This Day In Music – Dancing In The Dark
1984 – It was this day in music we first met Courteney Cox in a music video for Bruce Springsteen.
Before Friends fame. Before anyone really knew her name she was invited on stage to dance with “The Boss”. On purpose. Not like it is meant to look in the video.
They had tried to shoot a studio video for the song “Dancing In the Dark” but it never happened. The song is doing well, climbing the charts, and MTV at the time was wanting a video to play. So as Bruce Springsteen gets ready for his live show in Minnesota, he gets Brian DePalma to come to his show with cameras, and a then unknown actress, Courteney Cox. She is planted in the crowd, to stare at “the Boss” awestruck, fanning over the legend, and it’s during the sax solo, she is brought onstage to look like the ultimate fan experience, getting to dance with Bruce Springsteen. Seriously, who didn’t want to be HER?
It’s a moment so many people won’t forget.
Her part is the only thing staged. The crowd is real and so is the performance. The crowd didn’t even realize they were filming until Bruce plays the song again, and AGAIN, Courteney comes up to dance.
MTV puts the video in rotation as soon as they can, and the song climbs to #2 on the Hot 100, and the next six songs from the album all reach the Top 10.
Courteney Cox would go on to land a role on Family Ties, playing the girlfriend of Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox) the last two seasons of the show and we know where she went from there – in 1994 she stars in Friends, which runs for ten years, becoming one of the highest-rated shows every season.
