Big Man

by Clarence Clemons

  “Walter said that after we left Gleason would go through the basket and pick out the jokes he liked.”

  “Everybody hated him,” the guy said. “But his wife was an angel.”

  “I never met her,” said Don. “He used to sneak around the condo where we were in the afternoon and peek in the windows to make sure we were working. It was six weeks of daily humiliation.”

  “Why did you do it and why did you take it?” I asked.

  “To say we had done it. We had worked for the Great One. We had written lines for Ralph and Alice and Norton and Trixie. And that part of it was great. It’s like you always say, ‘I play the music for free, I get paid for all the bullshit,’ right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Anyway, at the end of all of this we finally move down to the Miami Beach Auditorium where the shows were shot. Gleason insisted it be fifty-five degrees inside the building. ‘They don’t laugh if they’re warm,’ he said. Frank and John and Allan and I moved to a hotel nearby at our own expense to avoid the hellish commute from Inverrary. Now you have to realize that Frank and John were rich. They had created and owned a show called Hee Haw, and after taking a considerable risk had cashed in big time by essentially syndicating the show themselves. So they didn’t need Gleason’s money; they just wanted to wear that T-shirt. I tell you this because of what happened the night of the show.

  “We had one rental car they provided for us, so we drove over to the auditorium together. It was raining very hard that night. The kind of impossible tropical downpour that’s actually hard to see through. As Tom Waits said, ‘it was raining hammers, it was raining nails.’ Frank, always in control and elegant, was behind the wheel. He was one of the funniest human beings I ever met. John, his quiet and brilliant partner, was riding shotgun, and Allan and I were in the backseat. When we got to the stage entrance the guard, who was wearing a heavy slicker with a hood over his hat, looked at some papers he had on a clipboard and said, ‘You’re not on the list.’

  “ ‘We’re not on the list?’ said Frank.

  “ ‘No,’ said the guard.

  “Frank turned around and looked at me and Allan, wearing a gleeful smile. ‘We’re not on the list,’ he said.

  “ ‘You need to turn around, go back out to the street, and go to the parking garage two blocks down,’ said the guard.

  “ ‘I think not,’ ” said Frank.

  “He put the car, a big Ford, in reverse and half-turned again to watch behind us. He put the gas pedal to the floor, and we went fishtailing backward across the driveway, over the curb, across the grassy lawn area in front of the building, and smashed into the flagpole. The trunk of the car was wrapped around the pole and wrecked. Frank opened the door and got out. He stood in rain falling so hard that it looked like a shower, and turned back to us. I remember the joy on his face. His smile was pure and full of life. He raised his right hand to his forehead and saluted us.

  “ ‘See ya!’ he said, and he walked away, disappearing into the darkness and the rain.

  “I never saw him again. Truthfully, that moment was so perfect I never want to see him again. Nothing could top that exit.

  “John decided to go off after him and skip the show, so Allan and I made our way into the building to see Mr. Gleason perform.

  “Gleason seemed to thrive on belittling people. A week earlier, everyone involved with the show got together for a cast reading and a production meeting. They were all there, from the fabulous Art Carney to the beautiful June Taylor. Gleason ran the meeting from the head of the table. He gave each department head his notes and finally came to Sammy Spear, his musical director for decades. ‘Sammy,’ he said. ‘Work on the music, will you? It’s never been any good.’

  “For the writing staff he had one final fuck you. He had a monitor set up for us to watch the show. It was set up in the men’s room. Allan and I sat on a couch along with Gleason’s agent, the late Sam Cohen, and watched a TV screen across the tiled room, the row of urinals ten feet to our left.”

  “He was a bastard,” the guy said.

  “Yes, he was a bastard,” Don agreed. “When he died nobody said ‘What a great guy’; they all said ‘What a great talent.’ And that is true. After everything he did for those six weeks, we sat in that men’s room and when Gleason went to work we laughed. The bastard made us laugh.

  “About a month later Allan and I were standing backstage at a televised roast for Milton Berle. We were talking to Frank Sinatra. All the stars appearing on the dais that night had gathered in this green-room area to have cocktails. It was a different time.”

  “What have you guys been doing?” asked Sinatra.

  “We were just in Florida for six weeks doing a show for Gleason,” I said.

  “Oh, really?” said Frank. “And you lived to talk about it.”

  Allan and I laughed.

  “I take it you know him,” said Allan.

  “He’s a bastard,” said Frank. “A real bastard.”

  New Jersey

  Clarence

  I surf.

  At least I used to surf.

  That is not fiction. That is the truth. And in 1973 I surfed often and I surfed pretty well. So did Bruce and all the other guys in that famous David Garh photograph on the back cover of The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.

  In fact we had been out surfing that day.

  We knew we had this photo shoot so we wanted to go inside and change. But Dave said, “No, you look great like this,” so we ended up taking those pictures and then we went back out surfing.

  You can feel summer when you look at that picture. You can feel the Jersey Shore. Everybody looks young and fit and sun-kissed. We all have that relaxed summertime attitude.

  During the afternoon go out, I took off on a wave that closed out in front of me. I shot the board forward and fell back into the water like I’d done a thousand times before.

  That time was a little different.

  That time my board went up into the air, got stopped by my leash, and came straight back down and hit me in the mouth.

  It broke my front tooth.

  We had a show that night at this club. There was no fucking way I was going onstage with my front tooth missing, so we went on this mad search for a dentist. Anyway, I think Bruce’s mother or aunt or somebody got in touch with a guy who agreed to see me right away. I went over there and he put on this temporary cap. It wasn’t perfect, but at least I didn’t look like an idiot.

  Problem solved.

  The next problem didn’t occur until my first sax solo in the first song.

  It might have been “Spirit in the Night,” I’m not sure. In any event, I went to blow into the horn and my front tooth came flying out of my mouth and into the audience.

  “Hold it! Stop the music!” said Bruce. “We’re not playing another note until we find the Big Man’s front tooth!”

  Somebody did find it. I think it landed in some girl’s drink. I fished it out and jammed it back in, and we finished the show.

  New York City

  Don

  I sat alone at the very back of Madison Square Garden and watched Bruce and the band do “Jungleland.” When I say I sat alone I mean that literally. I was the only person there who wasn’t working for the tour. It was the sound check for that night’s show. A few hours later I stood near the same spot and watched and listened with twenty thousand other people as Clarence played those magnificent solos again. (In Spain, one night, the entire crowd hummed those solos note for note. An amazing echo from the night so many years ago at the Record Plant when Bruce hummed his version to Clarence in the final hours of the Born to Run sessions.) After the show that night, Bruce brought a couple of young kids into the Temple of Soul to meet the Big Man.

  “This is their first rock and roll show,” Bruce said. “And they got to have the quintessential Big Man experience; ‘Jungleland’ in New York City.”

  Yes, Bruce is the kind of guy who’ll use the word quint
essential in front of innocent children.

  “What does that mean?” one of the kids asked sensibly.

  “It means it’s a New York song played here in New York and it’s the Big Man’s signature song,” said Bruce.

  On the way home that night in the limo, I asked Clarence what it felt like to play that song again after so many years. “I didn’t play it,” he said. “God did.”

  After a respectful pause I said, “I thought God played the trumpet.”

  “He used to,” said Clarence. “He kept working with horns till he got it right.”

  But perhaps the most interesting thing I ever heard Clarence say about “Jungleland” was this: the first time he heard it was on the record.

  “What?” I said. I was sure he was fucking with me.

  Now the story of the Born to Run sessions has been told many times. It always ends with Bruce and Clarence spending sixteen straight hours working on the “Jungleland” solos. Legend has it they finished at eight thirty in the morning, then jumped into waiting cars and drove to Providence to begin a tour. Clarence recently confirmed this. I always assumed that in those final hours they finally found the right notes and finished the track. Wrong. Bruce assembled it later in the editing process, but before it was finished the band performed the song in concert and the solo changed with every performance. You can hear those old versions on various bootlegs, which are now being played on E Street Radio.

  But the version we’ve all come to know is the best of all for a number of reasons.

  “The first time I heard the way Bruce had built it I couldn’t talk,” Clarence told me. “It spoke to my soul. It was the perfect combination of our talents and our abilities and our deep mystical connection. He took what I had played, all those little pieces, and married them to what he heard in his heart, and then put it together in a way that’s timeless. Every time I play it I feel that it represents our musical partnership in a way that’s beyond words. To me that solo sounds like love.”

  A Song for Danny, 1950–2008

  Clarence

  Danny Federici died on the afternoon of April 17, 2008, in New York City. This changed the world of E Street forever. The band would never again have the lineup we’ve all come to know and love.

  Danny was the quiet one. Bruce called him the Phantom. In truth he was a quiet, unassuming guy who didn’t crave the spotlight but was genuinely happy to remain in the shadows playing those fabulous fills, like the ones that run through “Sandy.”

  His funeral, which took place in the same church where we all had recently said good-bye to Terry Magovern, was devastatingly sad. It seemed like he was there for my whole life. From the beginning there was always Danny, and now…

  And now we go on, strengthened by his memory and weakened by his loss. Nothing will ever be quite the same. It makes me appreciate every single day that I’m above ground. I have a love of life now that’s more powerful, and that’s a gift from Danny. He’s with me every day, and he’ll continue to be with me till the day I’m with him.

  At the end of May I made a personal appearance in a friend’s dojo near my home in Florida. I had agreed to play a few songs and sign autographs to help him open this new business. It was an oddly sweet affair. With no advertising, somehow over a hundred people showed up carrying copies of Born to Run and wearing concert T-shirts. They took off their shoes and sat on the dojo’s matted floors and patiently watched a martial arts demonstration. I was dressed in white and wore my straw hat and glasses, and I sat at the far end of the room with my horn. Don drove me over to the place. Jo Lopez was there and had set up an excellent sound system. I played live to tracks from my new solo album, answered questions, and posed for pictures for more than two hours. The people who came were true fans who knew which songs had been played on a certain night in 1978 and hadn’t been played since, and asked if I’d be able to play those tunes if Bruce called for them. “Yes,” I said. “Because I don’t memorize the songs—I feel the songs.” One guy had been to 131 shows and claimed to have listened to over 700.

  It felt like a family reunion of sorts. Then near the end somebody asked a question about Danny. I spoke of my love for Danny and how much he would be missed. Bruce will never have a better organ player. Danny played Bruce Springsteen organ the way I play Bruce Springsteen saxophone. Then I was moved to pick up the horn one more time.

  “This is an unrecorded song called ‘Garden of Memories,’ I said. “I’m going to try to play it for Danny. Forgive me if I can’t get all the way through it.”

  Don

  He did get through it and it was beautiful. Those deep, honey-coated notes floated out of the man and out of the horn and into the air. We were all transported from a small dojo in a strip mall in Florida to a place of bittersweet loveliness apart from or maybe adjacent to this world.

  If music is the bridge between Heaven and Earth, we were all on that bridge. It was an eloquent and heartfelt good-bye to a friend expressed in the language that Clarence spoke most fluently.

  The Night Skies over Europe

  Don

  The darkened interior of the E Street jet looked like a hospital plane. Everyone on board wore a surgical mask. All the musicians, the managers, the assistants, the physical therapists, the visitors, and the trainers wore surgical masks. It looked like a planeload of sleeping Michael Jackson impersonators.

  Bruce had a cold. It wasn’t bad enough to cancel a show, not yet anyway, but if it spread it could affect the entire tour—and the tour was big, big business.

  This band, which has shown remarkable lasting powers, is starting to feel its age. You can’t tell from listening to the shows, nor can you see any major differences onstage except for Clarence’s throne, but these men are hurting in the ways that men this age hurt. Parts are worn down and need replacing. Nils rides a bike around backstage because it’s too painful to walk on hips that need to be traded in. But watch him spin and twist onstage an hour later in one of those astounding solos and you believe in miracles.

  Max is almost always trussed up to support his bad back.

  Danny is gone.

  Clarence is held together with bolts and wires and electrodes and is filled with plastic and metal in places where bone used to be. He needs new knees.

  “You’re the six-million-dollar man,” I said to him one night.

  “Shit,” he laughed. “I passed six million ten years ago.”

  Bruce remains a remarkable athlete as he closes in on sixty years old. He works at it every day and he works hard. And that doesn’t count the three hours of unbelievable aerobics he goes through every time he performs.

  Someday soon, if it hasn’t happened already, someone will write, “I saw Rock and Roll’s past tonight and its name was Bruce Springsteen.” In some ways that would be a fair statement. There is no other band like this and there never will be. This is the last and best rock aggregation with ties to the birth of rock in the ’50s and ’60s. And it is not a dinosaur act like the Stones have become. Bruce and the band remain vital and relevant like no one else of their ilk. U2 came along later and doesn’t have the history of E Street to draw from. Bruce and this band are representatives of America at a time when the music moved a generation (or two) forward toward that elusive Promised Land.

  So yes, they are rock and roll’s past. The world of music, like the world itself, has become more fractured and secular. To have one supergroup or artist who could capture the attention of the majority like Elvis or the Beatles did is no longer possible. It won’t happen again. And rock and roll itself has been eclipsed by other kinds of music. But Bruce and the Band are also rock and roll’s present and its future. They continue to make new music, and Bruce may not as yet have hit the height of his powers. They may not leap off the stage anymore, but the music is as strong and powerful as ever. But now it resonates across decades and touches millions of lives.

  Who knows how long they can continue? They have never been better than they are right now. I belie
ve that Bruce will continue to make music until he is simply incapable of doing it anymore. I believe that the E Street Band will continue so long as Bruce and Clarence are able to stand on a stage together.

  The Legend of Clarence and Thomas

  (A Screaming Comes Across the Bar), 2008

  I love Gravity’s Rainbow more than mac and cheese. It’s lasted longer and has more nutritional value. —C.C.

  Having lived in China, Clarence was somewhat of an expert on Chinatowns. Having been a saxophone player all his life made him somewhat of an expert on bars. These two things led him to the Li Po bar on Grant Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

  He was sitting in front of the Buddha shrine drinking martinis with Thomas (“nobody calls me Tom”) Pynchon. Clarence and Thomas had been friends for a long, long time. Pynchon had been to over 150 shows in person and also possessed a huge collection of bootleg CDs, which he listened to while writing in his study in Manhattan.

  Thomas was on a sentimental journey here to his old stomping grounds from the ’60s. Clarence was here to plan his next wedding. The wedding would be across the Golden Gate in Tiburon, but when he heard Thomas was in town he came into the city to hang out and have some dinner. Pat Buchanan, the conservative former presidential candidate, was across the room alone in the corner pounding shots of tequila. Neither Clarence nor Thomas paid any attention to him.