When the Darkness tour in support of the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album ended in January 1979 Bruce was eager to start recording again. By April of the same year, Bruce was back in the studio. As Bruce had dozens of unreleased songs, the selection process for "The River" tracks became a very difficult one.
It has been reported that by the end of 1979 Bruce had managed to reduce near a 100 songs, to a 10 track album called "The Ties That Bind". The album was never released. Instead, almost a year later, Bruce Springsteen, the perfectionist, released "The River" - a double album with only seven of the original ten songs that were a part of "The Ties That Bind". By the time all was done, the recording costs for "The River" surpassed the half-million dollar mark.
"On The River, I would tend to have songs that were kind of celebrations and darker songs next to each other. That was because I didn't know how to combine them. I didn't know how to synthesise it into one song. I knew it was all part of the same picture which is why The River was a double album."
The title track was debuted at Madison Square Garden at the 1979 "No Nukes" concert. The great majority of those in attendance came to see Springsteen and the resulting welcome chants of Broooooce, sounding like boos, prompted Bonnie Raitt to comment, "Too bad his name isn't Melvin". After the show one critic wrote "It was there that Springsteen blew the old guard (CSN, Carly Simon, and James Taylor) away and premiered a new song, The River." It is during this time that Bruce's live sets grew from 90 minutes to three and four hour marathons. Bruce did all he could to forge a bond with his audience and create a sense of community at these shows. Few acts, if any, have been able to duplicate.
Though Springsteen had released four albums and was acclaimed as the greatest rock singer in America, he still had not achieved a great deal of commercial success and had yet to have a song place in the top 20 on the recording charts. That would change with the release of "Hungry Heart", his first top ten single. Bruce originally wrote it for the "Ramones", however when Landau first heard the song he instructed Bruce to keep it and release it.
"The River" has its share of Springsteen's best and worst works. Later in the 1980s, "Roulette" (the first song recorded for The River) and "Be True", which were left of "The River", were both released as B side singles. Even Bruce himself admits that "they would have been better than a couple of the things we threw on there!"
There are also the usual Springsteen masterpieces like "Independence Day" dealing with Bruce's love for his fater and his inability to communicate that affection. One critic once wrote, "The song ebbs and flows on Danny Federici's fluting organ, the delicate acoustic guitar work and Clemons' sax break. But the over-riding image is of a teenage Bruce Springsteen, crouched in his bedroom, alone against the world, while downstairs, his father sits, smoking cigarette after cigarette in the darkness of the kitchen. The two men never talk, they communicate only by shouting at each other about all the bitter divisions that rule their lives and mark out the no man's land which father and son will never get across."
With Bruce's harmonica, Roy Bittan's piano and lyrics such as "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true or is it something worse?" the title track is another Bruce Springsteen masterpiece, making the album unforgettable.
With the success of his last few releases and the enhancment of his icon status upon release of "The River", Bruce Springsteen sat at the top of the rock world. It was anyone's guess as to which direction he would travel next.
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