Wax Poetics

The tape that changed the course of Bruce Springsteen’s history.

In June 1984, Jon Landau walked into the office of Al Teller, President of Columbia Records, and put a ¾-inch U-matic cassette into the player on his desk. He said nothing about what he or Bruce thought of it.

Fifteen seconds in, Teller was talking to himself. Where is the band? “Dancing in the Dark” is a big, full-band production, and the band was nowhere to be seen. It was Springsteen alone on a black stage — one locked-off camera, one master shot, no cutaways — until Clarence Clemons came strolling through the frame in a red suit near the end of the song. When it finished, Teller looked at Landau and said: “No way. We can’t use this.” 

Bruce and Landau had both already seen the video and shared the view that this video could not be used. The cassette became an almost forgotten part of Bruce's history.

This is that cassette. The original tape from the shoot, the one that was in the room.

It holds four complete takes. You see the clapper board and the colour palette card. You see Springsteen’s warm-up moves. You see the byplay with Clemons change from take to take. And you see his face as the song ends and he walks out of frame, take after take, perhaps arriving at the conclusion that this is not working. Blurred fragments have circulated online and none of it has ever been seen like this.

Without this film there is no Brian De Palma video. No arena, no unknown Courteney Cox pulled out of the crowd. It was the rejection of this tape that sent them back to the drawing board, and what came back two weeks later was the video that turbocharged the launch of the Born in the USA album on a trajectory which exceeded 20 million sales and made Springsteen a global icon.

A Springsteen grail that has never come to market, in any form, ever. Offered as one lot with Springsteen’s signed Born in the U.S.A. twenty million sales plaque.