The Promised Land (Introduction Part 2) (Springsteen on Broadway)

I had one shot, my girlfriend at the time did me a great favor, brought a guy who had a successful recording band down to the Student Prince, our club, Asbury Park, to discover us. We got up on a little stage that fit 150 people, was about half full, and we played for this guy like we were at Madison Square Garden. Everything we had, all night long. We played five sets from 9pm 'til 3am. At the end of the night, I was soaked to my bones, I got off the band stand, this guy walked up to me, looked me in the eye, shook my hand and said, "You guys are the best unsigned band I've ever seen". Then he slept with my girlfriend and left town. That's the end of that story. It's a sad ending, ya know. But that was enough for me. I gathered together the men, and I said, "Gentlemen, we are going to have to leave the confines of the Jersey shore and venture into parts unknown if we wanna be seen, heard, by anybody, or discovered". Now, I found a manager, surfboard manufacturer from the west coast, he'd moved east by the name of Carl Virgil "Tinker" West. Now, together he, Mad Dog Lopez, and myself, we lived in the surfboard factory, in the industrial wastelands of Wanamassa, New Jersey. Tinker said he had some remaining rock 'n' roll contacts in San Francisco so we all got excited, and he said if we could get there, somethin' might happen. So we saved up all our money until we had 100 dollars, alright?. And then me, Danny Federici, Mad Dog Lopez, little Vinnie Roslin our bass player, rigged out Danny's station wagon for the drive, put a mattress in the back for the drivers to spell each other into sleep, then on the way out there, we rigged Tinker's old 40's flatbed to carry our equipment, and we had three days to make it across the country for a New Year's Eve gig in Big Sur, California. Now three days means those are gonna be thousand mile days. You can make it, but you can't stop. You stop for gas and for nothing else. You drive, drive, drive, drive, 72 hours straight, somebody's drivin' all the time, around the clock. Now of course we lost Danny and the entire station wagon full of drivers in Nashville, Tennessee. Now, there's no cellular phones - young people, take a moment. Let's try it. Imagine a world without the cellular phone. When you lose someone in that world without the cellular phone, oh they're fuckin' lost. There's no device! You can't get in touch with 'em, they're gone! Out of your life! Into the ether!