereby removing any shared ambience, only to add masses of artificial reverb at mixdown to regenerate an acoustic connection! Of course, this rather roundabout process did produce sounds that were new and ear-catching at the time — and there’s no arguing with that — but now that the bouffant quiffs of the ’80s are long deflated, it does seem rather too much like hard work to me.
The small-speaker translation is worthy of admiration, though; there’s no denying the clarity with which the song’s main musical elements would have driven through a mono AM radio. The kick’s kept present in the mix by its perky upper mid-range, for example, and the bass guitar line can be easily traced via the fizzy synth that’s surreptitiously doubling it. The snare is, of course, as solid as you’d expect of a sample, while The Boss himself has clearly been expertly automated to keep softer low-register phrases such as “hey there baby” (0:33) pinned into the same mix position as the upper-register bawling on “I’m just about starving tonight” (2:14).
On a musical level, despite the song’s apparent simplicity, it pulls a neat little harmonic trick. The melodic backbone of the song, as featured in the opening synth riff and much of the vocal line, appears over three different harmonic backings. First you get it over a B pedal note, with alternating Bm and G#m chords, then the bass picks out the root notes of those chords for the second half of the prechorus (0:33-0:38), and for the title hook (0:45-0:51) we get E and C#m chords instead”.
On 10th May, Dancing in the Dark turns forty. From the brilliant Born in the U.S.A., I hope that there is celebration and acknowledgement of this song on its anniversary. I really love the song, so I was very keen to explore it more for Groovelines. It is a classic and one of Bruce Springsteen’s defining tracks. Dancing in the Dark still holds so much power and importance…
FORTY years later.