Clarence Clemons, said both my daughter and Bruce Springsteen this week, passed through his life doing exactly what he wanted to do. Bruce said the rest, which amounted to admitting that you can’t really do that, and the result of trying to is confusion and turbulence and discomfort and illusion. Except when it works. Then the result is clarity and joy, peace and truth miraculously revealed.
There are all sorts of meanings for what I watched Bruce and the Big Man do up there on those hundreds of stages for the past four decades, but the one that always struck closest to my heart drew them into the soul of the American drama and dilemma. Like Huckleberry Finn, the guilty boy, and Nigger Jim, the escaped slave, they traveled against the current even as they flowed with it, innocents abroad on a mission to redeem themselves of “sins” they hadn’t even committed in their quest for something closer to free.
Bruce and Clarence acted out their drama, which is our drama, in the exact same spirit as Twain, and with the exact same ambiguous result. At the end of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain was stuck because he had no ending. The ending he used is preposterous, obviously. But not because it’s over-reliant on the hand of God. The real problem is that it’s predicated on a false idea: Freeing one slave. You cannot free one slave, and since the slave owner is in the same prison as the slave, just like any other jailer, you can’t free two either. It’s all of us or none of us.
But the road to freedom, as a great song tells us, is a constant struggle, and whatever anybody else thinks, I know–I have witnessed it as fact–nobody in the history of that great race-mixing tempest we call rock and soul music, struggled longer, harder or more continuously to reach that promised land. A Bruce Springsteen show could not in fact slide on its knees all the way across Jordan, but it was determined to take every inch that had ever been given and then push further, if only a millimeter or even if rebuffed.
You could argue that Bruce and Clarence failed because they had no black audience to speak of (the idea that they had no black audience at all is a lie). But what need did the great majority of black people have to hear their story? (And why, for that matter, were most black listeners supposed to tolerate it being told in what, for their community, is an antique and discarded beat?). White Americans have the very strange habit of believing that racism and white supremacy and all that come with them are somehow problems for the black community to solve. This is absurd. Black people didn’t enslave white people and force them to come to America, and whip them and sell them, rape them and suck the life from them for profit. How could black people, then, end the consequences of those crimes? Black people did not portray whites as stupid, sinister, conniving, debased and debauched, thieving and rapacious, even though they’d have been able to marshal far more facts with far less fudging than whites have needed to spread such calumnies about them.
What I am saying is, America’s race problem has never been solved because white people refuse to recognize that it is only action on their part that can solve it. And Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons did not find a blacker audience because on the one hand, the anomaly of their enactment of the dilemma and its consequences, if not solutions, did not need to be impressed upon the black community. On the other hand, white people desperately require that story, even though when most witnessed that Pentecost on Thunder Road, which concludes with Scooter and the Big Man slipping each other a kiss right on the lips, they did not take away from it anything at all of what it was meant to mean.
Bruce and Clarence persevered, continually sending out their message over Radio Nowhere in case somebody, somewhere even might be listening. The real miracle is not that Bruce Springsteen was capable of finding so many variants of this theme, from the stage show itself to anthems like “Land of Hope and Dreams” and “American Skin (41 Shots),” and allusions peppered through his other songs. (How dumb would you have to be not to understand that this is one implication of, to choose the most obvious for instance, “Darkness on the Edge of Town”?) No miracle there—Springsteen set out to write about the heart of the country, and race was central to what he found there. In order to do an honest job as honest as he could, he had no choice but to tell the truth about who shackled whom, who has the key and what that key consists of.
The miracle was that Clarence Clemons, for all his affectations and clowning, playing for the most part accents and fills, found a way to portray a character not only of massive physical bulk but as massively stalwart, courageous, and dignified as the black part of this nation has always been. (If you doubt this, ask yourself how long you would be able to hold your community together if it were nightly vilified on television, erased from history where its story could not be falsified altogether, and beaten down by the cops and the other authorities as a matter of principle, while not even being granted its own name, instead referred to by a batch of code words as puerile as they are vicious.) Like Bert Williams and Louis Armstrong and a handful of others who crossed over not Jordan but simply the color line, Clarence held himself together at a cost that no white American, not even someone who studied him for decades and saw what the game was from the first encounter, can pretend to fairly estimate.
There were, of course, several versions of Clarence Clemons but if we stick simply to the artist, the musician-thespian, the most obvious other is the Clarence Clemons of his solo records, with the Red Bank Rockers and Temple of Soul. This music, readily available even now, though it never sold much, harkens back to a version of the soul music Springsteen so often draws upon, but also to the honking R&B music of the Big Man’s own youth. In that music, the guitar stayed in the rhythm section and the sax took instrumental center stage. Clarence was almost ten years older than the rest of the E Street Band and here, he let it show.
There is other, less well-known, harder to find Clarence Clemons music on which he portrays another version altogether, a seeker, a world traveler, influenced by the new age music of Narada Michael Walden (who produced and wrote Clarence’s one hit single, “You’re a Friend of Mine,” a duet with Jackson Browne), and by the time he spent in China wooing his fourth wife.
I mention this not only to emphasize that Clarence Clemons was a man, not a mythic figure—or rather, not only a mythic figure—but also to point out what sacrifices he made, what impulses he did not indulge, what roads this man so committed to doing exactly what he wanted to do chose not to travel. I am not crazy enough to make him out a martyr—he was too hedonist for martyrdom. But it cannot have been much fun to travel through America in the mid-‘70s, the wounds of the civil rights movement yet so raw and its mission even now unaccomplished in so many places, as the only black man traveling with a group of white hippies—and he, quite often, dressed to the nines, as if he were the impresario running the whole show. As Bruce said in his eulogy, there were times when not even Clarence was big enough to shoulder past all the confusion and contradiction of race bigotry, and, once David Sancious left, which was not very long into the story, do it alone.
The other side of that is, being treated as the safe, harmless, “why can’t they all be like this” black man. I loved Clarence, he paid me any number of small kindnesses over they years, mainly just always being glad to see me, but the idea that he was harmless is an absurdity, an insult and a symptom. Like any large orbiting object, Clarence had a powerful gravitational pull and while nobody who got caught up in it was endangered the way the ones who got pulled into the Keith Richards circle were, it was easy to see from whatever safe distance one could manage that the games inside Clarence’s circle were played on his terms, or not played at all. I mean, this is a guy who produced an autobiography that was admittedly half-fiction and lied so much of the rest of the time that even his bandmates weren’t sure where the truth lay in some of it. (Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales also happens to be one of the greatest rock’n’roll books ever written and possibly the funniest.) They can’t all be like that because you don’t know what even that one guy is altogether like. Which doesn’t mean that the role he played on stage was just an act, either. Is complicated safe and harmless? I don’t think so either.
So…there they are, Scooter and the Big Man, the Boss and the King of the World, little Bruce and towering Clarence, and for all those years, through all those shows, through all that time, they did one thing, as static and yet as ever-evolving as Krazy Kat albeit with a larger cast. Bruce tried a couple of other foils—Crystal Taliferro on the Human Touch / Luckytown tour, the huge Art Baron and the small Larry Eagle with the Seeger Sessions band. But in the end, if there was one thing that made the E Street Band the most essential tool of the greatest live entertainer white America has ever produced it was the gravitational pull between him and Clarence Clemons.
Curtis Mayfield, one of Bruce’s greatest unacknowledged influences wrote a prophecy in one of his songs that applied to the Scooter and the Big Man tableau: ‘Mighty, Mighty Spade And Whitey / Your black and white power / Is gonna be a crumbling tower.” That was not a prophecy of them but of what they fought against.
Bruce and Clarence could not pull down the tower in which America is shackled, no two humans could do that, but they inflicted their share of damage and from the places I’ve sat and stood and watched them do it, their effort, properly understood, had something of grandeur about it. They were these two guys who imagined that if they acted free, then other people would understand better that it was possible to be free. How close they came is harder to see than how far the rest of us are from that goal. But there are hearts and minds a few steps closer to liberation out there because of them, people who had fun until it stopped being just fun and grew inside them.
One of the other roles Clarence Clemons played for Bruce Springsteen is also not much remarked upon but it was crucial. When Bruce ran out of words—or more precisely, when the words could no longer tell the story—often as not it was the Big Man and that shining brass horn that took center stage and blew out the rest of the truth for us to hear. If you want to measure Clarence Clemons as a musician, consider what it must have been like to have to find a solo that could stand up after lines like “And the poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all / They just stand back and let it all be.” Then consider that, even if it took 16 hours in the studio, he found it.
During a concert, during one of Clarence’s solos, if you happened to look away from the horn and the giant blowing it for a minute, you’d see Bruce standing at center stage, chest thrust out, mic dangling from his hand, jaw jutting, in command and serene in the confidence that his story was being told, and told again anew, sending light not just into the darkness but out against it, too.
I am sure he will find other vehicles—he always has had a few, including his own fingers speaking through his guitar. But it will never be quite the same, cannot be. Because on that dark and stormy night on the boardwalk, when the door blew open in that little barroom where the band was playing and the Biggest Man in the World stepped through it, the force behind it was not merely the wind but also fate. And not their fate alone but also ours.
In this respect, it is not only Bruce Springsteen’s job to find a way to replace what Clarence Clemons meant, it is also yours and mine. It’s all of us or none of us and the cost is high. At the end of his eulogy on Tuesday, Bruce said that he and Clarence enacted a beautiful anomaly of two people who loved each other so much that race absolutely didn’t matter. He also said he thought they might need to be together in another lifetime to finish the job of making sure that their relationship was not an anomaly. But really, those lifetimes ought to be right here, right now—they ought to be our lives.
Farewell, Big Man, see you in the land of hope and dreams. Thanks for helping drag us there.
Tags: Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen and race, Clarence Clemons, E Street Band, Race and music, white people and racism, white supremacy
Great article. Thanks for sharing.
Lowell
Thank you for this thoughtful and powerfully written piece.
So powerful, Dave. Thank you for sharing your words and thoughts with those of us who just wish that we could have been Clarence’s friend.
You hit the point which makes this the hardest. Having grown up in the 60′s and really coming of age in the late 60′s, music in a lot of ways, didn’t have a color. I have been very fortunate to have many black friends that still come from that era. It has been hard to understand, how we went backwards instead of forward since then. The 1st time I saw Bruce, was in 1974, and was hooked ever since. But much of it had to do with the Big Man, who finished many songs when needed. There is a Springsteen story about my wife of almost 33 years I would love to share with you sometime. Maybe on E Street Nation. We got married in September of 1978, and we saw the band 1 week before. I’m sure you can imagine the rest. Clarence is gone, but will never be forgotten. RIP Big Man, I look forward to seeing you play again further on up the road.
I want to commend you on the remarkable article you wrote on the passing of Clarence Clemons. I am just under 30 years old but consider myself a disciple in the power of Bruce and the E Street Band. Granted I missed the evolution or perhaps revolution of this great band but tried to make up for lost time by catching them live about ten times in the last ten years. The monolith standing over Bruce\’s right shoulder carried so many prominent themes and meant so much to so many of us. I never got to meet Clarence or shake his hand but unlike any other art I am aware of, music provided the tacit passion that is branded into memories. It is odd to mourn the passing of someone you never met but maybe that just speaks to the character of the man. Great work Mr. Marsh.
Sir,
The one subject of your article, racial prejudice in America, so dwarfs your other, Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons, that their juxtaposition in your article becomes absurd. To hold Springsteen and Clemons’ relationship up as some sort of “way” towards whatever it is you’re suggesting needs to be done is juvenile.
amazing. makes clarence’s life take on even more meaning than before, which i would think an impossible task. truly thought provoking and enlightening. and i believe i feel it is totally spot on.
btw, call me a fool but i never thought of race when hearing the words darkness on the edge of town. i thought it was the non-race based symbol of needing to visit the scary lonely places, pushing the boundaries of comfort to find more out of life.
i never met him but i miss clarence a lot.
What an insightful, important interpretation to cause us all to think.
“He had a dream. And it shot him.” — Huck, on Tom.
You misread the end of HF. It’s actually essential, and entirely consonant with the thematic concerns of the rest of that greatest of great American novels. It explores two versions of liberation — one Romantic, narcissistic and imaginary (Tom’s mode), the other Realist, generous, and actual (Huck’s mode). Twain proposes that the best American art is the art that is driven by a devotion to real freedom, rather than the entertainment of our narcissistic illusions. You forgot your Garland Jeffries. And you have more to learn from Twain than Twain has to learn from you.
Nevertheless — thanks for this great piece, D, and for your own great work over the years.
Thanks so much Dave Marsh , My friend you Nail every essence about E-Street, I have pull from my vault your books their books, I love that you Dave believe in the biggest story ever told in your words
“Because on that dark and stormy night on the boardwalk, when the door blew open in that little barroom where the band was playing and the Biggest Man in the World stepped through it, the force behind it was not merely the wind but also fate. And not their fate alone but also ours”.
NJBorn1956glenridgeNJ
There’s been a ton of great stories/tributes that have come out this week. Creates a(n even greater)sense of pride in being an E Street fan. Thanks.
Wow. Powerful. Thank you. And thanks to Bruce, Clarence and the rest of the band for always fighting the good fight.
Articles like this help explain the way we feel about Bruce and the Band. Clarence was the most influential on stage, but Steve and others have a relationship with Bruce that has yet to be shared. Thanks for helping me understand why Bruce and Clarence make up that special pair, and perhaps in the future a description of Bruce and the other band members relations could finish the explanation as to why Bruce is the Boss, and why the E Street Band remained loyal to Bruce even after he let them go. You are in part responsible for the professionalism and the risks Bruce has shown over the years. I found him in 1978, and will be there till I die. The man’s music was played up front at my two weddings, and I’m hoping Bruce will someday write a song about what one says to his family and friends at their own funeral. I would love to have some Bruce music explaining to my entrourage why we connected on so many levels. I wish everyone could feel the connection to Bruce that I have felt over the years, and for the years to come. Thanks.
Thank you, Dave. Of all the many items out there about Clarence and Bruce that I have read this week, this one really sets it straight. Brilliant. My heart breaks for our loss and rejoices that people like you will carry on the spririt and love of all things E Street.
I certainly read it differently. But that’s OK.
As for learning from Twain, as we both know, we all have much to learn. It’s why I’ve read Huck 5 times, and why instead of working on banning it, our public schools ought to make sure that everybody reads it once.
Including the ending.
As to forgetting Garland, I’d let him be the judge of that.
And after all of that jousting, thank you so much for your kindness-seriously.
Dave
The important question is not whether you see it but whether when it’s pointed out you CAN see it, I think.
DM
Believing that popular culture is puerile is far more puerile than believing the opposite ever could be.
Grow the fuck up.
[...] The best words I’ve found were written by Dave Marsh. I hope you will take the time to read MIGHTY MIGHTY, SPADE AND WHITEY: Clarence and Bruce, Friendship and Race. Marsh helped me unpack the myth and recognize the impact that Bruce and Clarence have had on [...]
Why can’t the Springsteen experience just be about the music and camaraderie in the band. The music is great and the shows are excellent. The Springsteen story is no different than the Beatles story, the Stone’s story or the Who’s story. Personalities of band members, interaction between band members and opinions and lyrics from band members. Why do you have to make it so complicated? It’s a bunch of individuals trying to follow their dream.
Dave – I respected you for so many years. I am a 51 year old partner in a large law firm. I have many advanced graduate degrees and am a self-proclaimed Springsteen aficionado. While I have admired you work over the years, I must honestly say that this article was probably the biggest piece of dribble i have ever read about Springsteen. Your thoughts are scattered and not well laid out. In fact my best friend (a sophisticated writer in his own right) and I dissected this article line by line and we independently came to the conclusion that this article made no sense whatsoever. Besides revealing, unnecessarily, to the world that Clarence was a pathological liar (something that I didn’t want to or need to know) you forced the importance of Bruce’s relationship with Clarence into a very outdated racial scenario. As a Bruce fan from 1975 and one who has seen him over 150 times, I never once thought of Bruce and Clarence as a white and black man, but rather as two fabulous musicians and human beings. While I understand that there may have been racial implications to the relationship between Bruce and Clarence, you overstatements of the importance of their union from a racial standpoint is delusional. This is coming from a man that honestly believes there is no overstating the importance of Bruce’s music. I’m sorry to be so harsh, but after reading this article, I feel like I lost two important people in my life this week . . .Clarence and Dave Marsh, as an intellect and writer.
Reading your essay while listening to the June 24th 4p.m. show of Clarence as guest dj. He says , if you’ve ever been in love, you want to prove it, prove it all night, but… we’re not going to play that song… LOL He chooses Drive All Night. This song always makes me cry. Going from laughing out loud at my computer to sobbing the next. He will be truly missed. I swear I’d drive all night….. just to hear your sax again……..
Well, I believe you never once thought about it.
That’s exactly why I wrote it.
And when I did, I knew that exactly this kind of response would come from the people who don’t want to think about it. I also know I can’t get you to do that.
So why are you so threatened? Figure that out and write back, if you’d like to. It won’t kill me to hear it, any more than having you disagree that it was necessary to say such things was a mortal blow.
P.S. I never said C was a pathological anything, and I don’t believe he was what YOU not I say he was. If you want to be my editor, you must become a better reader.
I’m sorry I offended you by insisting that one of the reasons the shows are great is that they contain this other content. I am a little mystified why my seeing things in addition to what you see is somehow offensive or threatening to you though. Maybe you’d like to write back and explain it to me. I’m not trying to force you, or anybody, to see and hear what I see and hear. Am I?
I have to make it so complicated because I’m trying to see more of it than you want to bother with. This isn’t my problem, except when you whine about it. I’d suggest if you’re that upset you march right out and never bother to read me again. This might be painful to one of us but I am 100% certain, not to both of us.
Thanks Dave … remarkable
I had to comment on this article. I agree so very strongly in what Dave has to say about the importance of race relations in regards to the friendship between Clarence and Bruce. Clarence talks openly in his book about what it was like to be the only Black Man in the band, so I don’t see why it is anything but appropriate to talk about it in this article. I unfortunately do not write nearly as well as you, Dave, but I will tell you this… whenever I watch the MSG dvd and see the part of 10th Avenue Freezeout where they show Bruce and Clarence’s hands held high together, it makes me weep with joy. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I am a white woman who was fortunate to grow up in a small town in New Jersey (Franklin Township, for anyone who cares…) and it was probably about 30% Jewish, 30% Italian and 30% African Americans. I consider myself BLESSED to have been raised in that community and was taught from infancy that we really are ALL created equal. I showed an ex-boyfriend my yearbook once, and his response was “there were so many BLACK people in your school”… and he clearly did not think it was a GOOD thing. I should have ended the relationship right there, I know… but it made me realize that I was LUCKY to have been brought up among such diversity. So, forgive me for going on so, but I really feel the need to defend Dave’s perspective as it is something that I SO SO agree with, quite strongly. Thank you Dave, for all you have done over the years, and thank you for writing this beautiful tribute to The Big Man, who I was BEYOND fortunate to meet on his birthday this past January 11th, at his party/concert. I enjoyed the show tremendously, and after I stood patiently hoping to get a chance to speak with this wonderful man. By the time I was approaching him I was in tears, and the folks around me were kind enough to not tease me about it… Clarence was gracious enough to sign my book, and pose for a few pictures with me; all of which he has a BEAUTIFUL smile on his face that made him glow, and I, on the other hand, am all teary and quite red in the nose. However, I have the photo and a copy of it is on my wall next to a picture of myself, a friend and Danny Federici. I told Clarence I was from New Jersey and he asked where, and I told him, and he was familiar with the area. He was unbelievably kind and gentle, and did not seem to mind that I was just a wreck trying to hold it together enough to say Happy Birthday and Thank You for 30 years of joy. I sit here at my computer wearing my literally 30 year old black tank top from the River Tour… my first show was July 8, 1981. I celebrate it with joy every year; this year will be a bit different, but once again, I was blessed to have had a chance to see him, thank him, and have the chance to stand next to him and have our picture taken, so I can look at it whenever I want to, and see his huge smile, and remember his grace, and it will help me through any grief I feel. Forgive me for going on so… bottom line, Dave, you are spot on, in my opinion, and I thank you for putting into words what I have always thought. RIP, Clarence, and do send my love to Danny. You both are sorely missed. And will always have a place in my heart, and luckily, on my wall.
[...] of stories wrote about Clarence, Bruce and race. Only rock critic and Bruce biographer Dave Marsh managed to get provocative. From "MIGHTY MIGHTY, SPADE AND WHITEY: Clarence and Bruce, Friendship and Race" (quoting [...]
Of all the meditations on Clarence and Bruce I’ve read in the last week (and I’ve read them all and published one myself), this is by far the best. Well done. This is why Dave Marsh is our greatest living pop culture critic, because he indeed does see the things most of us miss. I’ve always said that even though “Jungleland” has nothing to do with race, that solo is one of the most important creative expressions of racial duality ever made. I wrote in a recent essay that while World War II may have been the single most important assimilative event in our nation’s history in terms of ethnicity, Top 40 radio in the 1960s was its equal in terms of race. The relationship between Bruce and Clarence was a constant reminder to those who remembered the 60s of what rock and roll helped accomplish, and how important a thing it was to be endlessly celebrated.
Thank you, Sue, and thank you for taking the time (and the risk) of standing up for EVERYTHING Big Man stood for.
We all need to bear witness to the trouble and to the solution. Open, public witness to these things. That is the only way forward.
Dave
Thanks for a thoughtful and well-meaning piece to remember the Big Man, even if there were some who did not want to be dragged into seeing things in the light you wrote about. While I have occasionally found myself in situations similar to what Clarence lived for all these years (playing hockey in Canada in a locker room full of French-speaking teammates or at work surrounded by Spanish-speaking workers – I can understand a little of both languages but not enough) a momentary senses of uneasiness can’t compare with 24/7 life as an “inside-outsider.” I don’t mean Clarence was considered different by either those in the band or the fans, just that the perception was there even if only because of visual contrast. I think that the sense you are writing about and the reason it continues in our culture compares to someone tossing a dollar in the Salvation Army pot at Christmas time. Even though there is no “personal involvement” in that act, it assuages your guilt and makes you feel you did your part. Just as a fan could go to an E Street show to cheer a sax solo and feel they were up on their black culture. While this is an obvious stretch, the problems of which you write are unfortunately part of a growing chasm like many others in our time. What I have heard of Clarence’s solo work over the years was a mix of older R&B and more updated black music, which is difficult for many of Bruce’s fans to embrace. To many of us of a certain age, we were fans of what I would say was “music by people who were black” rather than “black music”. Motown, Stax, TSOP, etc., the music had soul and melody in addition to the rhythm and beat, it could make you feel good or also make you think. What has evolved in the form of Rap and Hip/Hop is not necessarily an improvement nor an advancement in the eyes and ears of many who recall the music I mentioned earlier. So rather than even attempt to understand it or listen to it, or hear the reasons why the melodies have disappeared, it is dismissed as “their music” thus making it unaccessable for older white fans, while Bruce’s music is not a consideration for younger black fans regardless of having black musicians on stage. The only hope I see to address the problems you write of is in the younger generation being more colorblind in all aspects, and then having them embrace the past culturally to see how music got to where it is today. That might be harder than the racial aspect, since you have a generation now that considers what happened at breakfast today to be ancient history.
Great stuff Dave, for me though, being a 15 year old kid, sitting in the bleachers on a Sunday night
in McDonough Arena, (A small basketball gym at Georgetown U.), in 1975, it just felt good.
It felt Real Good! And thats Alright With Me!!!!!!!!!!!! Rock On Big Man! Rock ON!
Thanks so much, Dave, for writing this immensely insightful piece. It’s one that I will turn to time and again to help remind me of just how seriously Clarence Clemons took his role in the struggle against racism/white-supremacy. Equally importantly, it also reminds me of just how seriously we, the members of his overwhelmingly white audience, need to begin/continue taking our own roles in that struggle.
In BIG MAN…, his hilarious but also extremely moving autobiography, Clarence directly addressed this matter in only a few sections. The book makes it clear, however, that he was a very intelligent, well-read, perceptive, sensitive and spiritual person. There’s no way that Clarence couldn’t have felt and very consciously accepted the loneliness, etc. that had to come with spending four decades as the almost-always-lone and always-spotlighted African-American member of a band with an almost-all-white audience.
Of course, I’m sure that Clarence would be the first to acknowledge that a big part of his rock and roll dream included the fame, adoration, fun, laughter, wealth, women, etc. I’m just as sure, however, that Clarence’s dream reached much farther than all of that, too. There must have been something deeper that kept him working with Bruce & Co. for so long, especially in those early years when fame, wealth, etc. must have seemed so far off, if attainable at all. It also must have played a large part in what motivated him to continue performing (in a consistently excellent manner, it must be noted yet again) for so many of his later years through such immense physical pain.
Fittingly, one of Clarence’s final great recorded performances with Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band is in the title track to WORKING ON A DREAM. (Pick your pleasure: the original studio version or the live one on the LONDON CALLING: LIVE IN HYDE PARK DVD.) Clarence has no big sax solo to speak of here. His spotlight solo instead comes simply from his beautiful whistling, one of the most basic and direct ways that we humans can make music while we work on our dreams. (Perhaps this was the Big Man’s – and Scooter’s – response across the decades to Otis Redding sittin’ on that dock by the bay?)
“Working On A Dream” contains and speaks to a lot of different kinds of dreams. The one I’m thinking about right now, though, in light of what you’ve written here, Dave, is one that Elvis Presley began following (and asking us to follow, too) when he first started out at Sun Records. It’s also the same dream that Elvis later prayed could still come true in his final performance of the evening on the ’68 Comeback Special. It’s the dream deferred, the dream deeply rooted in the American dream, etc. Like many other great ones before him, Clarence Clemons couldn’t make it there with us physically, but I still believe in the dream (or vision, if you prefer) that we as people – in all of our various colors, cultures and classifications – can, must and will get to “the promised land”: an entire planet, not just a country or two, with true liberty and justice – economic AND social justice – for all. Through all of the great music and onstage hijinks, the key lesson that Clarence Clemons always helped to teach us is that in order to achieve that dream and get to that promised land, we either get there together or we don’t get there at all.
So along with Dave and so many of the other great commentators here, I also must say thanks, Big Man, for helping to light some of the way towards that dream for so many of us, myself included, for so long. Now we must begin/continue to honor your many gifts to us by keeping you and the dream in our hearts and minds, straightening our backs and working together to make it real someday.
Loved this piece, Dave. Thank you for such a provocative piece. It has been a tough week but since reading this I found myself thinking often of your story and “solo that could stand up after lines like….” Perfect. Not sure if you’ll remember me I’m a St. Petersburg Times photographer and was in the studio during your live radio show (with Ronny Elliot) from Tampa on Super Bowl Sunday 2009. I talked you in getting your first deviled crab at the little Cuban restaurant across from the stadium. I was lucky to have spent some time with Clarence while working on a story about his charity work in Florida. What a sweet, sweet man. I put together a tribute slideshow in honor of Clarence you might like to see. It will bring back memories.
Link: http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2011/photo_galleries/clarence_clemons/
Thanks again,
Cherie Diez
Dave, your extraordinary and provocative piece raised a number of questions for me, not the least of which is how Clarence and Bruce’s “story” fits into the broader flow of watershed events in interracial music ensembles (if it does fit). As we know, the most visible and, I guess, publicized of these, if not the first — I don’t know — was Teddy Wilson becoming the pianist in Benny Goodman’s quartet. Would a reasonable comparison be that Clarence/Bruce was an “evolution” of that event (now possible in the ’70s) since it was played out, quite visibly, every night on stage through a sort of symbology, while the business of the BGQ was playing swing/jazz, not making an overt social statement? Or was it just that the integration of Goodman’s band simply couldn’t be allowed to signify anything more at the time, in the America in which it took place? All of this? or something(s) else?
Please advise.
P.S.: And may we console ourselves with the thought that, up in that great studio in the sky, Clarence and Danny are rehearsing and doing a little jamming, keeping their chops up as they prepare for the rest of the band to join them, one by one (hopefully only), decades hence?
Just wanted to add another thought, here partly in response to Shawn Poole. Sure there was something, I believe, that kept Clarence working with Bruce and the band through all those years of scuffling, something that C has remarked about periodically in recent years in relation to himself. It’s their (basic?) outlook on life: If you bring something positive into the world, maybe it’ll come back to you. Bruce and Clarence must have begun to sense, as they got to know each other, that they shared this view of life, as did the rest of the band. It simply unfolded in lives spent making music. And it unfolded in a world, then as now, filled with a great deal of negativity.
And, from all appearances, it seems Clarence was right.
Your piece was amazing. I am the daughter of a minister who risked all during the integration of the 60s/ I was the only white person in first grade at a school in Riverside CA which went well. When more whites were added, the school was bombed. I was attacked, belittled by both colors being threatened, saved by my neighbors mom who was a sheriff and black—quite the time. When I moved to whiteville Appleton Wisonsin I dated one of the few black students there thanks to a program my dad did at church to get Trenton, NJ kids to come (my parents were from NY and NJ by the way) Much discrimination and outrage occurred. We all need to deal with these issues and be strong. I ended up working with students with emotional and behavioral disabilities and still fight that discimination today. My favorite moment is when I was in college and the teacher wanted us to give from our hearts for a Cultural Foundations assignment. I played the piano for Promise Land and then had Springsteen’s version and a paper–got an A+
I am lost right now without Clarence–his sax solos saved me from many situations—My daughters made sure I attended every concert possible including the marathon Harley 105th in milwaukee and my exhusband who couldn’t figure out why I blasted clarences solos all the time finally went with us in 1999 and all he could say after the concert was “WOW’ and he is never impressed with anything. Thank you for all you have done and written Dave===II’ve read tons. Your writing was beautiful/.
Terry’s Song was poignant and prescient. Bruce will have to ‘go somewhere else’ to think about his tribute to Clarence. I’m waiting to hear it, but I’m hoping it’ll be a while. Big up to the Big Man.
The last four paragraphs are very nice, something to be shared with real fans.
Everything before that is, in my opinion of course, worthless and, sorry to say, ridiculous.
Regards
Sandro
P.S. By the way, why after 250 shows I find myself thinking Bruce Springsteen audience in America, and specifically in New Jersey, is an extremely racist one?
Nice article.
I grew up in Jersey and first saw Bruce and Clarence in 1973 when I was 15. The artistic liberation from racism was immediate, monumental, and not easy to speak about at the time. I’m glad times have changed.
I love that your article recognizes that its all of us. I love that. That is so important to me.
Bruce is my favorite artist ever for so many reasons, but I recognize there’s a fair amount of happenstance in it. We have the same birth date (ten years apart to the day) and grew up 4 miles away. My parents would take me to Asbury park when I was 3, 4, 5 all the time and they were happy there, so I was happy there.
And Bruce is white, and I’m white.
I always loved “Black Music”. It was not as dangerous as loving black people, but it was as good a substitute as I could have.
I think Bruce and Clarence were my leaders on this issue for many years, and in the last 20 or so years I’ve become more “my own hero” as Bruce once said.
I think the key is people getting a chance to listen to each other about it. I am a singer/songwriter and I do songs about racism sometimes, and then as the audience to split into pairs. I take a break and let each person listen to their partner (without interuption or advice) for 5 minutes (we time it) about racism. Then they switch.
I usually have white with white and people targeted by racism with the same. There is more saftey there.
It is good, and a development of using music the way I think we always hoped it would be used when we were young and oppressed for being young : as a form of liberation.
I also want you to know your writing has been liberating for me for many years. Your Bruce writing especially. It’s good when the writer cares as much about it as fans do, and in this case is a bit of a leader.
Thanks
Ken Feldman
Brooklyn, NY
Thought provoking piece Dave. What I have always liked about your writing is that it is rarely a “free ride”; its often challenging and speaks uncomfortable truths. I think back to the Terence Trent-Darby “booing” all those years ago and the reception that the so called “other band” received………….
“We were so much older then, we’re younger than that now.”
Thanks Dave, for sharing your thoughts on what is a more complicated rock ‘n’ roll relationship than most Bruce fans fully appreciate. Speaking for myself, I have no idea what it must have been like in the ’70s in America, when racial issues were surely more tense than they are today. For younger fans like me, it’s easy to forget or simply be oblivous to the fact that having a black guy in your band wasn’t just part of your stage show and an artistic statement, but a bit of a commercial risk too.
Clarence was the opposite from Bruce in many ways. He was larger than life; he was described almost exclusively in terms of his physical attributes; and more than anyone else, he may have been the one member of the band who seemed to embrace the luxuries and hedonism of a “rock n roll lifestyle”. I don’t know if I feel that Clarence was ever a particularly progressive representation of an African American man, to Bruce’s mostly white audience. But the companionship and obvious love that he and Bruce shared was unique, special, and absolutely significant. From the immortal Born to Run cover, to the soul kiss, to the extended live introductions.
Bruce has described racism in America very aptly, as a “veil through which we view each other” (I’m paraphrasing here). And I think for 40 years he and Clarence did what they could to pull that veil down just a little, and perhaps encourage others to join them in doing so. And to show that this was not some chore to perform guiltily and reluctantly, but that it could be fun as well.
@ Robert Klausner,
For pete’s sake, please … get over yourself … what possible relevance does it have to your point that you are a “a 51 year old partner in a large law firm. I have many advanced graduate degrees and am a self-proclaimed Springsteen aficionado” — that gives your point no more gravitas than if you were the Dalai Lama … it just makes you come off as a pontificating schmuck.
I won’t bore you w/ my degrees, age, or professional standing (when I first saw Bruce 37+ yrs. ago I had one degree, I now have several more, lol).
Dave,
Thanks for all you do and have done. Reading this has helped me work through the process that one must go through in such times. Clarence will be so missed but we must be grateful for all the wonderful times he helped create for us. For me it is unquestionable that Bruce and the band have been one of the most significant influences in my life and will never be equaled.
Every time I hear that sax solo on Jungleland something special happens deep inside of me. And for that I am a better man.
Tony S
Rich,
Teddy Wilson joining Benny Goodman’s band was by no means the first instance of a white musician hiring a black one, or vice versa. It happened but it did not happen nearly so public. But Goodman/Wilson was the most prominent example, and that is an important reason that your comment is intriguing. Another is that John Hammond had a role in each case, although in Benny’s, he helped find Wilson and was an insistent voice in favor of the band’s intergration. In Bruce’s case, of course, he immediately disliked Bruce’s band although he changed his mind about it (to my certain knowledge; he thought Born in the USA a very good record) later on.
The symbolism of Wilson (and later Charlie Christian and others) in Goodman’s immensely popular band was much more powerful than you believe it to be, because at the time almost nothing in America was integrated: churches, jails, schools, perfomrance venues, housing (including hotels), transportation, let alone culture. I think that it would be like if, say, MIchael Jackson had had a group with an out male during his heyday.
Bruce and Clarence’s mission was not any clearer than Goodman’s I think, except that the times had changed sufficiently for more people to be comfortable with it (and some, as you see in a couple of comments here) to thus be able to deny that the problem of race still exists or that the stage show had anything to do with it. OF course, the same was true for a lot of people with Sly and the Family Stone and why would one expect American popular culture to have moved far beyond the late ’60s, since it has been in the hands of reactionaries trying to repeal the best things about the ’60s for the past 35 years or so?
Since I do not believe in the Sky God, I take absolutely no comfort from that fantasy. (Especially since, if the heaven you imagine did exist, I would not be welcome there for more than one reason.) I do take comfort from the fact that Bruce and Big Man took their shot and got trhough to some folks. And that’s plenty.
IF you read Clarence’s book, you’ll find that sex and money had a lot to do with it, too.
I will say thank you, Pam, but that isn’t all I’m feeling by any means. YOu’ve set the kind of example that draws us nearer to the land of hopes and dreams.
Stay in touch, would you?
Perhaps because you are content to deal with the sentiments in the last four paragraphs and refuse to grapple with the facts in those preceding them.
I don’t mind that you don’t like those parts but you don’t honestly believe that “worthless and….ridiculous” tells me anything at all about why, do you?
I mean, it doesn’t even really tell me anything about you (for which we may both be thankful, I suppose).
Ken,
Thank you for the kind words about my writing. I accept them gratefully but I still want to argue with you about your post.
Do you really believe that “times have changed” and that Bruce, Clarence, the band and audience achieved liberation? IF that’s so:
Why did they continue doing that tableau at some point, in some song or songs, in every show, then?
Why do you do what you do, and why do I do what I try to do about racism and white supremacy?
My own perspective is that if what you claim about race being solved were the truth of the matter, you wouldn’t consider that mixing black and white in conversation about race was unsafe. (It isn’t unsafe and I have been part of proving that point on many, many occasions.) Liberation consists of many things, but fooling ourselves about current circumstances is decidedly not one of them.
Again thanks but…let me ask you a question…
You say, “I don’t know if I feel that Clarence was ever a particularly progressive representation of an African American man, to Bruce’s mostly white audience.”
Why should he have been obliged to be?
I had hoped we had at least moved beyond the delusion that white people need to see only black people who are, to put it as it so often is said, “a credit to their race”? When Aerosmith found a largely black audinece (for a minute) with “Walk This Way” by Run-DMC, did it matter that Steven Tyler is not a particularly progressive, is in fact an appalling, representation of a European American man?
For me, Clarence was better than a progressive representation of an African American man. He was a progressive representation of a human being in full flight toward freedom. Martin Luther King talked a stride toward freedom. Clarence changed stride to glide.
I had the same 98.6 degrees in ’73 as now.
Check out the piece about Clarence by Bob Davis at his blog
It’s a great piece about the big man from, I guess you might say, “the other side of the tracks” than mine could be.
For a soul music romp, check out Bob’s Soul Patrol website.