Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You

One, two, three, four.

I'm in the middle of a 45-year conversation

with these men and women I'm surrounded by and with some of you.

Now, with some of you, I suppose, we've only recently started speaking.

But either way,

I've tried to make that conversation essential, fun and entertaining.

I started playing the guitar

because I was looking for someone to speak to and correspond with.

I guess that worked out better than my wildest dreams.

All I know is after all this time,

I still feel that burning need to communicate.

It's there when I wake every morning.

It walks alongside of me throughout the day.

And it's there when I go to sleep each night.

Over the past 50 years, it's never once ceased.

Owing to what, I don't really know.

Is it loneliness, hunger, ego, ambition, desire,

a need to be felt and heard, recognized,

all of the above?

All I know is that it's one of the most consistent impulses in my life.

As reliable as the rhythmic beating of my own heart

is my need to talk to you.

Gentlemen, congregate.

Get your notepads. Start your notepads.

Get your notepads and congregate.

My notepad. Got it.

Better than yours.

Man, it's snowing.

- It is. - It's snowing.

Last night I was sitting outside till nine o'clock in my front yard by the fire.

Today, it's snowing.

That's Jersey weather in the fall.

The end of it, anyway.

- Eight bars of one, right? - Yes.

Then two bars of six, two bars of one, two bars of four.

Neath a crowd of mongrel trees

I pulled that bothersome thread

Got down on my knees Grabbed my pen and bowed my head

Tried to summon All that my heart finds true

And send it in my letter to you

All right, try it.

One, two. One, two, three, four.

No foot yet.

I think we're going too long there, Roy.

I think it's one, two, three, four. One chord.

Roy, you're going to the E minor too soon.

- That's the breakdown. - No... Not...

Yeah, there... Yeah, there's... eight bars of one.

The E Street Band is a finely tuned instrument

of great flexibility and power.

One, two, three. One chord.

They can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

Our years of playing together

have created a shorthand and an efficiency in the studio

comparable to that of a finely tuned racing engine.

Foot.

We are a unit 45 years in the making, decades in the refining,

and we bring that power to bear when we engage with you.

Neath a crowd of mongrel trees I pulled that bothersome thread

Wait, wait, wait.

The intro progression is only the intro progression.

It never happens again. Then you gotta stick with the song.

We perform in service to our audience.

The pay is great, but you're the reason we're here.

That's big news.

Now, there's one thing we could try.

In my letter to you

It is our commitment that hardens our purpose,

our sense of do or die.

It's a little extra riff, but I don't know if it's in the way.

The E Street Band is not a job. It is a vocation, a calling.

It is both one of the most important things in your life,

and, of course, it's only rock and roll.

All right, E Streeters! Let's do this thing.

These are my friends, the men and women I work with:

Steve Van Zandt...

Max Weinberg...

Roy Bittan...

Garry Tallent...

Patti Scialfa...

Nils Lofgren...

Charlie Giordano...

Soozie Tyrell...

Jake Clemons.

And there are two members in absentia...

Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons.

This is the E Street Band.

Neath a crowd of mongrel trees I pulled that bothersome thread

Got down on my knees Grabbed my pen and bowed my head

Tried to summon All that my heart finds true

And send it in my letter to you

Oh!

Things I found out Through hard times and good

I wrote 'em all out in ink and blood

Dug deep in my soul And signed my name true

And sent it in my letter to you

In my letter to you

I took all my fears and doubts

In my letter to you

All the hard things I found out

In my letter to you

All that I've found true

And I sent it in my letter to you

I took all the sunshine and rain

All my happiness and all my pain

The dark evening stars And the morning sky of blue

And I sent it in my letter to you

And I sent it in my letter to you

In my letter to you

I took all my fears and doubts

In my letter to you

All the hard things I found out

In my letter to you

All that I've found true

And I sent it in my letter to you

I sent it in my letter to you

Sounds good. Really good.

- Should we listen? - Yep.

One, two, three, four.

Roy, give it more music box, pal.

E Street, E Street, E Street!

Want me to play it up higher?

- Don't play it up higher. - Okay.

Just don't play so low.

We're having fun, damn it.

Is there a waiter in this joint?

Nope.

Well, we gotta get back on our Beatles schedule.

Three hours a song, that's it. It's what the Beatles did.

That's a good call.

If we work Saturday and Sunday, we'll get a double album.

My letter to you

All right, hold on.

For some reason my guitar is roaring, and I have no control over it.

It's just 30 times the volume of yesterday.

- We lost it. - All right, hold on.

Garry's got a problem.

All right, well, let's take a few minutes and work on it.

It's thin today. It sounds thin.

- You can just scoot those over. - Yeah.

I like it when I "doo" with him,

and then he's alone, and then I come in on top of him.

Um, was that... Can I just hear that entrance again?

We wanna hear the harmony that's on when Bruce sings, um...

I'll see you in my dreams

This is my cousin Frank. See, make sure we get this.

Hi, guys. How are ya?

Championship jitterbug dancer of the entire Jersey Shore

and the man who taught me my first chords on the guitar.

Wow.

These are all my original guitars.

My Kent, first guitar.

You had one of those Sears and Roebuck ones, didn't you?

Uh... George Theiss had one in the case.

Yeah. One of the...

George Theiss had one where the speaker was in the guitar.

Oh, in the guitar?

But we also had one where it was in the case.

You know, you got the Sears and Roebuck's old...

Oh, Sears.

Both horrible. The one in the guitar with...

Look, it's a speaker right here.

Horrible-sounding.

We all had one of those.

On a sunny July day,

there I stood at the bedside of my old bandmate from the Castiles,

George Theiss.

George, at 68, was in the final stages of lung cancer and lay very near death.

George was the man who dated my sister Ginny

and pulled me from my house on South Street one afternoon,

where I would embark on one of the greatest adventures of my life.

I'd join my first real band, the Castiles.

The Castiles lasted for three critical, historically explosive years

from 1965 to 1968,

an eternity in the '60s

and an epic three years of historical and cultural events.

It was a powder keg of a moment to be in a young rock and roll band.

That was a long time ago.

But some things imprint themselves on you and never let you go.

They're a life sentence.

With George's death,

I was the last living member of the mighty Castiles...

the last living member.

I thought about it... for a long time.

And those meditations ended up being the songs I've written

for Letter To You.

Music just comes.

Sometimes... and only sometimes,

this is the way it happens.

This music, these songs,

reminded me of the debt that I still owed my Freehold brothers-in-arms.

So this goes out as a deep and heartfelt thank you to Diana and George Theiss,

Bart Haynes, Frank Marziotti, Curt Fluhr,

Paul Popkin, Bob Alfano and Vinny Maniello.

My friends, bandmates and fellow students

in my first and greatest school of rock, the Castiles.

This is "Last Man Standing."

Faded pictures in an old scrapbook

Faded pictures that somebody took

When you were hard and young and proud