Eleventh of January 1942
The Big Man joined the band,
with a huge-sound name
to live up to,
a name he grew into,
big, black and soulful,
with a voice and a touch
to break my heart.
He taught me,
words are unnecessary,
soul-to-soul through
saxophone.
Then he sang…
on an old-fashioned mix-tape
that I played and played
A man in love…
Clarence, I owe you.
You’ll have heard me say this before: I love a prompt. Sorry, but you’ll hear me say it again. A lot. This time the prompt was around people and events from January. Nothing immediately sprang to mind. Sub-prompts included famous people born in January: Martin Luther King Jr, David Bowie, Joan of Arc…radicals all. One of my most favourite quotes comes from Anouilh’s L’Allouette about the Maid of Orleans – probably the only quote I can remember in French from my A-level days. I know far less about Dr King than I should, and as for Bowie…oh, I came to him far too late.
There may still be things to be written about all of them, some of those things may be written by me, but in the context of this particular prompt, I initially breathed out and thought ‘no’. I thought I had no significant January dates, somehow forgetting one very close to home, but that's another story.
Nothing sprang up from the wider world of my life, because I did not know that Clarence Anicholas Clemons Jr was born on the 11th January 1942. It took a synchronous posting on the internet to bring me to this.
Those who know me, know that I’m a bit of a fan of Bruce and the E-Street Band.
Those who know me better, have an idea at just how much I melt at the sweet sound of a tenor sax. Sorry guys, but that is without a single shred of any kind of doubt, the sexiest sound on the planet: a lone tenor sax. Sweet and low, smooth and slow.
Perhaps the reason my life still has gaps in it, is because I’ve never met a saxophonist. Serves me right…there was a day back sometime last century, when I should have got off my behind and gone to talk to the one playing in the bandstand on Hunstanton cliffs. No doubt he was already hooked up and sorted, but at least I could have talked about the music.
I didn’t do so. I just sat on the grass drinking Bud from the bottle and wallowed in that sound, backlit by a silvered sea. I was walked-out. The tide was in. Late afternoon light was dancing on the water. I had only half-an-eye on the last bus home. I couldn’t tell you a single tune he played. Maybe he wasn’t playing actual tunes. If I’m only allowed one memory to take into my next life, that’s the one. Again, sorry guys…a slow, sexy sax on a late summer afternoon…probably twenty years ago. Maybe more.
I have no idea who that man on the bandstand was. He was not Clarence Clemons.
But it was Clarence who first made me listen to a sax solo. Despite my deep love of the poetry and the entirety of the songs, it was Clarence who brought me up short every time I listened to a Springsteen album, and that fed into listening closely whenever anyone else played such a solo. I still go to Springsteen gigs whenever I can. I still say they are the best party on the planet. I still grin like an idiot and sing and dance my whole way through…until they do…as they always do these days…play the ‘lost people’ montage. Then I have a tendency to get quiet. I have a tendency to take deep breaths, and try not to actually weep.
I miss The Big Man in the band. I’m sure everyone does – but let me also say that nephew Jake is filling those huge boots with panache. Of course, it’s not the same – it’s not meant to be – but the youngster still gets a roar from me, because he’s doing more than anyone else ever could. He’s playing the way (as much as any other could) the way the Big Man would play, and yet he’s being himself. Just having the guts to do it is awesome.
Maybe it’s because I’m sentimental, but I also feel that there is something special about it being a family member who has taken that spot in the band. A band that has been together so long that the E-Street Band is a family. One that has its ups and downs, perhaps, its ebbs and flows, but still a family. To bring in a complete outsider to take that key role in the ‘sound’ of the band – I’m sure that would not have worked. I wonder if it was Uncle Clem that first taught young Jake how to play? I’m not looking it up. I’m just choosing to believe it to be so.
Clarence has another role in my life though. One unconnected to Springsteen and E-Street.
Back in 1982/83 I spent a study year in Germany. It had been a weird Summer. My ‘official’ boyfriend of the time had been in the States for a year, but was now back…it wasn’t going well. Not least because I had met Clive – and all other considerations aside he seemed to ‘like’ me more than Neil did. He was better at letting me be me. That was my wild year. That was the year when I just let everything unfold, did what I felt like doing in the moment, and hang the consequences. There were consequences. In the short term they were dramatic, melodramatic, pathetic, all the unsettling chaos of young people who are wrong about what they claim to want. A few people got hurt along the way and I am sorry about that.
While I was away, Neil very occasionally wrote. Clive wrote all the time. And phoned – though mostly I wasn’t there when he did – this was before cell phones were a thing. And he did something else that was very 1980’s. He sent me a mix-tape. Remember those? I still have it. It is full of love songs.
One of those songs is Clarence Clemons singing A Man In Love. It’s the one song on the tape that I had not heard before. It is from the Rescue album by Clarence Clemons and the Redbank Rockers. Clive played that for me many times in the years the followed, before life got complicated again, so complicated that decades later when his flat was cleared, I was in no fit state to go in and claim the vinyl albums from those years. I hope someone rescued them and they have been sent back out into the wild. I suspect, sadly, that may not have been so.
A Man in Love is a soulful song. Much on that mix-tape is soul, some is rock, some is the interface between the two. Clive started out playing in soul bands before he moved into rock music (courtesy of waking up to Born to Run on the radio in the middle of the night as it happens). Linkages. Connections. Memories.
That tape, and that one song in particular, is what made my mind up about what I would do when I got home. There was still a lot of shouting and recriminations in other places, complications to clear my way through, but at soul level, I knew.
The tape had been sent without any kind of labelling. I took a piece of paper to list the tracks and artists. I gave it the title "Message". Clive raised an eyebrow when he saw that. "Well, wasn't it?" I asked. I think he just nodded. Maybe he said "yes". I can't remember. But we went on to live the rest of his life together (more-or-less) and he kept playing me the music, and I still have the tape with its handwritten track-listing and title.
I kind of like that Clarence was born in Norfolk County. Clive in the County of Norfolk. Me in neither, but that’s the way these things work. It's a tenuous thing in terms of the degrees of separation. We never met the Big Man, but both of our lives, and our life together, would have poorer without him.
"The Big Man joined the band" is a line from "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" from the "Born to Run Album" . For more on the story of him and his place in the band check out Clarence Clemons: ‘And the big man joined the band’ – That's How The Light Gets In
