Bruce, Patti, Petty & Iovine

PROVE IT ALL NIGHT: The follow-up Born to Run, Darkness was inevitably going to fall short of that masterwork in the minds of fans and critics alike, but over the ensuing decades, the LP has taken on an aura of its own. In a recent Uncut special devoted to The Boss, our own Bud Scoppa notes that the album might have had a far greater impact had Bruce not given away “Because the Night” to Patti Smith, who had a major hit with it. “But if the unremittingly dark tone of Darkness—“Candy’s Room” excepted—threw off many of Bruce’s fans, its monochromatic severity was ultimately the album’s greatest distinction,” Scoppa wrote, while also noting that Springsteen’s engineer, who produced Patti’s “Because the Night” as well as a string of hit albums for Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, was none other than Jimmy Iovine (see next item). (6/30a)