Dear Jimmy,

You family asked me to speak at your service and I am so honored and touched.

I’m also really scared and I say that because you of all people understand this, “I would like to run away and then call in four days from now from the beauty parlor.

I want to do a good job because I love you and because you always did a good job. I think the deal is I’m supposed to speak about the actor artists work part of your life. Others will have spoken beautifully and magnificently about the other beautiful and magnificent parts of you, the father, brother, friend. I guess what I was told was that I’m supposed to speak for your castmates who you loved, your crew that you loved so much, for the people at HBO. … I hope I can speak for all of them and give credit to them and to you.

Experts told me to start with a joke or cite a funny anecdote. “Ha-ha-ha.” But as you yourself so often said, I’m not feeling it. I’m too sad and full of despair. I’m writing to you because I’d partly like to have your advice because I remember how you did speeches. I saw you do a lot of them at award shows and stuff and invariably I think you used to express the thoughts on a sheet of paper and put in your pocket and then not really refer to them. And consequentially, many of your speeches didn’t make sense.

I think that could happen except in your case it didn’t matter that it didn’t make sense because the feeling was real, the feeling was real, the feeling was real. I can’t say that enough.

I tried to write a traditional eulogy, but it came out bad. So I’m writing you this letter and now I’ m reading that letter in front of you. But it is being done to and for an audience that will give the funny opening a try. I hope it is funny. It is to me and I know it is to you.

One day towards the end of the show…season four or five…we were on the set shooting a scene and it was you and Stevie van Zandt. I think the setup was that Tony had received news of the death of someone and it was inconvenient for him. It said “Tony opens the door angrily and closes it and starts to speak.”

The cameras rolled and you opened the refrigerator door and you slammed it really hard. You slammed it hard enough that it came open again and you slammed it again and it came open again. You kept slamming it and slamming it and slamming it and slamming it and went apeshit on that refrigerator. The funny part for me was, I remember Steven van Zandt – cause the cameras are now going and we have to play this whole five minute scene with the refrigerator door open. And I remember Steven van Zandt just standing there with his lip out and trying to figure out “Well, what should I do first as Silvio, cause he just broke my refrigerator” and  then as Steven the actor cause we’re about to play a scene with a refrigerator door open, people don’t do that. And I remember him going over, trying to tinker with the door and it didn’t work.

We finally had to call cut and we tried to fix the refrigerator door and it never really worked because then the gaffer tape showed inside the refrigerator and it was a problem all day long. And I remember you saying “just roll just roll with it. The places it take me too the things that I have to do it’s so dark.” And I remember telling you, “Did I tell you to destroy the refrigerator? Does it say anywhere in the script, ‘Tony destroys refrigerator?’ It says, ‘Tony angrily shuts the refrigerator door.’ That’s what it says. You destroyed the refrigerator door.”

Another memory image of you that comes to mind is very early on, we were shooting in that really hot summer in humid New Jersey and I looked over and you were sitting in an aluminum beach chair with your slacks rolled up to your knees and black socks and black shoes and a damp wet handkerchief on your head. And I remember looking over there and going, “Well, that’s really not a cool look.” Then I was filled with love and I knew then that I was in the right place because I said Wow, I haven’t seen that done since my father used to do it and my Italian uncles used to do it and my Italian grandfather used to do it and they were laborers in the same hot sun in New Jersey and they were stone masons and your father I know worked with concrete. I don’t know what is with Italians and cement. I was so proud of our heritage.

It made me so proud of our heritage to see you do that and when I say that you were my brother, this has a lot to do with that. Italian-American. Italian worker. Builder. That Jersey thing, whatever that means. The same social class. I really feel though that I’m older than you I always felt that we were brothers and partly based on that day. I was filled with so much love for everything that we were doing and what we were about to embark on. I also feel you’re my brother because of the things we both loved. Family. Work. People in all their imperfection. Food. Alcohol. Talking. Rage. And a desire to bring the whole structure crashing down. We amused each other.

The image of my aunts, uncle and father reminded of something that happened between us one time because these guys were such men – that was the point of it – your father and these men from Italy. And you were going through a crisis of faith about yourself and acting and a lot of things. Very upsetting. I went to meet you on the banks of the Hudson River and you told me, “You know what I want to be? I want to be a man, that’s all. I want to be a man.”

Now this is so odd because you are such a man. You’re a man in ways many males including myself wish they could be a man. The paradox about you as a man is that I always felt personally that with you I was seeing a young boy, a boy about Michael’s age right now. Cause you were every boyish. At about that age where humankind and life on the planet are really opening up and putting on a show, really revealing themselves in all their beautiful and horrible glory and I saw you as a boy, as a sad boy, amazed and confused and loving and amazed by all that and that was all in your eyes. That was why I think you are a great actor. It’s because of that boy that was inside; it was a child reacting. Of course, you were intelligent, but it was a child reaction and your reactions were often childish. By that I mean they were pre-school and they were pre-manners, they were pre-intellect, they were just simple emotions, straight and pure.  And I think that your talent is you can take in the immensity of human kind and the universe and shine it back out to the rest of us like a huge light; and I believe that only a pure soul, like a child, can do that really well. And that was you.

Now to talk about a third guy between us, there was you, me and this third guy. People always say, “Tony Soprano – why do we love him so much when he’s such a prick?” My theory was they saw a little boy. They felt and they loved the little boy and they sensed his love and hurt and you brought all of that to it. You were a good boy. Your work with the Wounded Warriors is just one example of this. And I’m going to say something because I know you’d want me to say it – that no one should forget Tony Sirrico’s efforts with you in this. He was there were you all the way and in fact you said to me just recently “you know it’ more Tony than me.”  And I know you and I know you’d want me to turn the spotlight on him or you wouldn’t be satisfied, so I’ve done that.

So Tony Soprano never changed, people say. He got darker, and he tried and he tried and he tried. And you tried and you tried more than most us and harder than most of us and sometimes you tried too hard – that refrigerator is one example. Sometimes your efforts were a cost to you and to others, but you tried and I’m thinking about the fact that – how nice you were to strangers on the street, fans, photographers, you would be patient, loving and personal and then finally you would just do too much and then you’d snap and that’s of course what everybody read about, was the snapping.

I was asked to talk about the work part. And so I’ll talk about the show we used to do and how we used to do it. You know that we always ended an episode with a song. That was kind of like me and the writers letting the real geniuses do the heavy lifting – Bruce and Nick and Keith and Howlin Wolf. So if this was an episode we’d end with a song. The song, as far as I’m concerned, would be Joan Osborne’s‘”What If God Was One of Us?”

The setup for this – we never did this and you never heard this  — was that Tony was somehow lost in the Meadowlands and he didn’t have his car and his wallet and his car keys – I forget how we got there, there was some kind of a scrape – but he had nothing in his pockets but some change. He didn’t have his guys there; he didn’t have his gun. So mob boss Tony Soprano is just one of the working stiffs getting in line getting on the bus and the way we were going to film it he was gonna get on the bus and the lyric that would’ve gone on with that would’ve been – and we don’t have Joan Osborne here to sing it – “If God had a face what would it look like? And would you want to see if seeing meant that you had to believe? And yeah, yeah God is great. Yeah, yeah God is good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

So Tony would get on the bus and he would sit there and the bus would pull out of this big billow of diesel smoke and then the key lyric would come on: “What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a stranger on a bus trying to make his way home?” And that would’ve been playing over your face, Jimmy.

But then – this is where it gets strange – now I would have to update because of the events of last week and I would let the song play further and let the lyrics be “Just trying to make his way home like a holy rolling stone back up to Heaven all alone nobody callin’ on the phone ‘Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome.”

Love, David< /blockquote>

 

This eulogy was delivered by Bruce Springsteen at Danny Federici‘s funeral on April 21 in Red Bank, New Jersey:

FAREWELL TO DANNY

Let me start with the stories.

Back in the days of miracles, the frontier days when “Mad Dog” Lopez and his temper struck fear into the band, small club owners, innocent civilians and all women, children and small animals.

Back in the days when you could still sign your life away on the hood of a parked car in New York City.

Back shortly after a young red-headed accordionist struck gold on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and he and his mama were sent to Switzerland to show them how it’s really done.

Back before beach bums were featured on the cover of Time magazine.

I’m talking about back when the E Street Band was a communist organization! My pal, quiet, shy Dan Federici, was a one-man creator of some of the hairiest circumstances of our 40 year career… And that wasn’t easy to do. He had “Mad Dog” Lopez to compete with…. Danny just outlasted him.

Maybe it was the “police riot” in Middletown, New Jersey. A show we were doing to raise bail money for “Mad Log” Lopez who was in jail in Richmond, Virginia, for having an altercation with police officers who we’d aggravated by playing too long. Danny allegedly knocked over our huge Marshall stacks on some of Middletown’s finest who had rushed the stage because we broke the law by…playing too long.

As I stood there watching, several police oficers crawled out from underneath the speaker cabinets and rushed away to seek medical attention. Another nice young officer stood in front of me onstage waving his nightstick, poking and calling me nasty names. I looked over to see Danny with a beefy police officer pulling on one arm while Flo Federici, his first wife, pulled on the other, assisting her man in resisting arrest.

A kid leapt from the audience onto the stage, momentarily distracting the beefy officer with the insults of the day. Forever thereafter, “Phantom” Dan Federici slipped into the crowd and disappeared.

A warrant out for his arrest and one month on the lam later, he still hadn’t been brought to justice. We hid him in various places but now we had a problem. We had a show coming at Monmouth College. We needed the money and we had to do the gig. We tried a replacement but it didn’t work out. So Danny, to all of our admiration, stepped up and said he’d risk his freedom, take the chance and play.

Show night. 2,000 screaming fans in the Monmouth College gym. We had it worked out so Danny would not appear onstage until the moment we started playing. We figured the police who were there to arrest him wouldn’t do so onstage during the show and risk starting another riot.

Let me set the scene for you. Danny is hiding, hunkered down in the backseat of a car in the parking lot. At five minutes to eight, our scheduled start time, I go out to whisk him in. I tap on the window.

“Danny, come on, it’s time.”

I hear back, “I’m not going.”

Me: “What do you mean you’re not going?”

Danny: “The cops are on the roof of the gym. I’ve seen them and they’re going to nail me the minute I step out of this car.”

As I open the door, I realize that Danny has been smoking a little something and had grown rather paranoid. I said, “Dan, there are no cops on the roof.”

He says, “Yes, I saw them, I tell you. I’m not coming in.”

So I used a procedure I’d call on often over the next forty years in dealing with my old pal’s concerns. I threatened him…and cajoled. Finally, out he came. Across the parking lot and into the gym we swept for a rapturous concert during which we laughted like thieves at our excellent dodge of the local cops.

At the end of the evening, during the last song, I pulled the entire crowd up onto the stage and Danny slipped into the audience and out the front door. Once again, “Phantom” Dan had made his exit. (I still get the occasional card from the old Chief of Police of Middletown wishing us well. Our histories are forever intertwined.) And that, my friends, was only the beginning.

There was the time Danny quit the band during a rough period at Max’s Kansas City, explaining to me that he was leaving to fix televisions. I asked him to think about that and come back later.

Or Danny, in the band rental car, bouncing off several parked cars after a night of entertainment, smashing out the windshield with his head but saved from severe injury by the huge hard cowboy hat he bought in Texas on our last Western swing.

Or Danny, leaving a large marijuana plant on the front seat of his car in a tow away zone. The car was promptly towed. He said, “Bruce, I’m going to go down and report that it was stolen.” I said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

Down he went and straight into the slammer without passing go.

Or Danny, the only member of the E Street Band to be physically thrown out of the Stone Pony. Considering all the money we made them, that wasn’t easy to do.

Or Danny receiving and surviving a “cautionary assault” from an enraged but restrained “Big Man” Clarence Clemons while they were living together and Danny finally drove the “Big Man” over the big top.

Or Danny assisting me in removing my foot from his stereo speaker after being the only band member ever to drive me into a violent rage.

And through it all, Danny played his beautiful, soulful B3 organ for me and our love grew. And continued to grow. Life is funny like that. He was my homeboy, and great, and for that you make considerations… And he was much more tolerant of my failures than I was of his.

When Danny wasn’t causing chaos, he was a sweet, talented, unassuming, unpretentious good-hearted guy who simply had an unchecked ability to make good fortune and things in general go fabulously wrong.

But beyond all of that, he also had a mountain of the right stuff. He had the heart and soul of an engineer. He learned to fly. He was always up on the latest technology and would explain it to you patiently and in enormous detail. He was always “souping” something up, his car, his stereo, his B3. When Patti joined the band, he was the most welcoming, thoughtful, kindest friend to the first woman entering our “boys club.”

He loved his kids, always bragging about Jason, Harley, and Madison, and he loved his wife Maya for the new things she brought into his life.

And then there was his artistry. He was the most intuitive player I’ve ever seen. His style was slippery and fluid, drawn to the spaces the other musicians in the E Street Band left. He wasn’t an assertive player, he was a complementary player. A true accompanist. He naturally supplied the glue that bound the band’s sound together. In doing so, he created for himself a very specific style. When you hear Dan Federici, you don’t hear a blanket of sound, you hear a riff, packed with energy, flying above everything else for a few moments and then gone back in the track. “Phantom” Dan Federici. Now you hear him, now you don’t.

Offstage, Danny couldn’t recite a lyric or a chord progression for one of my songs. Onstage, his ears opened up. He listened, he felt, he played, finding the perfect hole and placement for a chord or a flurry of notes. This style created a tremendous feeling of spontaneity in our ensemble playing.

In the studio, if I wanted to loosen up the track we were recording, I’d put Danny on it and not tell him what to play. I’d just set him loose. He brought with him the sound of the carnival, the amusements, the boardwalk, the beach, the geography of our youth and the heart and soul of the birthplace of the E Street Band.

Then we grew up. Very slowly. We stood together through a lot of trials and tribulations. Danny’s response to a mistake onstage, hard times, catastrophic events was usually a shrug and a smile. Sort of an “I am but one man in a raging sea, but I’m still afloat. And we’re all still here.”

I watched Danny fight and conquer some tough addictions. I watched him struggle to put his life together and in the last decade when the band reunited, thrive on sitting in his seat behind that big B3, filled with life and, yes, a new maturity, passion for his job, his family and his home in the brother and sisterhood of our band.

Finally, I watched him fight his cancer without complaint and with great courage and spirit. When I asked him how things looked, he just said, “what are you going to do? I’m looking forward to tomorrow.” Danny, the sunny side up fatalist. He never gave up right to the end.

A few weeks back we ended up onstage in Indianapolis for what would be the last time. Before we went on I asked him what he wanted to play and he said, “Sandy.” He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during the summer nights when we’d walk along the boards with all the time in the world.

So what if we just smashed into three parked cars, it’s a beautiful night! So what if we’re on the lam from the entire Middletown police department, let’s go take a swim! He wanted to play once more the song that is of course about the end of something wonderful and the beginning of something unknown and new.

Let’s go back to the days of miracles. Pete Townshend said, “a rock and roll band is a crazy thing. You meet some people when you’re a kid and unlike any other occupation in the whole world, you’re stuck with them your whole life no matter who they are or what crazy things they do.”

If we didn’t play together, the E Street Band at this point would probably not know one another. We wouldn’t be in this room together. But we do… We do play together. And every night at 8 p.m., we walk out on stage together and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur…old and new miracles. And those you are with, in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.

Of course we all grow up and we know “it’s only rock and roll”…but it’s not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.

So today, making another one of his mysterious exits, we say farewell to Danny, “Phantom” Dan, Federici. Father, husband, my brother, my friend, my mystery, my thorn, my rose, my keyboard player, my miracle man and lifelong member in good standing of the house rockin’, pants droppin’, earth shockin’, hard rockin’, booty shakin’, love makin’, heart breakin’, soul cryin’… and, yes, death defyin’ legendary E Street Band.