Bart Haynes was the first to fall.
He was the band’s original drummer until Halloween 1965, and his house in Freehold served as their rehearsal space.
A bandmate remembered him as an “absurdly funny kid, classic class clown, and a good drummer with one strange quirk: couldn’t play ‘Wipe Out’ by The Surfaris.”
Bart graduated high school the following spring, joined the Marines in October, shipped out to Vietnam in April, and was killed in action six months later.
Paul Popkin was the next man down. 
He was the band’s tambourine player and backing vocalist from October 1965 until the band broke up in 1968. He passed away from hepatitis the following year.
Bob Alfano was the last member to join The Castiles. He followed the band’s leader to his next group as well. Although he turned down an offer to play on his bandmate’s first album, Alfano stayed active in the local music scene until his death in 2007.
Vinnie Manniello replaced Bart Haynes as the band’s drummer and remained with the band until their 1968 breakup. When his former bandmate scored an audition with Columbia A&R legend John Hammond four years later, Manniello leant him his acoustic guitar to audition with. He remained an active musician and a Freehold resident until his peaceful death in 2011.
Frank Marziotti was one of the last surviving band members until he passed away in early 2017. He was also the oldest, a full decade older than his high school student bandmates.
He was the band’s bass player for their first year, until a kid asked him after a show if he was Bruce’s daddy.
“I took that as a sign that it was time for me to go,” he told an interviewer.
Danny Hyland (backing vocals, harmonica, tambourine), Richie Goldstein (backing vocals and guitar), Curt Fluhr (replacement bassist after Marziotti’s departure) also completed their life journeys in the years since The Castiles went their separate ways.
After Marziotti’s passing, only two Castiles remained.
They shared a birthday month, born days apart in September 1949. George Theiss formed The Castiles in 1964 (they were called The Sierras at the time) and began dating a girl named Ginny in 1965. When Ginny told her boyfriend that her brother Bruce played guitar too, George invited him to join the band.
Bruce remembers George as “kind of a regular guy. He was a carpenter by trade, and I believe that that’s how he made his living through most of his life, and played music on the side. But actually, as a teenager, he was quite charismatic: He was very good looking, attracted a lot of girls and had a great sort of tenor voice, and was really, initially, the frontman for The Castiles — I was simply the guitarist. And so he was a bit of our local star, you know, and he locally maintained that reputation for quite a big part of his life in Asbury Park.” (NPR, October 22, 2020)
In their post-Castile years, George formed his own eponymous band after stints in various local groups; Bruce earned himself a recording contract with Columbia Records and won over audiences worldwide.
In the summer of 2018, Bruce flew to his bedside to say goodbye to his old friend, who was dying of cancer. George passed shortly thereafter.
Fifty-three years after joining his very first band, Bruce Springsteen found himself the last man standing.
The last surviving member of The Castiles found himself profoundly affected by that realization and keenly aware that his tomorrows were considerably fewer in number than his yesterdays.
As summer turned to autumn turned to winter, Bruce reflected on his loss and his own mortality. His Broadway run was over, no tour was on the horizon, and it had been some time since he’d been visited by a muse. Something tugged at him though, and in the early days of spring, the dam broke.
Over the course of about ten days in April 2019, Bruce wrote the songs that would form the heart of Letter to You. “I just wandered around the house in different rooms,” he told Brian Hiatt in Rolling Stone, “and I wrote a song each day. I wrote a song in the bedroom. I wrote a song in our bar. I wrote a song in the living room.”
The first song–the one that established the theme for the album and inspired all that came after–was “Last Man Standing.”
Bruce wrote “Last Man Standing” on an acoustic guitar given to him by an anonymous Italian fan as Bruce exited the Walter Kerr Theater one evening. He was intrigued by the quality of the guitar and its mysterious origin, and he kept it in his living room where it sat neglected until Bruce reached for it as inspiration struck.
The concept was deceptively simple: the youthful energy and experience of a high school rock band viewed through the lens of its last survivor some fifty years later. Bruce composed a nostalgic, almost elegiac melody that rocks just enough for minds to conjure a band at its prime, yet restrained enough that Bruce’s vocals stand above and apart, particularly during the reflective verses.
The verses are simple and ruminatory: decades on, a band member leafs through the pages of an old scrapbook–long enough ago that he no longer remembers who captured the faded photos.
Faded pictures in an old scrapbook
Faded pictures that somebody took
When you were hard and young and proud
Backed against the wall running raw and loud
Losing himself in the photos and the details they reveal, he finds old memories newly stirred. We’re transported back to the mid-1960s and the local circuit on the Jersey shore.
Snakeskin vest and a sharkskin suit
Cuban heels on your boots
Kicking the band in side by side
You take the crowd on their mystery ride
Knights of Columbus and the Fireman’s Ball
Friday night at the Union Hall
Black leather clubs all along Route 9
You count the names of the missing as you count off time
With that last line, Bruce reveals that our narrator is both past and present. His young body stands on the stage beside his bandmates as his older soul marvels at the vitality of his long-gone friends. It’s one of only two powerful lyrical tricks in an otherwise straightforward song, and the second one comes immediately after:
Rock of ages lift me somehow
Somewhere high and hard and loud
Somewhere deep into the heart of the crowd
I’m the last man standing now
Rock of ages. It could have served as the song’s title, too.
As is his wont, Bruce uses the phrase to symbolize two things at once: the biblical metaphor for everlasting strength, and the literal reference to his life’s work. He calls on both to lift his soul in transcendence, as he attempts to forget the present and immerse himself in the past.
It’s only for the moment, though, and as the lights come up we realize that our bandleader is still at it.
Out of school and out of work
Thrift store jeans and flannel shirt
The lights go down and we face the crowd
The last man standing now
Lights come up at the Legion Hall
Pool cues go back up on the wall
You pack your guitar and have one last beer
With just the ringing in your ears
It’s present day; our narrator is long since out of school and retired now as well. His bandmates are different but the venues are the same. When the lights go down he imagines himself surrounded not just by his current band but by the spirits of his fallen former bandmates, too.
Once again he beseeches the divine spirits of both God and Rock and Roll for the strength to carry on–not just for himself, but for his brothers.
Rock of ages lift me somehow
Somewhere high and hard and loud
Somewhere deep into the heart of the crowd
I’m the last man standing now
For every great band, there’s a last man standing (or there will be), and as long as he stands on stage each night, his band stands with him. Or as Springsteen put it to his audience more than four decades into his career: if you’re here, and we’re here, then they’re here.
Bruce recorded “Last Man Standing” just prior to the pandemic of 2020, and he hasn’t had an opportunity to perform it in public yet. That may change next year, but in the meantime we can hear two brief, live acoustic performances, each performed during an interview.
The first was shortly after the song’s release in October 2020 when Bruce appeared on Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin’s podcast, Broken Record.
The second was just a couple of weeks ago during Bruce’s interview with Howard Stern.
As the genesis for Letter to You, “Last Man Standing” seems like a pretty good bet for at least a few set list appearances on Bruce’s next tour–which as of this writing is only weeks away. So if you’re waiting for a full-band performance, we hopefully won’t have to wait much longer.
Update 1/3/2024: With World Tour 2023 behind us, we now know that of course “Last Man Standing” did indeed feature nightly–but as an affecting solo performance rather than with the full band (although Curt Ramm played a moving trumpet solo during the bridge).
Last Man Standing
Recorded: November 18-22, 2019
Released: Letter to You (2020)
First performed: October 27, 2020 (Colts Neck, NJ)
Last performed: September 3, 2023 (East Rutherford, NJ)
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No mistake that Last Man Standing uses the same chord progression and cadence as Darkness on the Edge of Town. It’s not a sequel exactly, but it occupies a lot of the same emotional space (separated by 40 years of course). Loneliness, isolation, defiance – but the defiance is quieter now… there’s a resignation. It’s a different darkness surrounding him, and he knows that he can’t keep it at bay forever. It’s claimed his contemporaries and will be coming for him soon enough that he must feel it. But for now, he’s still on that hill cause he can’t stop. He’s still on that hill with everything that he’s got, but he’s the last man standing now, he’s the last man standing for now
You probably won’t see this but thought I’d still mention it.
It’s too bad you don’t generally go back and update performances for ones that hadn’t been performed yet. I’d really like your thoughts on how “Backstreets” was recontextualized and paired with this and sort of “I’ll See You In My Dreams” for the 2023 tour, it’s such an interesting change and the acoustic performance if this song is beautiful. Also, “I’ll See You In My Dreams” I haven’t read yet but if it doesn’t include the Howard Stern and concert ending performances it really, really needs to.
Thanks, Thomas! I do sometimes go back and update past essays. I haven’t done it for “I’ll See You in My Dreams” because I haven’t felt the recent performances have measured up to the ones he did on Broadway. But I might at year-end when I do my usual sweep of the site. For “Backstreets,” I probably will note his recontextualizing as a song about as friendship with George.