TV MOVIE

Official studio version

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A one, two, three, four

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

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

Well they can change my name or they can leave it, and 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

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

Let's rock it boys!
Oh yeah, woah!
Aw!

Yeah well it's a one two three you take the money
I think it's as easy as A B C
Well they're gonna make a TV movie out of me

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

One more time!

Yeah it's a one two three you take the money
I think it's as easy as A B C
Yeah they're gonna make a TV movie out of me

Yeah!

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Info

TV MOVIE is a song written by Bruce Springsteen and first released on the Tracks box set in 1998. The above lyrics are for Bruce Springsteen's official studio version of TV MOVIE as released in 1998.

Writing and Recording

In an interview promoting the Tracks box set and published in the 07 Nov 1998 issue of Billboard, Bruce Springsteen told Melinda Newman: "I always envied writers who were able to incorporate [sense of humor] in their music. A lot of my favorite rock performers were clowns. When you see Little Richard or the Coasters or Jerry Lee [Lewis], there was some element of that in all of them. I loved the desire to make your audience laugh on some level. Onstage I had the physical ability to incorporate that in what I did, but I found it a lot more difficult to write into my music. If I did come up with it, very often when I was making the final cut, that's what I'd leave off."

TV MOVIE was probably written sometime between January and April 1982. In an interview promoting the Tracks box set and published in the 08 Nov 1998 issue of the Los Angeles Times, Bruce Springsteen told Robert Hilburn: "The way it came about was we were in the studio and someone was talking about some episode that had happened to them, and someone else said, 'Look out man, they are going to make a TV movie out of you.' And that became kind of a running gag whenever anyone came in with a story. 'Hey, you are going to be a TV movie next week.' Then when I went to write about it, it became a mixture of things... That idea that your entire identity can be co-opted and twisted around and reinterpreted and then accepted as fact because it is the most visible presentation of yourself at a particular moment. It was a joke, but it had some ironic undertones."

In a 1989 interview, Max Weinberg told Rolling Stone: "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 the bug hit 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 a song called 'TV Movie.' Bruce got on a roll, and when that happens, you just hold on for dear life."

According to the Tracks booklet liner notes, the official studio version of TV MOVIE was recorded on 13 Jun 1983 at The Hit Factory in New York City, NY. On this track, Bruce Springsteen sings vocals and plays guitar and is accompanied by Roy Bittan on piano, Clarence Clemons on percussion, Garry Tallent on bass, and Max Weinberg on drums. Clarence Clemons also plays saxophone on the song, but his parts virtually disappear in the remix released on Tracks. However, a different mix, with prominent saxophone, has been circulating on bootlegs since 1996. See the "Bootleg Releases" section below for more details.

The official studio version of TV MOVIE (along with the alternative bootlegged mix) is the only studio version of the song in circulation among collectors. However, a band rehearsal take, recorded sometime in April 1982 in Colts Neck, NJ, is in very limited circulation. According to Brucebase, that take is very similar to the one that was recorded the following year and eventually released on Tracks.

Bootleg Releases

A different mix (with prominent saxophone) of the official studio version of TV MOVIE first surfaced on bootlegs in 1996 when it was released on The Lost Masters Vol. 02 (Labour Of Love) [track 03] and The Lost Masters Essential Collection Vol. 1 (Labour Of Love) [disc 2, track 05].

Tracks

In the liner notes of his Tracks box set, Bruce Springsteen introduces the box set as follows:

During long intervals between my record releases, as I was spending more and more time in the studio, when I met a fan out on the street I was often asked, "What are you guys doing in there?" I regularly pondered that question myself.

What we were doing in there was making a lot of music, a lot more music than I could use at any one time. As a result, my albums became a series of choices — what to include, what to leave out? I based my decisions on my creative point of view at the moment — the subject I was trying to focus on, something musical or emotional I was trying to express. In certain instances, as on Darkness on the Edge of Town, Nebraska, and The Ghost of Tom Joad, these choices crystallized the album I was making. On some of my other records the reasons I had for choosing one song over another, in hindsight, feel a good deal less significant. One of the results of working like this was that a lot of music, including some of my favorite things, remained unreleased.

This collection contains everything from the first notes I sang in the Columbia recording studio, my early and later work with the E Street Band, through to my music in the 90s. It's the alternate route to some of the destinations I travelled to on my records, an invitation into the studio on the many nights we spent making music in search of the records we presented to you. I'm glad to finally be able to share this music; here are some of the ones that got away.

- Bruce Springsteen, September 1998

Bruce Springsteen's albums were thematically linked even if they were not strictly concept albums; so some tracks that didn't fit the theme of the album ended up orphaned, not necessarily because they didn't meet his high standards, but because, he says, they didn't fit in with the tone or themes he mined for each set. Many of these unreleased studio outtakes got under the hands of bootleggers. Discussing that issue in 1984, Springsteen told Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder, "We record a lot of material, but we just don't release it all. [...] I always tell myself that some day I'm gonna put an album out with all this stuff on it that didn't fit in. I think there's some good material there that should come out. Maybe at some point, I'll do that."

During a break in The Ghost Of Tom Joad Solo Acoustic Tour, Springsteen thought that "if it's gonna be a year or longer in between records, I have all this music that I know is very good that I never released and I should release some of it whether it was just a CD or something. In that period of time, I should put something out because people would like to have it and I'd like to see it get out." He told Toby Scott (his audio archivist and recording engineer), "send me all the archives, send everything that we recorded". Scott then went to work gathering the potential material from Springsteen's massive audio library (located, along with Sony's sound archives, in the high-tech Iron Mountain facility near Buffalo, NY). "For a week or so," he told Billboard in a Nov 1998 interview, "I just listened to everything that I'd done that we hadn't put out. I made some very brief notes in a notebook, and then I just put it away. It was something that I could do at some point when I get to that place in a new project where I'm not sure how long it's going to take and it would be nice to sort of fill the gap so the fans wouldn't be so long without hearing any music from me".

Springsteen told Mark Hagen in an interview for Mojo magazine published in January 1999, "So it began just with that idea and we listened to about 250 songs, maybe more, I made quick notes in a notebook and put it away. A year went by, more maybe, and I came off the Tom Joad tour and I began to write acoustically again and I wrote about half a record. Then I got stuck and said, 'Well, I'm going to put this aside for a while.' Then I wrote half of an electric record, and hit the same place. So I thought, instead of waiting for another year to put something out I'll put some of this music together. So once again I went back to the archives." According to interview comments made by engineer Toby Scott (Springsteen's audio archivist and recording engineer), it was in February 1998 during solo sessions being conducted at Thrill Hill Recording (Springsteen's home studio) in Colts Neck, NJ, that Springsteen told Scott that the time was right to proceed with the long-anticipated box set of archived, unreleased studio takes. Thrill Hill Recording served as the main operational center for all Tracks project activities. Note that the "Thrill Hill Recording" name is used for whatever home studio Springsteen is recording at, whether it's in Rumson, NJ, Colts, NJ, or Beverly Hills, CA.

Springsteen told Billboard that the songs were culled from between 200 and 300 tunes. According to Toby Scott, the number was down to about 128 songs by late June 1998. It was then narrowed down yet again in July to about 100 songs that were prepped for the Tracks release. Although the project was originally projected to be a 6-disc set, there was a commercial decision made later in the summer to reduce the size of the release to a 4-disc (66-track) set. The package was delivered to Sony in mid-September in order to facilitate the mid-November 1998 release schedule.

Unreleased songs from the Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ sessions were not included on the box set due to ongoing and still-unresolved court proceedings involving most of these unreleased 1972 recordings. The court battle wasn't resolved until in 2001 (April 2001 in the UK and June 2001 in the U.S.), and those recordings are now free for release at any time. The opening four tracks of the box set — which were culled from Springsteen's 03 May 1972 Columbia Records audition — were not part of the court proceedings.

On 16 Jul 1998, Springsteen attended a convention for Sony Music Entertainment Inc. in Miami, FL, where he officially announced that a box set was the works and he played a tape of three songs: WHERE THE BANDS ARE, LOOSE ENDS, and I WANNA BE WITH YOU.

The Tracks box set was released on Columbia Records on 10 Nov 1998. It was issued on both compact disc and audio cassette formats. It's a 4-disc (or 4-cassette) set consisting of a total of 66 tracks (almost 4.5 hours long), 10 of which were heretofore unavailable single B-sides, 6 were demos and alternate versions of already-released material, and 50 (48 studio and 2 live) were never-before-released songs recorded during the sessions for Springsteen's many albums. Some tracks were treated with a recent touch-up here or there to give the older recordings a fresh polish.

• Disc 1 consists of material from 1972 to 1980, including Springsteen's very first Columbia Records audition for legendary A & R executive John Hammond. This disc also features additional songs most of which recorded for (but never released on) Springsteen's first four albums.
• Disc 2 consists of material from 1979 to 1983, taken primarily from the recording sessions of The River, Nebraska, and Born In The U.S.A.. Springsteen describes this disc as "almost the completely other album from 'The River'."
• Disc 3 consists of material from 1982 to 1987, taken primarily from the recording sessions of Born In The U.S.A. and Tunnel Of Love.
• Disc 4 consists of material from 1989 to 1998, taken primarily from the recording sessions of Human Touch.

Live History

TV MOVIE was performed once during the Wrecking Ball Tour (133 dates, March 2012 to September 2013), on 23 Jul 2013 at Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. The song was played in its full-band studio arrangement.

Covers

As far as it's known, no artist has recorded and released Bruce Springsteen's TV MOVIE.

Available Versions

List of available versions of TV MOVIE on this website:

TV MOVIE [Official studio version]
TV MOVIE [Live 23 Jul 2013 version]

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Page last updated: 02 May 2018