I remember one night when we were completely packed up to go home and Bruce was off in the corner playing his acoustic guitar. Suddenly, I guess the bug bit him, and he started writing these rockabilly songs. We’d been recording all night and were dead tired, but they had to open up the cases and set up the equipment so that we could start recording again at five in the morning. That’s when we got “Pink Cadillac,” “Stand On It,” and… “TV Movie”… Bruce got on a roll, and when that happens, you just hold on for dear life. — Max Weinberg, quoted in Clinton Heylin, E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
It wasn’t just that night. Bruce had been writing in a rockabilly vein all through the Born in the U.S.A. sessions. “My Hometown” started out as rockabilly, as did “Cynthia” and “Sugarland.”
It’s not clear exactly when that night was that Max refers to–“Pink Cadillac” and “TV Movie” both date back to home demos in very early 1982, so it’s unlikely that Bruce had invented them out of whole cloth in the studio sessions that followed.
More likely he resurrected them, inspired by his mood to finish and perfect them with the band. “Pink Cadillac” was recorded on May 31, “TV Movie” on June 13, and “Stand On It” on June 16, so that rockabilly groove lasted at least two weeks. While none of the three would make it onto a studio album (they’d all see the light of day on Tracks, Bruce’s 1998 outtakes collection), two of the three would be performed dozens of times over the decades that followed.
“TV Movie,” however, would see only a single live outing (to date, at least), so let’s give this relative obscurity some sunlight.
No discussion of “TV Movie” can start without first acknowledging the track’s superstar: “Professor” Roy Bittan is in full Jerry Lee Lewis mode throughout. During the bridge, I can’t help but envision Roy kicking away his piano stool when Bruce screams, and Roy’s final flourish at the end of the song is well-earned. He certainly didn’t deserve the ignominy Bruce threw his way four decades later, but more on that in a bit.
It almost feels silly to analyze a song that’s basically a lark, but let’s take a crack at it anyway, shall we?
“TV Movie” starts with a literal nightmare and quickly segues into a metaphorical one:
I woke up last night shaking from a dream, for in that dream I died
My wife rolled over and told me that my life would be immortalized
Not in some major motion picture, or great American novel, you see
No, they’re gonna make a TV movie out of me
We know already that Bruce’s narrator is famous enough to warrant a biopic, but in her attempt to console her husband (although still a few years away from marriage, we can probably safe assume “TV Movie” is thematically autobiographical), our hero’s wife damns with faint praise.
In those pre-HBO and Netflix days, the quality divide between movies made for television and those made for the cinema was a canyon. TV movies were typically made on shoestring budgets with a more affordable tier of talent. (Movie stars wouldn’t typically be caught “slumming” on television.)
But TV movies were prolific, and celebrities were popular and profitable fodder for biographical adaptations:
Well now it’s a one-two-three you take the money
Yeah, it’s as easy as A-B-C
Yeah, they’re gonna make a TV movie out of me
Bruce’s narrator knows he has little control over how he’s portrayed, and he frets over it… or so we think.
Well, they can change my name or they can leave it, yeah they can change my story too
Or they can make me black or Chinese and do things that I never gonna do
They’re gonna give my life a whole new ending and put me in prime-time first-run
And when it’s over, what I did there will be what I done
In later years, Bruce would quote the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” By that time, the legend of Bruce Springsteen had indeed become fact; in 1983, Bruce could see it coming.
But here’s where Bruce throws a curve ball right down the middle of “TV Movie,” as we learn that our protagonist doesn’t fear being misportrayed at all–in fact, he welcomes it as the price of fame:
Well, now I don’t want my name in a history book
Nobody’s ever gonna see
No, they’re gonna make a TV movie out of me
In 1983, television may not have offered the critical respect that movies afforded, but it offered something more important: popular respect. From this point forward, our hero embraces the notion of living forever in a TV movie that will air forever in late-night re-runs, and the band lets loose in celebration during the bridge. One almost suspects they’d revel endlessly if Bruce hadn’t reined them back in with a “one more verse now!”
Well, I’m a shoe-in for a sponsor, Goodyear blimp and radial wheels
Somebody had a meeting somewhere, somehow somebody made a deal
Well, I was one of them kinds of stories that everybody liked to see
Yeah, they’re gonna make a TV movie out of me
Now I don’t want no inscription on my gravestone
No long soliloquy
Now they’re gonna make a TV movie out of me
Our hero sees dollar signs in his future, and more importantly: late-night immortality. Ironically, the world would change over the decades that followed. Today, most of those TV movies are lost to pre-streaming history, relegated to studio archives and old VHS tapes.
“TV Movie” suffered similar fate, available as an outtake on Tracks but completely forgotten in concert.
Forgotten, that is, until a fan requested it in Cardiff, late on the Wrecking Ball Tour in 2013. Bruce issued a disclaimer before he played it, calling the song “ridiculous” and “silly.” But he did so with a wry smile that betrayed self-awareness that there was also a lot of truth in it.
However, Bruce did one thing in that world debut that was unforgivable: just seconds after launching into what should have been Roy’s star turn for the evening, Bruce shouted for his sound crew to turn down the professor’s volume. “He’s not that important!”
Despite softening the slight with a parenthetical “He sounds good, though,” Bruce inexplicably marginalized the best part of the song, giving the bridge solo to Jake instead of Roy.
Interestingly, the original studio take of “TV Movie” did have a sax part, but Bruce completely removed The Big Man from the track before releasing the song on Tracks. Here’s that original version, with Clarence in the mix:
So why did Bruce change his mind forty years later and spotlight Jake instead of Roy? No idea. Perhaps the request threw him and he didn’t remember how essential Roy is to the song, or perhaps it was just a whim that night.
Regardless, “TV Movie” needs at least one more outing to set things right. Let’s hope we get it soon.
TV Movie
Recorded: June 13, 1983
Released: Tracks (1998)
First performed: July 23, 2013 (Cardiff, Wales)
Last performed: July 23, 2013 (Cardiff, Wales)
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