Jake’s very existence gave him the first shot. Besides, I had already played with the other guys I was thinking about and Jake was the only real question mark. I needed to find out who he was. So, many months after we’d sat in that little room at St. Mary’s passing the guitar around, I made the call he must’ve been expecting. I laid out the situation. It was an audition. It’d be just him and me. We’d meet and see if there was reason to take it further.
On tour, some had expressed reservations about Jake’s maturity. In my experience with him I could feel some swagger but after speaking with him during Clarence’s illness, I felt there was a lot more there. It was time to see.
• • •
Jake came to his first professional meeting with me an inauspicious hour late. I was ready and steaming. When he walked in I said, “Did you have something more important to do?” He said, no he did not, but he had gotten lost. I said, “Let’s go to work.”
Over the phone I’d given Jake four or five songs to familiarize himself with: “Promised Land,” “Badlands” and a few other ringers. I wanted to hear his tone, his phrasing, and find out his learning ability. When he arrived, he “sort of” knew them. Lesson number one: in the E Street Band we don’t “sort of” do . . . ANYTHING. James Brown was my father, god and hero as bandleader. Sam Moore was also a great inspiration. At their best, these were men whose lives forbade them to fuck around with the thing that was lifting them up. On the bandstand, with their bands, they gave NO QUARTER!
People always asked me how the band played like it did night after night, almost murderously consistent, NEVER stagnant and always full balls to the wall. There are two answers. One is they loved and respected their jobs, one another, their leader and the audience. The other is . . . because I MADE them! Do not underestimate the second answer. I needed Jake to deeply understand them both, so I said, “Let me get this straight. You are coming in to audition for Clarence ‘Big Man’ Clemons’s seat in the E Street Band, which is not a job, by the way, but a sacred fucking position, and you are going to play Clarence’s most famous solos for Bruce Springsteen [referring to myself in the third person], the man who stood beside him for forty years, who created those solos with him, and you’re gonna ‘sort of’ know them? Where . . . do . . . you . . . think . . . you . . . are? If you don’t know, let me tell you. You are in a CITADEL OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL. You don’t DARE come in here and play this music for Bruce Springsteen without having your SHIT DOWN COLD! You embarrass yourself and waste my precious time.”
I don’t usually talk like this and I was exaggerating for his and my benefit, but not much. I needed to know who Jake was. Because even if he could play in the E Street Band, who you ARE, what you’ve got inside, your degree of emotional understanding of the stakes we’re playing for, FUCKING MATTERS! It’s not intellectual. Dan Federici was all instinct but he understood the brotherhood. Did Jake?
After a few times around, I instructed him to go to the hotel room from whence he came and not to return until he had these solos down. I said before I’d take him to sit in with the band, he’d have to play this material perfectly with just him and me. Then we would play and record to a live tape of the band in full flight. Then, and only then, would I bring him before the group. He called me a day or two later and said he was ready. When he came in this time, he was.
Over the next few days I found Jake to be a soulful, hardworking young sax player whom I had a deep feeling for. I was rooting for him, for us. C was in the room, big-time. He drew us closer. He’d been Jake’s uncle, had mentioned Jake to me when he wasn’t well, and I knew he’d have smiled over Jake’s being here. This felt like it had his blessing. That would’ve meant nothing if Jake hadn’t had “it.” There could have been an army of sax players with C’s looks, his playing ability and the Clemons name, but if they didn’t have that deep connection to why we were in all this, we would’ve come up zero. Jake had E Street soul in his blood and bones. He was a big, good-looking, talented kid. That’s cool. You want stars, and Jake had that kind of confidence. Before the day was over, he’d need it. I also knew that Jake was ready to put his talents, body and soul, at the service of my band and our ideas, and we, in turn . . . would change his life.
Some of the band members who’d played with Jake before found him undisciplined and were skeptical. Jake and I had to be ready to wash that away in one fell swoop. We drove to the abandoned military base of Fort Monmouth, where the band had a rented theater in which we rehearsed. Jake and I walked in and greeted the band, and I called the tunes as Jake killed them, one by one. For Steve and several others it was a done deal. A guy or two wanted to hear possible other options. Jon Landau was initially made anxious by Jake’s physical similarity to C. “He looks like a young Clarence,” he said, face wrinkled in consternation. I looked but that’s not what I saw. I saw that somebody up there liked me and had sent us this very lovely kid with all the right ingredients to take what was potentially the most damaging injury to our family and help us move past it and down the road. This was not a job for a hired gun or mercenary, no matter how well intended, at least not on this tour or at this moment.
• • •
The Apollo Theater . . . holy house of soul. The most sacred stage in a rock ’n’ souler’s world. This is where the next-generation E Street Band will fittingly, frighteningly, have its debut. As we arrive for sound check, the stagehands greet us, thank us for coming and show us the tree stump sitting stage right that every Apollo wannabe rubs for good luck before their moment of truth. I suggested Jake give it a rub. This is the stage where James Brown “took it to the bridge,” where Smokey didn’t leave a dry seat in the house, where Joe Tex dug the women, “skinny legs and all,” then sagely counseled his followers, “Hold on to what you’ve got.” Tonight, after forty years of road work, we’re wannabes like the rest. You just want to live up to the place and deserve your short moment onstage in one of the great shrines of music.
From this stage, Sam and Dave schooled the crowd on what it took to be a “soul man.” Soul man, soul man, soul man . . . that’s the term. As an R & B singer, I will never be more than “pretty close,” but “soul man” is a much broader term. It encompasses your life, your work and the way you approach both. Joe Strummer, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Mick and Keith, Joey Ramone, John and Paul—all white boys who could rest comfortably with that sobriquet. It’s all-inclusive, and I’d be perfectly happy with just those two words on my gravestone.
• • •
At sound check I walk back to Jake’s station within the horn section. I don’t want to do anything obvious that would place Jake in the position of having to stand in Clarence’s stead. C’s spot won’t be reinhabited by another sax player and the Big Man will be something our band and audience will have to get used to missing. That’s why Jake plays out of the horn section or out of his own position. It’s his. It’s open ground waiting to be claimed. But he will play those solos. I’ve instructed Jake that those solos are compositions, collaborations between Clarence and me that are engraved on our fans’ hearts. You don’t need to do anything fancy, just play them. Reach back for your best sound, breathe where C breathed and play them as they were written and recorded. The work Jake has to do comes from the inside. Knowing the notes is easy. Any reasonable sax player can blow those notes, but understanding them—knowing what they mean, their power within the song—is what’s transformative.
As time passed and our music bored its way into our fans’ souls, Clarence’s entrance within one of our classic songs was almost always greeted with thunderous applause. Why? He wasn’t playing something hard, but he was doing something hard and singular. He was meaning it. As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he wrote upon Clarence’s death, C was blessed with “the power of musical intent.”
The solos themselves are beautiful. They’re simple, elegant I suppose, but they’re not going to win us any blue ribbons at Berklee College of Music unless you understand how difficult it
is to create within a framework of limits something slightly new under the sun. Clarence reinvented and reinvigorated the rock ’n’ roll saxophone for the seventies and eighties. Yes, there were King Curtis, Junior Walker, Lee Allen and many other of Clarence’s mentors, but for me, Clarence goes right up there with the greatest (and he is a big part of what carries me up there in whatever slot I may fill).
Jake’s job, his service, is to understand those notes, to mean them. Then he will become a part of that collaboration, and that’s something you can’t fake. You either do it or you don’t.
Technically, Jake is a fine saxophonist, and when he does his work he restores those solos to their shining brightness. C himself struggled to play them in the later years due to his physical degeneration, so Jake gets to fill them with the power of youth one more time. It’s good to hear.
• • •
I walk up to Jake at the end of sound check and stand alongside him. I can’t resist. Smiling, I take six paces forward to a small landing. This is where Jake will perform his pieces. I look at him and say, “Two hours from now, these are the steps that are going to change your life for better or for worse,” and I slap him on the shoulder. He smiles that thousand-watt smile that is one of Jake’s most potent weapons and nods.
Showtime. Jake appears backstage moments before we go on without his glasses. I say, “Where are your glasses?” He says, “I’m wearing contacts.” I say, “Put your glasses back on. You’re the student.” “We Take Care of Our Own,” no solo. “Badlands.” The air sucks out of the room, a beat, then the two dozen notes or so of the “Badlands” solo roar out of Jake’s sax and roll across the interior of the Apollo. The briefest of moments, then an explosion of applause and screams storms back from the audience and we’re on the other side. He’s never late again.
• • •
Before the Apollo I explained to Jake that at this moment we were in a great dance with our audience. They would tell us what we, as a duo, could and could not do. All we had to do was watch and listen. At first I never put Jake in any staged position Clarence and I had been known for. That meant no opposite risers, no shoulder to shoulder or any of the variety of other iconic poses C and I casually knocked off. We were careful to tread respectfully, but Jake proved to be himself right from the start. He performed the difficult task of allowing C’s spirit to inhabit him without giving up his own identity. Slowly, most of our rules fell away and we began, with our audience’s approval, to simply do whatever felt right. The tour was going to be not only the hello to this new version of the band but an international good-bye and a sad and joyous wake for the Big Man. That’s the way it was at every stop. Clarence’s presence hovered over us without ever stopping our forward march toward our new direction. That was Clarence’s parting gift to us.
SEVENTY-FIVE
ZERO TO SIXTY IN NOTHING FLAT
The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn’t experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice—not Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children—but Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill.” I do. I’ve been on antidepressants for the last twelve to fifteen years of my life, and to a lesser degree but with the same effect they had for my father, they have given me a life I would not have been able to maintain without them. They work. I return to Earth, home and my family. The worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns. I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.
During this time I lost quite a few friends and family. Clarence; Danny; my aunt Eda and aunt Dora; Tony Strollo, my friend and trainer of a decade, to his own depression; and Terry Magovern. Terry was my aide for twenty-three years and the man who’d fired Steve and me from our last-chance bar gig at the Captain’s Garter forty years earlier. Some people take whole worlds with them when they die. That was Terry Magovern. A navy SEAL, Terry was the last great symbol of the raging honky-tonk Jersey Shore scene of the sixties and seventies. Bar manager, feared bouncer, lifeguard, father, grandfather, loyal friend and working companion—Terry covered it all, and I wrote “Terry’s Song” for him on Magic.
At first I thought it might have been all this death around me. But as deeply as I loved all of these people, death I can handle; it’s this other . . . thing. This thing I have studied and fought against for the better part of sixty-five years. It comes in darkness or in broad daylight, each time wearing a subtly different mask, so subtle that some like myself who have fought it and named it multiple times welcome it in like an old friend. Then once again it takes up deep residence in my mind, heart and soul until it is finally routed out after doing its wreckage.
Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I’d been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I’d been seeing a new doctor whom I’d been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I’d been on for five years and see what would happen . . . DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I’d never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of ’em, oceans of ’em, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. Bambi tears . . . Old Yeller tears . . . Fried Green Tomatoes tears . . . rain . . . tears . . . sun . . . tears . . . I can’t find my keys . . . tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t.
Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All . . . everything . . . the future was grim . . . and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass.
Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life
, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.”
I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal.
SEVENTY-SIX
GARAGE LAND
The phone rings. Mick Jagger is on the line. I had a teenage daydream about receiving a call like this many years ago, but, no, the Stones do not need an ex–pimply faced front man for the next evening’s show. But it’s THE NEXT BEST THING! They’re playing in Newark, New Jersey, and have decided one extra New Jersey guitar man and voice for “Tumbling Dice” might get some of the local fannies wagging.
By the time I was fifty, I’d met many of my heroes (Sinatra, Dylan, Morrison, McCartney, Orbison) and I’d enjoyed it, though I still gave them a wide berth. They still meant too much to me to surrender my star-struck feelings. And that’s the way I liked it. But the following evening I find myself walking into a brightly lit, busy reception area of a New York rehearsal studio. The girl behind the desk gives me a nod and points to a door. I open the door to a modestly sized room where there’s a band in a tight-knit garage setup against one wall. There are two guitars, bass and drums, and a B3 organ in a corner. The lead singer comes up, giving me a smile that still lights up the entire room. Mick welcomes me to rehearsal. Keith, Ronnie and Charlie (from back behind his drums) follow with warm greetings.
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