Bruuuuuuce

For his 71st birthday today Bruce drops this photo of his first band, The Castiles. That's Bruce all the way to the left, and he recently realized he's the last surviving member of the band:

In the early days of Springsteen’s first real band, an assemblage of teenage central-Jersey greasers called the Castiles, there was one member marked for success. He had a smooth, pure tenor. He was the group’s designated heartthrob. His name was George Theiss, and he invited Springsteen into the band as lead guitarist in the first place. “We were the only five freaks in Monmouth County,” Theiss once told Rolling Stone. Theiss and Springsteen were close, often walking to high school together, but they clashed as time went on, especially as Springsteen began singing more. “They were competing for the same spot in the band,” says Diana Theiss, George’s widow. “And George was a little threatened.” The Castiles broke up in 1968. 

It wasn’t always easy for Theiss to watch his former bandmate leap from one unimaginable triumph to another. “It’s just different paths,” says Springsteen. “I don’t know how to make much more sense of it than that.” He and his friend never fully fell out of touch, but Springsteen and Theiss reconnected in the past few years. When Springsteen learned in July 2018 that Theiss was in the final stages of terminal lung cancer, he chartered a plane to North Carolina to sit with him just before his passing. The whole way back, Springsteen was silent, lost in his thoughts. He was, at that point, performing on Broadway five nights a week, talking about his past again and again. Springsteen realized he was the last surviving member of the Castiles, a revelation he sat with for a while. “You can’t think about it,” he says, “without thinking of your own mortality. Most of the guys in the band died young for one reason or another, and so it really kind of came down to George and myself.”